Every March, I get a little misty for print.
To outsiders, reporting on a tiny Pacific island sounds like light work. Those of us who survived the newsroom on Saipan know better. We were a small tribe carrying outsized weight.
Some days, news broke everywhere at once and physics refused to let me be ubiquitous. Other days, the chief and the editorial assistant both called in sick, leaving me to run the whole circus: lining up stories, pagination, formatting, and sweating out the 9:00 PM handoff to pre-press. The adrenaline was a reliable drug.
I miss my window cubicle, but mostly I miss the tribe. Production deadlines were a full-contact sport, but bayanihan ran deep at the Variety. We survived on communal spirit and copious gossip. Friends from advertising brought news tips, administrative staff quietly did my paperwork while I chased leads, and everyone caught typos. If we made a real blunder, we stopped the Harris press machine mid-run to fix it—dignity preserved before we had to face our neighbors the next morning.
We were no New York Times, but on-island, the stakes felt absolute. The quota was four good stories a day, and our rivals at the other paper were sharp. We fought them tooth and nail for scoops until deadline. Then, we clocked out, marched over to Shirley’s or J’s for coffee, and traded our battle armor for non-stop chatter until the early hours.
It was a small operation, but every single day, we made magic on newsprint.
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