Celebrating 45 Years in Print

Let’s not make too big a deal out of it. That was always the consensus when we started mulling how to celebrate the Chronicle’s 45th anniversary. We’ve done plenty of blowout issues over the years and will again (lookin’ at you, 50). This time around, we thought we’d keep it simple – less about looking back, more about celebrating the now and what’s still to come.

So to commemorate our 45 years in print, we thought we’d spotlight the folks producing the paper week in and week out, uplifting the same mission statement we’ve had since 1981: still free, still independent, still progressive, still a community newspaper.  

Some of us are, shall we say, rather senior; other hires haven’t even hit their first-year mark yet. At last fall’s School-tastic Book Fair for Grownups, Publisher & Advertising Director Cassidy Frazier took note of the long line to sit for Lens of Athena Photography’s camera, so we hired her to shoot the whole staff for a very fun day of yearbook photos. Art Director Zeke Barbaro incorporated the yearbook theme into this week’s cover story, too, a guide to the biggest events of the fall, and that story’s architect, Calendar and Qmmunity Editor James Scott, carried it over into “clubs” that give some insight into our Editorial staff’s particular enthusiasms.

And that’s pretty much what the paper is all about. What you read every week is a reflection of the people who work here – our enthusiasms, our passions, our values. And with your continued support, we hope to keep doing that work for many years to come. 

While we’re on the subject of the human hands and creative brains hard at work here, I should mention we’ve instituted a formal AI newsroom policy. You can read the whole policy online, where we note some areas where assistive AI has been incorporated into the newsroom (for transcription, translation, and to process large data dumps, for instance) and pledge to be transparent when AI is used in any meaningful way. But the long and short of it is, our Editorial staff will not use generative AI to write stories, headlines, social media posts, or newsletter copy, and our Production department will not use AI to generate photographs, video, or illustrations, or even to brainstorm ideas. 

By instituting this policy, we don’t mean to imply AI has been writing the paper up until now; as a paper that’s always valued creativity and artists’ rights, we were always going to come down on the side of humans. We just figured it was time we made it official.

So flip the page and put a face to the humans who call the Chron home – a wildly talented, dedicated, dynamic, misfit bunch of people I’m so proud to work alongside.

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