In our yearly tradition, we spoke with graduating seniors from The Mac Weekly about their time on the paper. These seniors have been talented writers, editors and leaders throughout their time at Mac.
TMW: Why did you first join The Mac Weekly, and what made you stay?
Callisto Martinez: I kind of came to Mac for The Mac Weekly. There were not very many liberal arts colleges with decent papers that were in a metropolitan area that were also in the Midwest. So Mac felt like the best choice. And I emailed The Mac Weekly, and I said, “Do I have to apply to be on this?” And they said no. And then I became really good friends with Mandy Week [’25] and Ari Pincus-Kazmar [’25], who were writing at the time.
Daniel Graham: I joined The Mac Weekly because I had written for my high school newspaper. My first year at Mac, I intended to join the paper, but I never got around to it. I finally wrote an article in September of my sophomore year. It was about Professor Emma Törzs’ best-selling book “Ink, Blood, Sister, Scribe.” Then, Noah Riccardi ’25 convinced me I should be writing for the sports section. All of sudden, he went abroad and I was [Sports] Editor. I had written maybe five articles by then. … I don’t know that I ever made an active decision to stay on the paper, it just became a part of my life. Every week, I go to layout, because why wouldn’t I? Even now, when I’m not actively in charge of anything, I can’t help myself from writing. I love to do it, and I hope to write for the rest of my life.
TMW: How has The Mac Weekly impacted your overall college experience?
Lucy Wing: It’s impacted it totally and completely. [Writing for The Mac Weekly is] not academic, but still challenging that sort of same part of your brain, and it’s more of a passion project. I get to do what I want to do and I love to do, which is write [and] talk to people on campus and in the community. I know so many people around because of interviews, because of articles, and knowing that many faces around campus is really special. It’s part of what I love about Mac, and The Mac Weekly definitely helps make those connections.
And then in terms of [my] career path, looking towards graduating now, I know I want to be writing, and a lot of that is [because of] the writing that I’ve done on The Mac Weekly. I’ve written for every section, and have really figured out the type of writing that I like to do. The skills that I’ve built, and especially communication skills — like how you communicate and how you interact with people you aren’t friends with, but are peers with — and then being in charge of the whole thing [as editor-in-chief] totally changed my mindset about leadership.
Elisa Hsieh: In terms of job experiences, it really got me started. It feels like it’s led to the sorts of work that I have done all my other summer internships, and internships in general.
DG: The Mac Weekly has probably been the only real career preparation I’ve had at Macalester, outside of my on-campus jobs. I love the liberal arts education style, and I don’t think that college should be about career readiness. College is about life and learning and being a smarter, better human being. That said, I need to eat. The Mac Weekly has shown me what my life as a journalist might be like beyond these couple blocks. More than that, it has connected me to my campus community. Macalester sports might be ridiculous and embarrassing sometimes, but I care about each and every program here, I’m interested in their history and their future, and I want to tell their stories. There isn’t a huge market for a lot of the writing I’ve done. I wrote 23 articles about the football team last semester, and I don’t think I eclipsed 200 readers on a single one of those pieces. That’s really not the point. I’m here to tell stories that matter to a small group of people, and as long as someone — literally anyone — gets something out of it, then I’m happy. No one else will write these stories. That makes our job here all the more important. Being a free paper means that we don’t have to worry about headlines that will make our issues fly off the racks. We can really consider what matters to us and what matters to our campus community. And we have fun sometimes, too.
Audrey Milk: What I’ve done on The Mac Weekly has taught me so much about myself as a student. This paper has taught me how to organize my time. This paper has taught me how I work, where I work best. The office has become my homework space, and my safe space, both with people there and the community in that office, and also just that space feels safe to me. It’s the place I’ve laughed, it’s a place I’ve cried, and I think that that’s definitely the space on campus I’ve spent the most amount of time — except for being asleep, [though] even that’s a little debatable. But, yeah, just being a consistent part of my life for the last four years — and in a time that’s so different semester to semester, year to year — that’s really important: to have something consistent, something just safe.
Editors’ note: Audrey Milk has spent 468.75 hours in The Mac Weekly office this school year, at the time we send this issue to print.
TMW: What is a behind the scenes moment from The Mac Weekly that people would be surprised to know?
