Value the Truth: Steve Missey and the Legacy of The Prep News

Down the hall at Bakker Memorial, across the St. Louis Metro Region and around the world. This is Insignus, the St. Louis University High podcast. I'm Jim Linhears. The astonishing information revolution, news feeds on any topic, live posts on Twitter X, the relentless onslaught of social media posts, videos on TikTok, has not been good for the print newspaper business. But at St. Louis U. High, the prep news, one of the nation's few student-produced, weekly high school broadsheets, remains a signature institution and one of our most vital, enduring and formative co-curricular activities. It's still read it every Friday. The extended community of parents and benefactors connect to it on the web and thousands of alums get it each week in their email inbox. And the fact that they often let us know what they think tells us they actually read it. When the school recently announced a transformative gift of $10 million for STEM education, the prep news got to scoop and ran the story in a special edition. The paper's motto, "If nothing else, value the truth" has been scrolled above the headlines since the mid-70s. There's no counting the number of alums whose character and careers have been profoundly shaped by the experience of reporting, writing, and editing the prep news. But dozens have gone on to distinguish careers in journalism, at news and media outlets across the country and around the world. This episode of Insignus in our backer memorial Centennial Year on Oakland Avenue is a celebration of the legacy of the prep news. But like all clubs and co-curricular activities at SLU, the future is on the line every year. They all depend upon the new energy and enthusiasm veteran students need to bring to each club, team, or activity. They depend upon the willingness of a new class of eager, if somewhat overwhelmed, freshman, who will have to decide to give up some of their precious free time to get involved. So we stopped by one of the great co-curricular beginning of the year traditions at St. Louis U.I. The Activities Fair. To hear why members of this year's prep news staff are preaching the message that having a school newspaper still matters. So I think what's truly great about the prep news is the hard work that we put in each and every week to get a print paper out every week from our articles on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. All of the interviews we carry out during the school days. And on Thursday nights, when we spend all night here from the end of school all the way until 1030 midnight, laying out the paper and just getting everything done. I mean, I think it's really so unique to have not only a weekly high school newspaper, but a weekly print high school newspaper. I mean, especially as things are getting more and more digital. To have that resource and then the community that we're able to build each and every week, I mean, staying and working eight hours a week on Thursday nights. And it's pretty tough work, but I mean, you have a lot of fun doing it, and I really enjoy it. Steve Missy is a graduate of the class of 1988. His boyhood fantasy of being a sports journalist got a boost when he came to Slew as a student and took a job as a writer on the sports beat for the prep news. In the fall of 1992, after earning his undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt, he returned to Slew as an ASC volunteer teaching English, coaching baseball, and assisting legendary English teacher and prep news moderator Jim Raderman. After a few years away from Slew in pursuit of a master's of, Steve returned as a full-time member of the faculty in 1994 and became the moderator of the prep news himself for the 2000-2001 school year. He's been in that role ever since. Overseeing the paper's transition to a printed broadsheet and eventually to an additional e-addition. A distinguished career in the English department as a teacher and department chair led to his additional current administrative role in curriculum leadership. I sat down with Steve on a Tuesday afternoon last spring to talk about the prep news and his many years at the helm. I got our conversation started by asking about the intense, weekly adventure of putting out the paper. So right now it's a Tuesday and another issue is coming. It's like Saturday night live. The thing has to get put together in a week. There's got to be this kind of drama of, "Oh my, housing got to happen." So what is happening on a Tuesday? In the process of production, what's going on out there in the halls and in your head and in some workspace that's eventually going to lead to a paper coming out? So where we are right now is guys are, guys are theoretically out interviewing the people that need to interview and going to the places they need to go to tell whatever stories they're telling for the week. They're marching from some big board that you guys have been managing. Yep. So we've got the big board. We've got all, we've got, we're not on slack. But so or discord or any of that kind of stuff. But we do have, you know, Google with Google is pretty amazing. So we have, we call it the prep news hive. It's this master document where we're keeping all of our story ideas and then