Ten years ago, The Heights still printed twice a week. When the stacks of newspapers hit the stalls, I am told, students would flock to pick up their morning copy, each issue rich with the resinous smell of ink.
Fifty years ago, fresh off our financial and editorial split from the University, our editions were fat with advertisements: “Just $199 for Spring Break in the Sun!”, a quarter page for Pino’s Pizza, a leaflet insert from UGBC.
One hundred and six years ago, at its genesis, The Heights published an earnest four pages per week.
Today, there are no regular print editions. Our top stories go to students’ email inboxes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We keep our website and socials updated in real time, reviewing their weekly analytics in the office on Sundays.
Advertisements still keep us afloat, but the digital age has turned us into a nonprofit newsroom equally reliant on the generosity of our readers.
We publish tens of stories each week, hundreds each semester, and well over a thousand each year.
I’ve seen The Heights change a lot during my short time guiding its history. That hasn’t always been easy. It’s strange to love something and see it contort over and over—no tradition too sacred to bend, nothing steady enough to anchor your commitment to.
But The Heights is changing and unchanging. The means and methods reshape themselves constantly, but what matters remains. Through our 106 years, one thread winds through everything we’ve been and will become: stories.
People have always tried to rescue and preserve things from the blur of time. Journalism is one such attempt.
I imagine for an editor who worked on The Heights during the peak of print, there would be something almost tragic in seeing how we labor over Instagram Reels the way they did pagination.
But the care, the impulse, is the same: to notice what’s significant and set it somewhere it might endure.
A great professor once told me that “journalism is not philosophy,” by which I believe he meant, “not very important.” That the facts and information in which modern journalism dabbles are only as valuable as they are new. A timeless distraction.
And to him, I wish I could show our newsroom at 2 a.m.
The walls crowded with movie posters and drug store 5x7s from years no one remembers. A guzzler helmet on one shelf, a Happy Meal toy on another. Christmas lights drooping from the ceiling. The room could probably pass as a dive bar if it weren’t, of course, for the tall drifts of old newspapers. And the people—tired, laughing, and working past the point of reason.
Facts and information don’t keep them there. Nostalgia for the ways of old doesn’t either. There is, I think, a true desire to make sense and make note that keeps people in that room week after week, year after year.
Almost four years of my life are captured by stories—stories that stretch out over a place I’ve come to know intimately. And as silly as it must seem to care so much about documenting this small place (my loving mother has often commented that three newsletters a week “seems like a bit much”), it’s worth it.
Over 100 years of Boston College, a small blink of time and space, accumulate in thousands and thousands of stories.
I’m left thinking, predictably, about The Heights’ first board of editors. Sleep in their eyes as they typeset their first four pages. Holding their breath as they set down the first stacks in Gasson.
It was something new. It was something old. Something in perfect accord with their desire for preservation.
As I part from The Heights, I’m carried by the simple goodness of creating things time doesn’t touch—the late-night newsroom, the whisker of space between today’s news and tomorrow’s, offering us what ordinary life cannot.
For a year, I had the privilege of caring for all that could change and could not change about The Heights. I am all the better for the stories it gave me.