by Erin Thompson

Created on: September 23, 2008

When I started freelancing a few years ago, my editor told me something that took me awhile to fully understand.

He said that criticism was the best gift that any journalist could receive.

"Don't you want to avoid criticism?" I asked myself. "I didn't get involved in this to make trouble."

I later realized that criticism is possibly the only way to gauge readership.

Given that only about 34 percent of people will read the printed edition of a newspaper, according to the Readership Institute (the statistic has been declining since the rise of the Internet), we should consider ourselves lucky to have such an honor.

And it's not because we're trying to make trouble, or because we like to start controversy.

Any journalism professor will tell you that most readers won't make it past the first few sentences of a story. Many won't even make it past the front page.

According to the Readership Institute, the average reader will spend less than 27 minutes reading a newspaper, but we continue to put hundreds of combined hours into each issue of the Spectator because we understand how important it is to deliver the news.

The only time anyone is going to give us any feedback (except on rare occasions) is
when we are doing something wrong.

Sure, it's tough to accept criticism, but we learn, we adapt and we move on.

I don't think that I've ever felt cheated that we don't get congratulatory phone calls when we caught a comma splice on page four at the last minute. That sort of thing is just expected of us.

And let's get real. No one is going to call and say "Hey guys, great job covering that SGA meeting last week." We understand that-even though our lives revolve around such things-most people don't care that much.

I will be honest; when I do hear a compliment, I am often skeptical and question the sincerity of the person. It's not that I'm cynical, I'm just not used to it.

There are situations in which you will upset someone no matter what type of story you run. We try to avoid it, but we will be accused of having biases no matter what our viewpoint may be. We learn from our mistakes and move on.

If we wrote on a controversial topic and did not get any feedback, I would be worried because it means no one is reading.

I am beginning to understand that when people criticize our work, it means that people are reading what we write.

I won't sugarcoat it. This is a thankless job, 95 percent of the time. We have to take things as they come.

This is my second year as editor-in-chief, and I'm learning that we have to deal with the exhaustion. Each editor pours countless hours into putting the paper together, and most people who read it will only complain about the things we do wrong.

But somewhere deep down, I hope more than anything that I have many more exhausting years of this to come.

As for the upcoming year, we will continue to pour hundreds of hours in to the Spectator because we want to hear your complaints.

In a way, it's what drives us.

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