each week kind of starts being built one on top of the next. And so basically every Friday, somewhere in along Friday, Saturday or Sunday, the editors are assigning stories and reporters are getting stories and then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays when they're out hitting the bricks and doing their thing unless it's a longer term thing. But my job at the beginning part of the week is to poke my head and say, what are the red flags? Where are, what's going on? And then I'll hear it. Show me the friction. Tell me what's grinding. So, so, so can't get such and such. We haven't talked to this guy. This guy says he can't do the article. It's just that kind of thing. But it's actually pretty, from my end, it's pretty low key because I'm not the guy writing the stories. I'm not doing the work. Those guys are. So they're trying to juggle their, their, their in the spring, their playing all their sports. They got band concerts. They got a p test. They got, they are, they are crushed here at the end of the spring and 15 to 20 of those guys right now are out there and they've taken on this special extra, basically a slew high research paper for the week. So they had to go out and sort that all out and put it all together and get it, get it on the dock and ideally it's there by tomorrow afternoon or late evening. So it's not like be the director of a show down the doff and players. The whole thing's not in your head and you're not ushering it towards some finish line. It sounds to me like you got a trust that a lot of the right stuff is going on. Yes. You guys have talked about it. That's right. And that's different from, I would say that it's different now. I used to coat, you know, I coach baseball Steve Nicole out for a long time and I, he, I watched how he would run, he would really run the infield because that's where all the high practice stuff is. Outfielders, you just throw balls for an hour and they're like puppies, they go chasing. But infield, you got to really work their brains and their, their bodies. And Steve would do it so that each kid who'd been in the program for a couple of years could turn around and teach kids who hadn't. So Steve didn't have to be everywhere all the time. Yeah. But everything was coming through Steve. So the second basement knew what to do because Steve had hit them and then he would circle back, he was kind of like the dentist, he'd come in and make sure the tech had done the, you know, what are your hands doing on a, on a relay, right? So the prep news in my early years, I think was, I looked back and I think like, well, it was kind of setting up those systems. It was setting up like how, how editors and reporters are accountable to themselves, to each other, to me, how to recognize. So in the early years, I was kind of shepherding every little. You were creating cultures and, and routines and values there. I didn't, I didn't know it. I didn't think of it that way. I guess there was a Rattamann template there that you stretched all the way back to your years, right? Yeah. Well, the Rattamann, so the genius of the Rattamann template is, the template is, it's a real newspaper. So everything that goes in it has to feel like organic and real. That's, it's something the community would theoretically like they would need to know either now or sometime in the future as an archival kind of a thing. It's the newspaper of record. And that, that template was genius. I mean, that's, that's why it feels vital to slew even still when most kids aren't reading any news at all anywhere. Like they say they see it online, but, but most kids don't actually. But it does feel like, oh, this is real and vital. Like this happened this week and now here it is and I'm going to sort of read some version of, of what went on. So that was the genius of the Rattamann template. And then I guess, I guess in the early year, I guess so. So now when I look at it, I see all these, like I just see all of them. All these parts that I, it's not that it's not in my head. I just don't have to consciously think about it a whole ton early in the week because mostly they're all like in the early years. Here's an example. Like in the early years, I can remember sitting down with Greg Fox and Alex Sudo. And we had hit this point, this is my maybe third year. We hit this point where it was late in the year. They were getting very tired. They were starting to kind of mail it in a little bit. And we had an issue that like it was the old 8 1/2 by 11. And I think we really, really, really struggled to get six pages. Like we had to like sweat to make six pages happen. You know, I never want a two page stapled paper like that. Yeah. That's bad news. So we sweated it. And so I went home and I just thought like this is not, this is not good. Like we can't, the paper is going to suck if we just keep mailing it in. So I started, I got a piece of paper and through the week, I just every time I, every time I saw anything that I thought, that's a story, I would just write it down. And I just, I wanted to flood the paper with, it's not hard. They're everywhere. We just have to really, really, really pay attention. So you did have to intervene in those years to get a culture of real news restarted. Yeah. A