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EDITORIAL
Farewell Letter from the Editor

My two years as editor-in-chief here at The Advocate have been something of a wild ride. Alternately militant and hilarious, depressing and encouraging, radical and bureaucratic, the heading of a paper like this one is nothing if not a learning experience. However, the wide road ahead beckons the feet to move on and besides it’s time to let a new voice take the helm here at the Graduate Center’s in-house Ministry of Propaganda. As this will be my last issue as the editor around here, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on where we’ve been and where we might want to go. One basic recommendation I would make is that a portion of ad revenues—which currently go directly to the DSC’s general fund—be folded back into developing The Advocate. This would help create a greater incentive for staff members to bring in ads, simultaneously setting the paper on a course of growth.

When I first came onto the paper staff as layout editor three years ago, the main goal was to rescue a paper that was barely functioning. The staff was exhausted, the design was not professional, and the student body had an attitude of complete disregard for the paper. Our first task was to reconceive, redesign, and rethink the paper from mastheads to back page. We wanted the paper to be a radical voice, but we also wanted to stay open to any viewpoint that GC students might have. We wanted the paper to reflect the intelligence and sophistication of a student body of PhD students, but we also wanted to offer a respite from the sometimes-stifling seriousness and scholarliness of graduate school life. And we wanted to bring in student writers, photographers, and activists and get them involved in the paper. At a time when the phrase “GC Community” was practically an oxymoron, we wanted to be a force working in that direction. In the effort to achieve this last goal, all three editors have been working overtime, trying to convince already-overworked students to send us articles, reflections, poems, collages, cartoons, ANYTHING to help display the intellectual vibrancy that exists here, and which we wanted to put on display.

The results have been exciting. We’ve been able to run original investigative pieces on important events, including protests, labor relations, CUNY politics, and international conflicts. We’ve seen several of our regular contributors go on to pursue careers in professional journalism. We’ve established regular features such as the student forum, which are aimed at making life at the GC a little more fun. Our Web site now features all articles that run in the paper (and some that don’t), and includes complete archives going back more than a year. We can all be proud of these achievements.

And yet, the thought I want to leave you with is that The Advocate could still grow into something bigger and more significant. In recent months, people have been asking me why we don’t send more copies to the other CUNY campuses, why we don’t distribute a little more widely. To this I say, Let’s hope the next staff makes it happen. Basically, The Advocate is almost fully supported by DSC funds—and The Advocate spends many times more money paying staff and contributors than it does on printing costs. If we’re going to spend all that money on talent, why not think of a way to get the message out a little louder?

The right direction for The Advocate would include some of these steps:

* Bring in a higher-profile guest writer every now and then, as our pay scales are good enough to do this

* Restructure the selling of ads so that a portion goes back to development of the paper. This might allow printing of more copies, printing the cover in color, or other improvements

* Another thing future staff members might want to consider is the hiring of an ads manager to handle the complex task of selling and keeping track of ads. In the past the other staff members have resisted this duty.

Because The Advocate is well-subsidized by the DSC, I’d like to see it become a little better known around CUNY and New York City in general. In 1996, for instance, The Advocate printed 4,000 copies–four times as many as today. In these times of reaction in the United States, our city can use all the informed radical voices it can get.

While I step down today, I hope to remain available as a grandpa/tech support/dartboard target-figure for future generations. Let’s show’em what analysis is all about!

James Trimarco
Editor-in-Chief