WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE: A NEWSPAPER

Submitted for Volume 1, Issue 2

Quick, haul your butt off of those sticky Cafe benches and get on the phone to the FBI's Fox Mulder and Dana Sculley: the Woodlands has a case for them. Things at this school have a notorious habit of disappearing. First it was the cheerleading team, then the posters of Jimi Hendrix and the Who, (luckily, they haven't been burned in a cult ceremony in the Staff Lounge, the're just leaning up against the back wall of the stage, behind the curtains. Go up and look for yourself.) Now, the school newspaper Woodchips, is slowly vanishing. First, the October issue didn't come out. Then the November issue bit the dust. The way things are going now, we will be lucky if we see the September 2013 edition. Why have they stopped being printed? Is it aliens? The CIA? Has Brian Mulroney stolen all the copies and put them into a vault in a Swiss bank? No,Woodchips is facing a far deadlier foe than Canada's ex-Prime Minister. Our school newspaper is being destroyed by the bogeyman of the 90's: Lack of funding. It just doesn't have enough money to print up copies to hand out. It seems that the newspaper is trying to pay for itself by selling advertising space. For a couple of bucks, you can advertise almost anything you want in Woodchips. Unfortunately, ad space wasn't exactly a hot seller, and the SAC isn't chipping in enough to cover the shortfall. End result: a non-existent newspaper. That means that all the stories a school newspaper should be covering, like sports news, club happenings and other events, are being neglected. First, Woodchips sucked up to the administration and acted as the yes-man for the Yearbook and SAC's hilarious hijinks. Now it doesn't even exist at all. What is the SAC doing about this? Nothing at all. It seems that the paper has served it purpose as the SAC's puppet, and so it is being left to die. But as much as we complain about Woodchips' first issue, it should be given the chance to improve. So quit trying to spell the name of that school in South Africa we are selling popcorn for, and start breathing down your home form SAC rep's neck to dump some cash into the newspaper editor's laps! 

Why we didn't print it: This article was written sometime between the release of our first issue (back in '95) and the Woodchips second issue. It was meant to be a kind of 'hey let's put aside our differences and co-exist in harmony' article. A few days later the Woodchips published their editorials on HTP (you can read them here), and someone pulled this article for spite. Pretty juvenile, I know, but that was back in the day..