LW: I think people are surprised to hear how many reads articles get, the amount of eyes that go on these papers, the care that goes into the edits and the changes some articles have from that first draft to what is actually published, because so many people are contributing to it from an editing standpoint. This is a completely student-run paper. It is all student leaders. It is all peer editing. We have advisors, but in terms of the actual paper getting published and getting out and what we’re writing, it is totally in students’ hands.
AM: Probably how many frustrated noises people make at InDesign on a daily basis? Like, do any of us really completely know how InDesign works? My serious answer [is that] a lot of us are just learning as we [go]. I feel like from the outside, a lot of people think we’re such a well-oiled machine, and that is really not always true. Sometimes it is. It’s really like there’s always some unexpected twist and turn, and we’re going as we do and we’re making it work.
CM: How much your writing changes in the course of four years. I remember my first year writing felt so much more like writing an essay, and now I [feel] this is totally different … And I think [about] how specific each section is with its style and its rules, and what works in one section works a lot differently in another.
TMW: What are some highlights or favorite memories of your time at The Mac Weekly?
Scarlet Dunning: The first actual article that I wrote — because I [previously] only did puzzles, and pretty much still only do puzzles. I’ve written very few real articles, and the first one that I did was a full-page arts article on Mario Party Jamboree when that came out. And that was a really, really fun article to write and edit and lay out, because I got to do a lot of really fun things with png cutout wrapping. I still have a copy of that issue saved. It was a really fun page to lay out, and it looks really good.
LW: I kind of love the crisis, [when] It’s 1 a.m., everyone’s so tired and ready to be done, but there’s still things that need to be done. You have to go to the printer to actually publish. Some of those super late nights were some of the most fun I had because everyone was kind of delirious and not really wanting to be there, but also really dedicated to getting this thing done.
AM: Anytime we were all tired enough that there was a group of us lying on the floor, just staring at the ceiling, talking about nonsense, [were] always some of the best nights. And, honestly, a lot of the fun things I’ve co-written with people. I think those moments of, “Hey, do you want to co-write this really random thing and make an article about it, and put it on the internet and in a newspaper?” are some of my favorites. Anything that’s just funny and silly, or even a serious article I get to work on with someone, it always turns into something fun.
TMW: What Mac Weekly work or moments are you most proud of?
SD: I’m pretty proud that Henry [Skalla ’26] and I co-founded an entire new section, and that it has stuck around, and now we have. We’ve now had three different puzzle editors and so many people writing puzzles. When it first started, it was just Henry and I.
CM: I think Mac for Palestine’s academic divestment proposal. Sitting outside Kagin [right now], It’s really strange to think about the fact that I went to faculty meetings for three months, but that felt big, because the meeting before the last faculty meeting, when they voted on it [the divestment proposal], a lot of faculty didn’t know that they were going to vote on it. So that article felt really pivotal, that we were able to announce that and announce that they debated it.
And also, I had an article about all gender housing my first year that got reprinted in Fox News, and I was like, oh my god, I f––cked up. This is so bad. I’ve ruined this person’s life who basically got doxxed. And they [that student] actually came back and they were like, “This helped me. And I would go through it all again, because I got to live in a housing accommodation that was better for me.”
AM: A lot of the opinions I’ve written, I’m really proud of. Two of the disability-based opinions I’ve written have made real change on this campus. Talking to people who are going through a housing accommodation process now, it does actually seem that they’ve made it better, so I’m proud to have made at least a part of some of that change.
I’ve written some [of my op-eds] in, like, a night, but I’m just really proud of how they’ve turned out and what I’ve gotten to put out into the world: a little piece of advocacy that I get to share with not only this campus, but whoever wants to read it. I’ve had people from high school DM me that they read my article that I put on my Instagram story, and I haven’t talked to this person in a year and a half, two years, and they read this and didn’t [previously] know anything about it, and then it’s made an impact on someone.
TMW: What was your favorite article to work on?
CM: Writing Dino World Live. Sitting in the children’s theater surrounded by a bunch of kids, feeling like a kid again was so amazing. AM: Justine and I co-wrote our Eurovision backgrounds and production the last week of my first year. We were both already big Eurovision fans. And then we sat down together and watched every single performance video for the year. Then [we] wrote this massive article about everything and ended up having to cut it down because we just kept writing and talking. Just that process of, what of our random feelings about this song contest are we going to get put in the article?
