DPOSTM seniors bid farewell

Responsibility is key to being DPOSTM A fifth-year rookie Responsibility is key to being DPOSTM A fifth-year rookieMichael Hasday What I remember most is the feeling I got when I walked into the DP's windowless office, affectionately known as the Pink Palace. It was a feeling of being on a team with a seemingly impossible mission: to put out a daily newspaper that accurately portrays the bustling Penn community -- the tensions, the people, the spirit. It was not only a feeling of checking the pulse of Penn, but of controlling its pacing. It was a feeling of great responsibility -- that what you did in the wee hours of the night, after the stale pizza, after much of the campus was asleep, after you stopped worrying about your history exam the next day, mattered. I remember the tireless efforts of the sports editors during my first five semesters at Penn, and want to thank them -- Dan, Rachel, Adam, Josh, Jed and Nick -- for teaching me about the craft of sportswriting and affording me this incredible opportunity. One of my goals as sports editor was to leave the department a little better off than I received it. Those guys made that goal tough. Also, I would like to thank my co-editors -- Jeff, Eric and Scott -- for putting up with my idiosyncrasies and producing a great body of work on a consistent basis. But this legacy began long before I came to Penn. Consider: In the late 1930s, a sportswriter for the DP wrote this about an intriguing shot of Penn's 5'8" forward Chuck Diven, Jr.: "The Chucker had discovered a new shot for his repertoire, a leaping two-handed, overhead try from the vicinity of the foul line?" From that evidence, Diven is credited as being a pioneer in basketball as the inventor of the jump shot (although this is hotly contested). Now, I've never had a moment like that, a moment that it was up to me to record a historical first -- up to me not to drop the ball. But I feel like I did record history, albeit on a smaller scale. I was solely responsible for recording Penn women's soccer games and men's tennis matches my freshman year and Penn wrestling matches and volleyball games my sophomore year. No other newspaper covered these events. It was up to me to accurately portray the teams' year for the Penn community and the players. I still remember feeling that I had this incredible responsibility to do a good job. If I dropped the ball, it would hurt the players who put their hearts in their sport; that would hurt the Penn community which would get a subpar effort -- hurting the reputation of the DP as a whole. This feeling of responsibility was heightened since the DP is often talked about as a singular entirety: such as the DP said this, or the DP got this wrong or the DP criticized so-and-so. But, of course, the DP is not a singular entity; it is a product of its people, hundreds of them, nearly all students who try to produce a daily newspaper in the time remaining after their classwork and social life. Or at least classwork. That makes the DP, in some ways, only as good as its weakest member. That places an awesome responsibility on each and every person in the organization, and that's what makes working at this place so much fun.