little bit because they, and they're tempted all that. So that's like one little story. But that, that's an example of like all, I think in the early years, even when we first went to newsprint, one kind of anxiety was always like, are we actually going to have a paper this week? Like, do we have enough stuff to have a paper? And that anxiety has gone, like I'd say it's been 10 years since I felt that anxiety. Now it's much more like, God, are we going to have to do a, are we going to have to do a 12 page paper? Because that's just a lot of stuff. Or we have to do it, you know, it's eight pages of newsprint is a ton. It's probably, it's equivalent to probably 14 pages of the old paper, which was a bonkers, big paper on the eight and a half by 11th. I hope our listeners have paged through it and know what we're talking about, but you're really struck by that when you read it. It's just substance. Yeah, it's not stuff. And you're, you're turning the next page and then there's a world of sport to read about. Yeah. I just did this today. Yeah. You know, I went up with last week's edition. Yeah. But it really is a piece of substantive work. There's a lot of stuff in there. So, when you get to Thursday, you're all stacked in there and you're new nest, which by the way, how's that going? It's going, so it's going great. I love the media center's amazing. It's an amazing space to work. I know it's giving me years on the job. Part of the reason I may feel less worn out is because I haven't spent all year and 110 square feet of teenage human coughing and packing and sneezing. I'm really glad to hear that because you and I haven't sat down to actually ask, does this all feel worth it? You're saying exclamation point. It absolutely feels worth it. Yeah. Yeah. So, you're in new digs that suit you better for a production day. Thank you. But it's all focused down on that day and it's bustling and it's very cool to come in as a guest. And I did that in preparation for this show a few times. But when it works, it hums and it all, it all happens. But I got to imagine there's some, there's some sand in the Vaseline and there's some grinding of the gears. Can you take us into that? What kind of rough patches do you have to go through some Thursdays to get a paper out? Again, I feel like they're fewer but they happen and the answer is it can be anything. You know, like you just don't know any given week. So one thing that happens is, you know, I'm reading articles. So part of the workflow is on Thursday afternoon, I'm reading people, editors are doing editor reads on documents and they're forwarding them to me and I give them a final read before they get set on layout. So in the course of that process and you got lots of articles coming through and we've got a kind of spreadsheet that we're keeping track of. And, you know, so at like five or five fifteen, I might all of a sudden realize like, oh, this article, you're going to get the article gummed up. No and so didn't do the article, he didn't talk to such and such. Well, where is he now? Well, he's at track actually and they have a meat and a salad and he's not going to be back until seven and he's not answering his texts. And so you get like that, you get little things like that. We'll pop up, you know, here. You had the rhythm of the paper set and that's not going to happen. It's just, yeah, you're going to have this thing that kind of holds things up. Thankfully, I mean, I think one thing like, I think really maybe the defining difference between like when Jim Raderman produced the paper and when I've produced it. It's changed a lot even since I've been here, but even when I started, the technology, like the trust in the technology is going to hold and work every night that I have versus like when Jim was here and you just didn't know. Which was bailing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's allowed us to pay attention to lots of things that aren't like, is the rizograph machine going to work? Right. You know, because that's a sucky thing at one o'clock in the morning. Like, oh, wait a minute. What do you mean the drum is out of masters? Yeah. How do I fix that? I was the other one of my terrible high school newspaper and I know exactly what that was all about. Yeah. Yeah. Because that was the whole game. That's right. And you're basically a mechanic at that point. And Jim Raderman was an amazing mechanic. Like that dude could, but as anybody who knows me will tell you, I, the me and the world of physical objects, we're not friends. So it's all up in my head. But if I got actually fixed something like, we're just all out of luck. Yeah. Yeah. The quintessential cinematic moment in a movie about journalism is people huddled around some story and sort of the anxiety around, do we go with? Yeah. Yeah. And if we go with it, what's the angle? Yes. Have there been moments like that in the prep news? And I know that's not easy to talk about. I'm going to assume there, there were because our guys leave here when they talk about the scene in a moment and they walk into newsrooms and organizations where they're dealing with it. They seem to be able to land on their feet. So even at a high school newspaper, were there those moments when you guys are huddling