TMW: What will you miss the most about working on The Mac Weekly?
DG: We talk about a bubble a lot in college. The Mac Weekly is its own bubble within Macalester. And there are downsides to a bubble, but also a bubble can be nice. I mean, that basement office is kind of its own world. You can go in there, and — it’s not as if it’s worry free. It’s very stressful. [But] it’s its own world. I’ve gone in there in weeks where I’ve had a terrible week, and it’s just like, well, now you [just] have to worry about the paper. Everything else kind of goes away. You’re in there with a bunch of people who are all just working on the paper, and you’re going to talk to them, you’re going to hang out, you’re going to have a good time and you’re going to have to work a certain amount. But it’s kind of nice to have the world not be all on top of you all at once. And you’re exposed to all these people who are not the same at all and there’s really no reason for all these people to be hanging out at 11 p.m. on a Wednesday, but they are anyway. And so you get to learn a lot about people that way.
CM: This is the last time in my life that I’ll be a student journalist. I’m hopefully going to be a professional journalist one day, and that’ll be really exciting, but I also won’t be working with the same people that I go out with and have random conversations with on, like, a Wednesday night at three in the morning. And so I’ll miss that a lot. And I’ll miss being in a place where, like, obviously it would be great if everyone on the paper could get paid, but because that isn’t the case, everyone really does want to be there, and it’s pretty rare for that to happen in a place where you have to work so hard.
TMW: In what ways will you take TMW with you after graduation?
AM: Before I joined The Mac Weekly, I didn’t know what an em dash was, and now it is my favorite piece of punctuation. But seriously, I feel like every different thing I’ve done has taught me or helped me in a different way. The biggest is probably my confidence in my writing and my confidence in my own ability to see a project to fruition. I’ve undertaken so many different things — obviously, opinion has been my home within the paper, but I’ve done something for every section, whether it’s a big interview, heavy features piece like special appointment faculty, or a concert review that I did on a whim with a friend or Wayback at Mac, which has helped me stretch my creative writing muscles so much more than I ever thought anything on Mac Weekly would. Everything I have done on this newspaper has made me a more confident person in my ability to take on whatever comes next, and I think that is what is going to carry me the furthest of anything I’ve learned here.
TMW: What do you hope for The Mac Weekly in the future or what is one piece of advice you would give to your past Mac Weekly self or a future staff member?
AM: Advice I would have for myself just starting on the paper is say yes to things. Don’t be afraid to take on a new project. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out of your comfort zone.
So many people who find themselves on this paper thrive out of their comfort zone because you’re willing to put yourself out there and take on the hard thing, take on the hard project. Take on the hard piece, and don’t let the uncomfortability scare you.
DG: Pursue your passion. If there’s something you want to see or do on the paper, this is probably your last chance to do pretty much whatever you want on here and not have a boss who’s going to say no to you, or a budget that’s going to be not enough for you. You’re on this paper because you’re passionate about something, so figure out what that is and be the best at that. Because there’s no point in doing something you don’t enjoy, and there’s no point in not pursuing something, because if you enjoy it, go after it.
TMW: What is a favorite rejected title or a funny title that has made it into the paper?
AM: “Springfest grows in years, shrinks in beers.”
DG: There’s a lot of headlines that I have deleted that were pretty good. The only [published] one I can think of is, for chess-wrestling, I went with “Only at Macalester: Chess-wrestling.”
CM: I rejected Vik’s MCSG “meat-ing.” I want to go on the record saying I should have just dealt with the angry email.
The Mac Weekly would like to thank Daniel Graham, Lucy Wing, Callisto Martinez, Scarlet Dunning, Audrey Milk, Elisa Hsieh, Owen Honour, Emily Hueser, Zander Leong, Natalie Mazey, Jizelle Villegas, Sammy Casillas, Ivan Orozco, Lawrence Salonga, Molly Friedrichs, Parker Etzbach, Andrew Dong, Henry Skalla and Emma Runchey Smalley for their contributions to the paper over the years.
