For most, The Northwood Howler is just a regular occurrence. Once a month, some nerds come out of their little hidey-hole to shove a couple of papers in your face. You flip through the pages, looking at the pictures before unceremoniously missing your glorious three pointer into the garbage bin. Well, I’ll have you know that the papers you just threw missed into the trash was the culmination of over four weeks of blood, sweat and tears. Today we’re going to give you a 100% true inside scoop about what happens in The Howler.
Getting Our Pitches Cleared
The pitch is the heart and soul of each and every article. You see those mysterious elevators on campus? Do you know where they go? To a magical world called JournaLand, of course! In this Narnian wonderland, instead of Turkish delights, you will find something far more valuable: a shiny golden stamp of approval from The Howler advisor. Staff writers (we call them Trailblazers) trek through the journalistic wilderness, deadlines and the occasional boba run, in search of these stamps to bring back to Room 1102. Sometimes one or two writers go missing along the way, but it’s worth it to uphold rigid journalistic integrity.
The New Writing Process
In the olden days of the late 1900s, we used to write by hand with paper and pencils. Ugh! Today, journalists use state of the art equipment to write their stories. Case in point: The Hearst-inator 5000. Every writer and editor on The Howler is required to plug their brains into the Hearst-inator using special helmets. The machine connects everyone’s thoughts into a giant hive mind that allows us to abstractly craft the article letter by letter until we finish the article, after which it’s automatically uploaded to Google Drive. The process to complete just one article is extremely time consuming and takes an entire period to complete.
Delivery! Photo Airstrikes
Have you ever noticed that the pictures are lowkey way too good to be taken by mortal men? Such masterpieces can only be the work of camera drones. Specifically, we contract Amazon delivery drones from San Joaquin County to come down to Irvine and take pictures for us. After making their deliveries all around California, the drones stop by for their part time service as photographers for The Howler. And the actual student photographers? Their backpacks are full of remote controls, spare propellers and extra batteries to perform impromptu maintenance on the robot workforce in case they’re feeling under the weather.
Total Eclipse of the Art
In the lower 1100s pod, there is a secret VR room where only the artists are allowed to enter. Inside the dark and foreboding space, illuminated by a single incandescent bulb (for aesthetic purposes), is a Meta Quest 3 with only one game loaded onto it: “Minecraft.” From there, the artists load up the only world on the system and create every graphic block by block using pixel art, with each block representing one pixel. Using the endless creative possibilities of “Minecraft,” the artists spend up to three months placing over two million blocks for one image. All of the graphics are made in a single Creative Mode world called “SUPER SECRET HOWLER ARTISTS PLAYGROUND DON’T TOUCH” which holds the pixel art images of every single graphic going back to 1999. Impressed yet?
Edit-uccine:
Holding all of these separate roles together, the editing staff makes sure that all the articles are written on schedule, with an extra year of wiggle room of course. But sometimes, the editor receives work that needs edits. In this case, the custom is to first go to Albertsons and buy a $15 bouquet of flowers. Then, the editor invites the staff writer to Olive Garden. After graciously paying for unlimited breadsticks and fettuccine, the editor hands over the flowers, leans up to the writer’s ear and whispers their grievances.
“Your feature on the Girls Lacrosse MVP has grammar errors. Please address them by Tuesday,” one editor said.
Then, satisfied and happy, both parties go home. We eat a lot of Italian food over the course of the year. One senior is planning to take a gap year to Naples to visit the sacred shrine of Pasta Journalism, ensuring the tradition will continue forevermore until the coming of the Rapture.
Super Howlio Odyssey
The final step for a successful issue is to email the finished layouts to the printing factory. The printing and subsequent delivery step is easy – for us, anyway. For the delivery people it’s an infamous slog. The papers are delivered to Northwood by a magic flying Pegasus and her magical pony friends, then loaded onto an alien semi truck who brought his interstellar war to Earth, then onto a blue British steam engine before finally arriving at Northwood via a die cast hot rod that drives on orange tracks.
As you can see, a lot of work goes on in the newsroom before the issues are ready to print. So before you throw away your next batch of paper fodder, maybe think about all of the magical effort that went into publishing it before missing your next three pointer.