together as an editor group and saying, what's our through line here? Do we go? Yes. So yes. And I mean, the short answer is yes there are. And as you, as you like, I want to preface. So I'll, and I'll talk about that in a second. But I want to say is one, so something I've said over the years to kids and other people about the prep news when people say, I don't know how you do that week after week. This is, this is true. This isn't like rhetoric. Part of the reason I can do it week after week is I completely forget what happened the week before all, all the time. Like I, kids will say, remember last week we did this thing and I'll be like, I have no, I do not. I don't remember the opposite of Groundhog Day. It kind of is like, because so much, I don't know. There's so much, it's like all short term memories. Like it's all just like it's right there in front of you and you're trying to make all these decisions about text or photos or headlines or doing all, it's just, it's a billion little bitty things. And I've seen it all a ton of times before it comes out, which is sometimes embarrassing when you see the mistakes that get made. Like I'll, I just think like how did, I know I saw that ten times. How did I not catch that? But I just, I don't know, I kind of forget. So I want to preface this part with that because the answer is yes, but I have to go off and work pretty hard to bring back like the texture of some of those, some of those. Yeah, because there's a lot of moments in there where a specific issue was at stake. And things I can remember vividly have much more to do with like, they have much more to do with like, kids and things that were going on with those kids either about the story or not. Yeah. And less about like the, the, the dramatic life of the school kinds of stories, but those are really powerful and cool. Like I, you know, I, I know there have been nights, you know, I know I like, I can remember being up in the J wing on the phone in the hallway with an administrator or a letter writer or a parent of a letter writer saying, well, this is, you know, this is what he's saying. You know, you guys, oh, you're the parents, are you okay with this? And or with the administrator? Well, you know, the language, okay, the language you want to know. So the language we're using here is this. I mean, all kinds of, the, the great thing about the prep news is that, and the great thing about what Jim did was because he made it a real newspaper by the time I got it, the default position of the institution was trust in what the prep news was doing as a paper. Like Jim fought those battles and got it there. We have to refight them with every new administration, each new year. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good way to put it. You have to kind of refight it or reestablish it. Yes, you can trust us, but the default position is this thing's the legit and we can trust that they're going to handle it carefully. Right. It also means, and you know this, that when and where a school is pretty newsy and big and interesting, when a story does begin to break in the community, if you're an administrator, and I've been able to be in that role for 13 years now, you're saying to yourself, what's the prep news going to say? It's a thing. Yeah. You're aware that the prep news is there as a reporting institution. And like people out in the world of politics, you think about the press, which is a pretty cool thing. It is. It is a cool thing. And I took it, there was a period, there was a point, I know the point when that started to happen in my time at the prep news. And it is hard. It's hard because there's this novel by a doctor called World's Fair that I really love. And in the novel, the dad, the dad's this kind of like proto-socialist who's teaching his kid like kind of the way to see through kind of the American illusion to some degree, teaching his kid how to see the world. He takes him to the 1939 World's Fair. And the boy has already been, and he's been with the boy's eyes the first time, and so he's just been dazzled by everything. Then he goes back with his dad, and his dad just starts, he starts kind of critiquing. You know, this little, like, we'll notice that. They're doing this to trick you here. You know, they're pretending this. And the kid just knows that his dad is right. And then, but instead of being deflated by it, what Edgar says, I love this line. He says something like, he could be critical of a thing and love it too, as what he said, which is a line I really, really, really love. Which is really ignition. We got to keep retrieving the ignition thing for being something real and not just sort of a moniker. Yeah. That is ignition. I think so. You know, to love it and analyze it. Yeah. To study it in its complexity and come back and affirm that process. Yes. But it isn't easy. It isn't easy. And I can, you know, like, I know I can think of the rooms I've been in with various people who outranked me by a lot, who are asking this question or making this argument, or, you know, I really want this thing to go, whether it's a story or a letter or an opinion piece. I understand, like, I really do under, like, I'm very sympathetic to their position as kind of stewards of the school and