Is this the end of The Oak Leaf?

When I started this blog, I was determined to make it a negativity-free zone, but it's becoming impossible to keep that up. Because I honestly think that The Oak Leaf is on its last legs.

Everybody says they're in favor of having a school newspaper, but they're not willing to take any actions to make sure that The Oak Leaf continues to exist.

I was absolutely miserable last year because people didn't seem to care. Maybe they did. But they certainly didn't pay attention to deadlines. And deadlines are called deadlines for a reason. If you miss them, there's a good chance the paper won't come out. And it's guaranteed to kill your grade.

And now I can't help but sit here and think that this year is going to be last year all over again.

A few days I sent out an email announcing that I wanted to hold a meeting to talk about next year's Oak Leaf. So far only one person emailed me back to tell me that she probably couldn't come. 

And that's just not right.

Either people are out of town, not checking their emails, or blowing me and The Oak Leaf off.

If they're out of town, that's okay. But it seems kind of weird that everyone would be out of town at the same time.

If they're not checking their emails, that has to change. Journalism is based on communications. And email is how I do most of my communicating. Also it's how you send your notes to yourself so you can write articles at home.

But what I'm really afraid of is that they're blowing me off. Which means this year's Oak Leaf is going to be another failure.

The second you sign up for journalism, you're signing up for one of the toughest classes on the course syllabus, way harder than AP History or AP Environmental Science. Depending on the stage of the paper, it can be harder than AP English.

You can't just skate through it. Well, you can, but if you do, the paper will suck. To have a good school newspaper, everybody on staff has to try hard to put together a good paper. 

A good newspaper has soul. It's possible to have a personality without sensationalizing. And a good paper has a personality, a personality that's kind of like an amalgamation of all the people who contributed to it. But if you do a halfway job, then the paper will have no personality at all.

I guess I'm not making any sense.

And I know I'm blowing things out of proportion. I always do.

But if people aren't paying attention to their Oak Leaf emails, that's not a good sign. Answering an email and saying whether you can come to the meeting or not isn't a hard thing. Just about everything else that goes into making a newspaper is.

I just don't think this bodes well...