The Elusive School Newspaper

I wont go on about my desire to be a writer and my need to write for local papers, or the fact that I tested out of High School and am now attending the local community college, or my experience writing for my High School Newspaper the year before I left. All this you either knew because you know me personally, found out reading past blogs, or just now learned and don't need to know more to understand where I'm coming from.

In my quest to find magazines and papers to freelance for, I learned that local publications are generally the easiest to get into. I have some beef with our local daily newspaper (They printed a story of mine from the high school paper but edited in poor grammar and changed my perfect intro into an incomplete clause, and then they defamed my entire high school unnecessarily by blowing up a scandal and ignoring the fact that only a few students from, who were from all the local schools, were involved), so I decided I really didn't want them touching anything else of mine. I can't really write for the high school paper anymore, so I'm stuck with small magazines and weekly papers - most of which are geared towards the high class population in a nearby retirement town.

Because I wrote for the high school paper, though, the college paper seemed like an obvious choice. Of course we're not a 'real' college, but we still have a paper - somewhere.

I can't really find that paper, though. I see copies online and in newspaper boxes around campus, but their online link doesn't list student names (Other than on the byline), or the name of faculty advisers or publishers or anything else which might help someone in my position know who to go to with story queries. It's as if the paper is written by a secret society of students who find likely candidates in their English classes and spent so much time with initiation that they forget to promote their actual paper, or even write more often than every three months.

With the little amount of press it's getting, I don't think writing for the school paper would really help me at all, but would it kill the editors to put some contact information where people can find it? Maybe if they were a bit more serious about their work, they'd have more people reading their paper. But who am I kidding - I still need to get something published.

(EDIT: I actually got offered a job by an online pay-per-click type news website, which would have given me pennies and some experience, but wouldn't let me publish under a pseudonym. Unfortunately, I'm trying to build a platform here, and working my butt off for pennies and being unable to use the experience to further my career isn't my cup of tea. Yet.)

(I don't even drink tea.)