The Story of a Stony Brook Presser

I posed this question to the class: "Is the Saint Cloud State University student newspaper The Chronicle an example of mainstream press or alternative press?"

When I was in college, I loved to read, write, and draw.  While I was pretty focused on my studies, I still found time to wander around campus and find some trouble or make some.  I belonged to an organization called the Science Fiction Forum; we would hang around in the basement of one of the campus buildings, watch movies, talk about various subjects, and manage the massive science fiction and fantasy lending library that the group had developed over the years.  We basement-dwelling Forumites shared a hallway with some pretty dubious company--Nat the Can Man, who claimed to be homeless by choice; gigantic cockroaches that you could saddle and ride (we called them "fluffies"), and the Stony Brook Press.

The Stony Brook Press threw regular parties, complete with alcohol and various types of cigarettes.  Now and then they would invite a band to perform, or some naked performance artists.  The parties attracted people from all of the groups on campus.  Some people showed up just to witness these legendary gatherings with their own eyes.  Some people showed up for the free booze and funny cigarettes.  But certain people showed up because they had actually read The Press, and said FUCK YEAH--they really cover "the real issues" in their paper, they thumb their nose at the university administration and student government, they publish viewpoints that other newspapers do not, and they make demands.  These folks were funny as hell, but dead serious about political, environmental, and social issues.  Certain people wanted a piece of that action.  I was one of them.

When I joined the staff in 1992, the editor-in-chief gave me a little white book called The History of the Stony Brook Press.  This book made it absolutely clear that anyone who joined The Press had a legacy, and a responsibility.  It was our job to wake people out of their slumber using any journalistic or artistic means possible.  We would publish two print issues a month during the academic year, and one a month during the summer.  We had to fill a certain number of pages with articles, photos, artwork, and advertising and meet deadlines, even if it meant staying up for three days straight to do it.  Part of the work involved creating a dummy layout on paper, then using Quark Express to format the paper using the measurements on the dummy layout, copying and pasting from Quark to the paper layout, sending both to the printer, then getting the actual copies and distributing them around campus.  We had a room called "The Morgue" where we kept back issues; this was our archive.  If we did not make a point to save a few issues for The Morgue, there often would be no issues left for us to collect later.  This is a testament to the popularity of The Press, as opposed to the official campus paper The Statesman.  It did not matter that The Statesman had paid staff from Newsday working on the paper alongside students.  It did not matter that The Statesman covered all of the campus sports.  It did not matter that The Statesman reported about the activities of student government.  If you read The Statesman and believed it, you were a tool. 

To take a look at those old Stony Brook Press newspapers now, you can go to the digital collections of my alma mater and take a look at our primitive efforts.  I will tell you, though, that our paper won awards and also got the campus sued on numerous occasions.  We received hate mail and disturbed people.  Not because we said anything wrong...but because we reported things that some people did not want others to know.   

I Googled "Stony Brook Press" and discovered that their paper is now an online publication.  It no longer has the same flavor as the publication that I used to know, but if you compare it to the online version of The Statesman, you will notice some differences in reporting and style.  Do not read the Wikipedia article about The Stony Brook Press; it is all wrong, and does not cite the official History of the Stony Brook Press booklet...which you could only get if you were a sworn Presser.  I will have to contact the digital archivist and find out if that booklet had been digitized and added to the collection as well. 

[This entry is dedicated to Shari Nezami, Managing Editor of The Press, who was killed in 1994.  While The Press published a memorial issue for Shari, I have to confess that the Statesman did the honor of documenting the car crash.]