by Ayla McDonald
During Fall semester 2018, I worked as a reporter for the Prospectus Newspaper, a student run news source for Parkland Community College.
Writing for the paper offered an experience like no other. The Prospectus gave my fellow student workers and I a platform from which to speak and be heard. It offered a place for us to explore our interests and curiosities, not only to our own benefit but also to the benefit of the community at large. As reporters for a newspaper we had the ability to both expose our own voices and to make heard the voices of others, holding in our fingers the responsibility which comes with writing another person’s story – that of telling it truthfully.
It is a great thing to be trusted with the voice of another person. Writing for the Prospectus gave my fellow reporters and I an opportunity to listen to the voices of people from many different walks of life, each with their own story to tell. The need for sources brought some of us to places we never thought we would be – attending the speech of a former US President, witnessing the plight of homeless students, learning the spiritual practices of a modern-day wiccan, to name a few. By enabling us to have such experiences and by encouraging us to work together to seek out and write about topics that related us to our school and to the world beyond, the Prospectus engaged its reporters, the subjects of its articles, and its readers in a way that made us aware of our present time and created connections of community within it.
But a student newspaper does more than just engage people in the present – it also serves to preserve the past. My favorite memory as a student reporter is of reading old copies of the Prospectus that have been archived in the Parkland College Library since the start of the Newspaper in the 1960s. As we sat around a table looking through hundreds of decades-old editions of the same newspaper that we construct today, my fellow reporters and I held in our hands time-capsules of the history of our College through stories, photographs and advertisements. In that moment we were connected not only to each other but also to the people who contributed to the Prospectus before us, to the students who walked the same halls we now walk, to those who wrote about then as we write about now.
As a student newspaper, the Prospectus has been and continues to be a constant record of changes occurring in the collegiate, local, and national societies of Parkland College students throughout time. Containing stories of political duress, of social conflict, of Champaign-Urbana community events, and of student activity within the College, the Prospectus charts the course of change and presents it through the perspective of students – people whose lives are defined by change.
This semester I will continue to write for the Prospectus as co-editor. I am excited to work beside returning and new Prospectus staff and I look forward to the experiences that this season with the Prospectus has in store. As we welcome a new year and a new semester, I hope that our readers will follow the Prospectus team as we continue to document the changes that are occurring in the life of our community and as we tell the stories of the people within it.
If you would like to contribute to the weekly publication of the Prospectus Newspaper please visit www.prospectusnews.com.
