Well, here we are, the last issue of the semester. We can hardly believe we’ve made it this far. It’s been such a strange time to be students, and an even stranger time to be editors of the paper.

In March of this year, we received a phone call from our advisor Katharine Martin that offered us the positions of Trinitonian executive editors. We were overjoyed, of course, but we had no idea that being editors our senior year would be so drastically different than what we envisioned. We haven’t allowed ourselves to grieve everything we had planned that just couldn’t be. We suppose this editorial is us doing just that.

To us, the mere thought of not hosting story idea meetings, otherwise known as SIM, in the newsroom, seemed so disheartening that we tried to bury my feelings about it in the back of my mind. Both of us had such exciting plans for the newsroom. We talked about what color we were going to repaint the newsroom and how we wanted new chairs for our section editors to use on production nights. We had the idea of us putting a mailbox in the newsroom where we could all leave affirming notes and cards for one another. “Let me know if I’m being tookindergarten-y with our staff,” one of us recalls. We were going to split the different rooms in the Tigers Den to accommodate different needs of our staff. We had so many plans, and up until recently, we’ve been resentful that we weren’t granted a typical editor experience.

Now, we are months into producing the Trinitonian, and it’s still really hard to accept that we are all so far apart. We feared doing the Trinitonian remotely, not because we couldn’t handle it, but because in our heads, we couldn’t imagine our staff being a community as we knew it. In these past few months alone, we have learned just how wrong our assumptions were.

Every week we are amazed at the perseverance and passion the Trinitonian staff displays. Something as simple as proof-reading their stories every week makes us feel like we’re in the newsroom together. Reading is like having a conversation with them. Week after week, we have pushed forward as editors because our staff keeps us together, they motivate us to keep pushing forward, even when we encounter stressful situations, which is every week. Our readers make us happy too, people who have engaged with the Trinitonian in any form: thank you. Without you and your amazing support, managing the Trinitonian during a pandemic would be a lot more difficult. So thank you for supporting student journalism, it means the world to us.