Schuyler Mitchell PO ’20, TSL’s life and style associate, sat down with the spring 2019 TSL editorial board to get the inside scoop on their interests, backgrounds and love lives.
What’s your favorite thing about TSL?
Hank Snowdon CM ’21, managing editor: I think it’s a really great challenge. It gives us the opportunity to cover five schools, five administrations, two athletic programs, 7,000 students.
Kellen Browning PO ’20, editor-in-chief: Because we go to private schools, it’s a lot harder to get information. Some events or decisions made by the administration might not be immediately available to students, so we have a special challenge and opportunity to dig deep into different stories.
Meghan Bobrowsky SC ’21, managing editor: For a lot of those things, if we weren’t here reporting about them, people wouldn’t know what was going on. I think we serve a really special, unique purpose that no other organization at the 5Cs serves.
So, Kellen and Meghan, you’re dating. Tell us the story about how you guys met.
KB: We knew each other for like three years.
MB: From cross country and track.
KB: We went to high school together.
MB: But we weren’t friends.
KB: That’s not true — we knew each other.
MB: But we were from very different groups in high school.
KB: But we did our high school journalism class together, and in April my senior year I was working on a data-driven story about teacher salaries in our school district. It was for our local newspaper and I needed help with it, so I asked Meghan if she was interested. It went much longer than we thought it would, and we had to continue working on it over the summer and spend a lot of time together. Then I was her counselor at a journalism workshop.
MB: Kellen ignored me for two weeks.
KB: Which I dispute. But then we took the train ride home together, and started dating three weeks before I left for college.
So Hank do you ever feel like the third wheel?
HS: I felt left out because Kellen and Meghan were all over each other.
KB: That’s a lie, for the record!
HS: So I recruited my girlfriend, Lia Gagliuso, to be our Instagram manager for the semester.
Do you think journalism is dying?
HS: The current business model is not set up in a way for it to succeed long-term, so I think it’s really fun to run our own paper and get to handle that issue of how to make money/survive as a newspaper on a really micro scale. We all do the hiring; we all try to help with ad sales; we all make decisions. We’re running this as if it’s a business, and I really enjoy that challenge.
KB: I don’t think that journalism is dying. I think that it’s more important than ever. Here at TSL, even though print is struggling and we’re constantly underfunded, we’re doing our best to deliver high-quality content. We’ve been printing for 130 years, and I don’t want to be the editor-in-chief that ends that … so we’re going to keep going as long as possible.
If your life was a newspaper headline what would it be?
HS: “Snowdon in over his head”
KB: “Breaking: Exhausted college student doesn’t get enough sleep”
MB: Uh, maybe, “She’s still got it?”
What’s the weirdest thing to ever happen on production night?
MB: I hate ketchup, and once at two in the morning Hank was throwing ketchup at me.
HS: Ketchup packets. I wasn’t pouring ketchup on you.
MB: I thought they were going to explode, and I was freaking out and running around the newsroom and trying to hide behind people. Another night, we’d done our entire production and were ready to submit the PDF, and as we were about to print a 10-page newspaper we realized there were 11 pages. The joke is journalists are bad at math, right? So that was a pretty good example of that.
Let’s end with a controversial topic. What’s the best 5C dining hall?
KB: Mudd.
MB: Scripps.
HS: I’ll give a more nuanced answer. Collins for breakfast, Scripps for lunch, and Mudd for dinner.