not wanting to bring scandal on the school. But I also want, like, I want inside the building that the town square should be the place where people, it's not all pretty and rainbows and stuff. You know, there's arguments and there's different tensions. And if you can't say those things out loud, then it's really hard to be a community. You know, you're missing something. And to me, that's one of the, I think, not great. I mean, I'll know more in 20 years when I can look back and see this more clearly. But in the last 10-ish years, there's far fewer of that kind of conversation happening in the prep news in particular. Yeah. And I think there's lots of reasons for that. I mean, kids have phones and can have those conversations all over the place. They can post what they think on social media all over the place. I mean, they're not reading newspapers. They don't think about letters to the editor or opinion pieces. Yeah. Yeah. I think those are lots of the reasons. But I also think, just in the culture in general, it's just, it's really, really, really hard for people to say out loud. This is what I think, even though I know you don't think this. And now we're going to have this kind of open disagreement out loud in public as opposed to we're just going to come to people. Yeah, I'm very glad you've gone there because it's a diagnosis of one of the ills of our society right now. We're losing our capacity for that kind of debate. It becomes personal. It becomes inflammatory. It becomes an attack instead of a meeting in which difficulties are being worked through in a dialogic way. And lots of algorithms take everybody down into the places where they're already likely to simplify and whatever it is. It's base commitment. Yeah. And what's cool, I think about the prep news when it works is that it is, and this may be throwback and this may not be able to last, but it's, there is a kind of common, there's a common culture. There's a common place where you can go to for what the stories are. What stories are going on in slew right now. Instead of, there's always lots of stories, but they're just kind of all down in their own little rabbit hole. Let's go down the hall to the new Height House media commons where the prep news staff is busy getting out the next edition of the paper in digital and print editions. So we're just kind of working on page four here. So we've got an eclipse story. We're talking about voices of slew here, cashbaw, and then the Shakespeare program. Oh, the show that's about to go on down there. So Drew and I are just kind of fitting everything onto the page, making sure it all fits, organizing it, putting pictures in, just kind of assembling everything, putting it all together. I'm doing the sports section right now, and I would say like a struggle that sports is definitely had within the past couple of weeks is that our riders are very good at riding, but they like to ride a lot. And so we've kind of struggled to like make the pages pop out a little more to people who read it in the classrooms every day. So that's so text rich and it's an narrative that they can stay with. Exactly. And include helpful images like scoreboards or pictures. It really helps to draw people to the page and make them want to read the article and make them engage is what we want. Steve's journey from being a sports beat reporter as a student to becoming the moderator of the prep news took some unexpected turns. His dream of being a sports writer was inflated by an encounter with the famous St. Louis sports writer Bob Burns. Then suddenly went bust in the living room of a war-winning post-a-spatch sports writer Bob Bregg. He had years of intense academic and philosophical cynicism that might have sent him down the darkest of rabbit holes. Fortunately for all of us in the slough community who are fans of the prep news, way led on to way and Steve returned to back of Memorial as an English teacher and came under the tutelage of the legendary Jim Redman. I want to take us back in time a little bit to when you walked into this school and how you became a person associated with the newspaper. The way in which that has anything to do with who you are today is the moderator. If you go back to your memory banks at St. Louis High, first of all, who were the North Stars for you and what were the experiences that had the biggest impact on you making you who you are? Aside from the news, I try to ask all the alum guests this question. What shines kind of luminously there that, well, there's a few. There's a great question. I just, man, there's a lot there. I feel like you should sit down, Jim. You should get comfortable. Just wave when you want me to just stop. There's just so many things to talk about. First, as a student, I arrived in the school. I grew up loving sports and loving sports storytelling. I would play imaginary baseball games on my driveway with a tennis ball against a brick and announce them in the voice of Jack Buck using a blank score card that I had made. I wasn't following something that had happened in a game. I was just creating it. Here's the line-ups for the day. I always had language in my head. That was just my thing. I got here and I loved sports. I loved playing sports. I played baseball. But by my