Editors-in-Chief Say Goodbye to the RF’s 131st Year
Editors-in-Chief Azusa Lippit and Esther Cull-Kahn reflect on the year.
June 9, 2022
If you’ve ever wondered how the Register Forum is magically created, we’d like to introduce ourselves: the Editors-in-Chief who put their blood, sweat, and tears into each monthly paper. These editions would not be possible without the hard work of our editorial staff, contributors, copyeditors, illustrators, photographers, and of course, all of our readers. Most of all, the enthusiasm toward the Register Forum this year has been overwhelming, and we could not be more grateful for it. Bringing student-written and student-edited news into our CRLS and Cambridge community every month that is then shared, discussed, and enjoyed, is what motivates us to keep going.
After a year of Zoom NewsStorms and online editions, it was easy to feel disconnected from fellow editors and contributors. This year, we wanted to ensure that our editorial team did not just feel obligated, but rather excited, to communicate with each other. We started our time as Editors-in-Chief organizing staff photos and profile bios in order to get to know our new team better. By spending time together at social editors’ events, we gradually built genuine relationships with one another, making the brunt work of producing the paper an enjoyable communal effort.
In creating an environment where our editors and writers feel comfortable making jokes and enjoy each other’s social company, we’ve proved that professionalism does not require a loss of fun. We love including elements of levity and humor into the relatively daunting undertaking of producing a sixteen-to-twenty-page newspaper every month, especially the task of reporting on difficult topics and issues faced by our community. We’re proud of our ability to adapt to unique and challenging obstacles, most surfacing thanks to COVID-19, while still keeping a contagious, positive (no pun intended) outlook. We believe that by lessening the intimidation and pressure previously shared by first-time writers, attendance and enthusiasm of contributors increased tremendously.
At the beginning of the year, we wrote to you about our aspirations. We are delighted to share a few things we’ve achieved: an expansion of our podcast production to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, inclusion of more printed long-form journalism, the revival and subsequent popularity of our Games & Humor section, and the increased accessibility to the Cambridge Public Library’s Register Forum archive, dating back to our founding in 1891, which can now be found on our website under the “CPL Register Forum Archive” tab, under the “About” heading.
We’ve also worked to improve the diversity of our staff and thought; we’ve prioritized the elevation of the voices and perspectives of students of color, including collaboration with the Black Student Union. However, we will not be satisfied with our newspaper’s diversity until it accurately reflects and promotes the perspectives of the entire student body, as every CRLS student organization should. To ensure that all students feel empowered to explore their extracurricular interests—not just in the newspaper—to the fullest extent, administrators, teachers, school committee members, and students must challenge the exclusionary cycle of centering the voices of white students.
Even though the Register Forum has become the sole focus of our lives, we are forced to abdicate, graduate, and allocate (bars) thousands of dollars for unemployable liberal arts degrees. Luckily, we could not be leaving the Register Forum in better hands. Eman Abdurezak and Esther Fu (the other Esther) have consistently proved their dedication to produce high-quality journalism while bringing editors closer together. We want to thank our incoming Editors-in-Chief and incoming Managing Editor Margaret Unger for sticking with us as we’ve adapted to this year’s challenges; we are so proud of them and cannot wait to see what they will do next year. Thank you and goodnight.
This piece also appeared in our May 2022 print edition.
