In winter 2020, I was sitting in the Olive Kettering Library with my close friend, and now co-editor, Quinn Ritzhaupt. She was looking at old issues of The Record, Antioch’s defunct newspaper, as was her job as the Archive Assistant at the time. I remember having a sense of despair at all the old student-run initiatives sitting around campus forsaken. As we both sat there, basking in the energy of The Record and what it represents, I voiced a thought.
“You know, I know how Indesign works; and you have done journalism before.”
“I don’t want to do journalism,” she said.
“And I don’t want to do graphic design.”
We immediately began looking into how we could bring The Record back with the two of us as editors. As fate would have it, we weren’t the only ones who felt the newspaper needed revival. There were already initiatives being set forth to revive interest in this piece of Antioch history; we had just beat them to the job. When asking around about how we could go about this, we initially ran into issues with people assuming we just wanted to garner interest in other students to bring it back and there were many times where we had to correct them that, no, we’re just going for it.
In the spring term, we achieved a major milestone when we received access to The Record‘s email address. For the first time, I was able to witness the state it had been left in for the past three years and it finally dawned on us just how difficult this project would be. From this point on, every step forward was shadowed by the fear that perhaps all of the newspaper’s former connections had been burned to the ground. I remember the feeling of dread from the first time I walked into the Yellow Springs News office to ask if they would still be willing to assist us with printing (which they were—much love to Matt!). A similar feeling occurred when I walked into local businesses to ask about running ads in our paper.
Despite the odds, the first issue of Volume 69 of The Antioch Record was published at the end of the spring of 2021. Not much compares to the feeling of looking at the product of multiple consecutive late nights of work in our brick oven of an office. Despite the inevitable mistakes that came with two people exploring entirely unfamiliar territory, it was something I could be proud of, and the feeling of accomplishment was enough to send me back into the dreaded realm of the Adobe Suite.
As of today, at the end of my co-op, we have published our fourth new issue of Antioch’s historic student newspaper. It is likely I will be doing this until I graduate, which I am surprisingly okay with. Quinn and I tend to joke that we are going to get stuck doing what we hate, but I am starting to mind it much less.
Read More: Antioch College Interview covering The Record’s revival
