From 2007 to 2025, Mr. Steven Matteo was the Register Forum’s club advisor. And while these eighteen years were characterized by bustling NewsStorms and lively distribution days, enthusiastic student involvement and community reception weren’t a given—and certainly wouldn’t have occurred without the efforts of Mr. Matteo to save a newspaper that was once, quite frankly, dying.
“By the time I took over, there was barely anybody in the club,” Mr. Matteo recalls, “There was no journalism program connected to the Register Forum … and I don’t think anybody was reading the paper for a few years there.” But, just a decade earlier, under long-time Register Forum advisor Mr. Stephen Surette, dozens of students contributed to every edition. This stark contrast was likely due to an awkward transitional period following Mr. Surette’s retirement. “[Mr. Surette] was retiring, and nobody else was kind of passionate about it,” Mr. Matteo recollects, “Not having an advisor who’s passionate about it can kill years of enthusiasm.”
By the time Mr. Matteo assumed the role, the Register Forum had a mere three members. Even when the tiny team could muster a four-page edition, he remembers that then-principal Dr. Christopher Saheed “would [often] point to a stack full of papers in the main office that were not distributed.” Mr. Matteo continues, “I don’t know how [the Register Forum] ran at all.”
With the future of the century-old newspaper hanging in the balance, Mr. Matteo determined that the Register Forum needed more structure—so, he began teaching Journalism 2. Class time in Journalism 2 was entirely allotted for writing and designing the Register Forum. “We had like eight students in that first year,” Mr. Matteo continues, “I got the school to purchase some computers, and that was the first time we were playing around with Adobe InDesign.” It was a wild success. For several years, Journalism 2 alone sustained the Register Forum, with limited contributions from those outside the course. “I would take our staff of students in Journalism 2 to walk through the yard, and we would go into The Harvard Crimson on Plimpton Street, down into the basement, and pick up our papers and bring them back [to CRLS],” Mr. Matteo reminisces.
But, in the late 2010s, the administration effectively ended Journalism 2 by consolidating it with Mr. Matteo’s Journalism 1 class. But the students’ momentum remained, only now channeled into the Register Forum as a club. “[It was] cool to see that students just demanded that there be a place, whether we had a Journalism 2 class or not,” Mr. Matteo explains.
“The story of having dozens, and dozens, and dozens of people—30, 40 people—show up for a NewsStorm every month, that took a little while to get to that momentum,” Mr. Matteo concludes. Just this year, Mr. Matteo passed the baton to the Register Forum’s new advisors, Ms. Sarah Walker and Mr. Erik Scott. And while they’ll continue to improve the Register Forum with a steady hand, this paper’s continued existence is owed to Mr. Matteo and the persistent passion of the Register Forum’s many student journalists.
This article also appears in our February 2026 print edition.
