The Cornell Daily Sun was my classroom, my fraternity, my dining hall – my home. I surely spent more hours in the cramped second-floor offices on S. Cayuga Street than in any other place at college, including my bedroom. I’d wanted to be a journalist before I ever set foot in Ithaca – I chose Cornell in part because of the warm welcome and scrappy newsroom I experienced at the Daily Sun as a visiting pre-frosh. The Sun took my vision of my future and made it a reality. So in that way it was a dream come true. And it didn’t disappoint.
My first night as a compet, a message came across the police scanner that a body had been found in a gorge on campus. The newsroom sprang into action: Reporters and a photographer were dispatched to the scene while others jumped on phones and started hammering at keyboards. All the age-old journalistic challenges reverberated: how to confirm elusive facts, how to meet impossible deadlines, how to cover a shattering tragedy, how to serve a grieving community.
The lessons I received in that messy, greasy, run-down office suite were not just Journalism 101. They were a master’s class in why journalism was the best job in the world – the impact, the adrenaline, the collegiality, the creativity, the irreverence, the invitation into the lives of everyone in the community around us.
The Sun also had a wonderful rigidity to its rules, necessitated by the yearly turnover of graduation, that made it adhere to a purer ethics and journalistic soundness than I’ve witnessed at any of the dozen professional media organizations I’ve worked for: Three sources for a story! No involvement with politics! No anonymous sources that haven’t received an editor’s approval!
The Cornell Daily Sun has shaped everything about the reporter and editor I am today. Perhaps most importantly, it has provided a continual well of inspiration that journalism itself is worth fighting for, that the old-school standards have enduring value, and that a newsroom is more than a workplace.
Hilary Krieger
Editor-in-Chief '98
