Have You Herd the News?

Ladies and gentlemen, I interrupt your viewing of the school newspaper to bring you some breaking news! Namely, there is a school newspaper! (Oh wait, it’s a magazine. My bad, I got the online page where students in an organized group write and publish articles mixed up with the internet website on which a team of high-schoolers compose and distribute news columns. They’re totally different, I’m sorry everybody.) That’s right, the wait is over, and student-produced broadcasting publications are finally back. At the beginning of this school year, many of you were probably heartbroken to realize that depthless, haphazardly-written articles weren’t being spewed out onto the Rampage website every couple weeks. I, for one, checked every single day to see if I could read up on fascinating news such as which types of candy would be available in the Bunker. (Yet another witty name for one of our school’s most valued services. All these puns will make you want to ram your head into a wall.)

Anyways, there is no need to worry. Once again, you can receive breaking news alerts and reports of current local events, conveniently offered in a quarterly publication. You can rest easy knowing that you get to hear what that guy that you pass in the hallway sometimes on your way back from lunch thinks about local musicians, or what that chick who sometimes hangs around those people that your sister’s friend kind of knows is saying about UN proceedings. You even get to hear some socially-crippled nerd rant about the newspaper magazine he’s writing for. And thank God we get to hear these opinions.

Some of you may be thinking to yourselves, “Who even reads this stuff?” Well for starters, you do apparently. Aside from that, I will have you know that we have dozens of faithful supporters across our student body — that’s right, dozens! Or at least a dozen . . . I hope. Honestly I’m not sure. The last time anyone actually talked about an article in the paper it got censored and shut down faster than the football posters it was talking about. (Thanks, Karl.) But hey, cut us some slack. There isn’t exactly a lot of newsworthy stuff going on around here. Nobody really cares what goes on in this school, in our classrooms. I can’t imagine any reason that a news network might be interested in anything pertaining to KHS. (Except, of course for that one story that everybody’s thinking but nobody wants to talk about: our football team’s tragic loss to Falmouth.)

So why, you ask, do we have a school magazine in the first place? Why would people participate on it? What would drive these dedicated writers to commit entire minutes of their lives to this service? Honestly, I’m not sure. Maybe the editors just needed something to do, since they had gotten tired of their regular hobbies, which included watching “Friends” reruns and eating blocks of cheddar a pound at a time. [Editor’s note: I do not eat plain cheese by the pound. It was one time, Dan, get over it!] Maybe school news is just an unavoidable fact of life, despite being pointless and unnecessary — the taxes of high school: they’re everywhere, unavoidable, and unwanted.

Now that I think about it, I may be putting myself into a dangerous situation here. Perhaps I shouldn’t be talking so poorly about the Herd. After all, you never know when Ms. Carlson is watching yo—