sophomore year, I also knew I was a good writer, and so I just started to write things. By my junior and senior years, I was doing sports reporting. I never worked for Jim. I was not an editor for the prep news, but I was just a all geeked up. You were on the sports beat. I was on the sports beat and I was geeked up about it. I wanted to be like, I knew who John Feinstein was. I wanted to write him. I read sports illustrated just religiously and I wanted to be like Rick Riley or Frank DeFord. These guys were like, I just knew how they wrote. Those guys were journalists first. Sports fans second almost. They knew how to tell. I just love that storytelling. I wanted to do that. I thought I was going to go to college to do that. That's what drove you to Vanderbilt? It is. There was a sports writing scholarship that I applied for. I got to meet Bob Burns and Bob Brigg to Hall of Fame. Wow. Horts people, thanks to a great uncle of mine. Bob Burns was awesome. I met him at Forest Park. He said, you're stuff's amazing. You're going to get this scholarship. You're amazing. I'm so glad to meet you. We had this great lunch. I just thought, man, I am amazing. Then I went, the future is opening up for me. Here we go. Then Bob Brigg, I went to his house over in Fry's. I wanted to come on over. I went to his house in front of neck and I walked in like, I know how this is going to go. And Bob Brigg was basically, he didn't say this exactly, but basically what he said was, you're such not that good. You're not going to win the scholarship. You shouldn't go to Vanderbilt anyway. Go to Mizzou and be in the sports information department if you want to be a journalist. I just thought, okay, well, I like Bob Burns a lot better than Bob Brigg. I did not get the scholarship. So Bob Brigg was right. I got to Vanderbilt and I learned that I loved English. I loved sports at SLU, but I was no longer, I didn't care about storytelling about Vanderbilt sports. I didn't love sports. So there wasn't such an overarching thing that I wanted to do that. It was like, I loved here. It gave you the muscles, but the substance of what your feet was. I was interested in something else. And so, way led on to way and I came back in the AAC and I worked with Jim and Jim Raderman. So that's where your mentorship with him really kicks in. Yeah, when I came back. In the back years. Yeah. And he was a mentor. I mean, we have the same birthday which we discovered when I came back and we couldn't have been more different when I came back. I was a, I had just gotten out of college. I could not have been more cynical. Like you couldn't have programmed a more cynical human being. Steve, I remember that toughness. Yeah. I remember the sharpness. I remember the cynicism. Yeah. It was well-honed and vicious. It was a good, tough journalist thing you had going on. Maybe it was also not very kind. But Jim and I, this is where we were. The first, Jim was amazing for me. He taught, he was amazing for me as a classroom mentor because we taught Junior English together. I worked with him on the prep news. Jim and I decided we were going to show, I got him to agree to show a movie in class for a couple of days. So we went around about what to do and we tried something the first two years we worked together and then we moved on. So we just said we were going to do Groundhog Day and write the Del Mary film. Which is so great. Yeah. So we went to the house and we watched the movie and took our notes and stuff and we started talking about it afterwards. And this just says everything about who we were and especially who I was. I was adamant, just adamant that Groundhog Day was an utterly ironic film that the ending was completely bleak and ridiculous and- Wow, you kind of went Brazil on the ending? I went deep dark on Groundhog Day. Jim, I know with that thing. It was deep and Jim, he was so patient. He was just like, inside he must have just thought, how can you watch this film and be a human? What about that ending? Isn't uplifted? Let's live here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I had a whole intellectual thing on it. I'd like to hear that. I'm tight with that movie. So I'd love to hear what you take on it. I was steeped in the postmoderns and the structuralists and the decay and cliche. You know what listeners can't handle here right now because they don't know Jim. If you don't know Jim, you won't get it. Imagine a person with the widest smile you've ever seen and then brighten that up with incandescent light. And that was right, I mean. And you're saying next to that personality, this- Here you were, this brooding dark intellectual. That's correct. Jim is the guy who, I mean, the one, this is Jim's character note forever and ever and ever. This is a Bill George story. Jim comes into the office on a Monday morning. People say, "Hey Jim, how are you doing?" And Jim says this sentence, "Oh, we had the neatest weekend. We had the neatest time on this bike ride. We got a flat tire." And that was Jim's story about the neatest bike ride. I heard a hundred of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're everywhere. Like, what? Imagine what I would do with a flat tire on a bike ride. I mean, it would be apocalyptic. But, you know, I had the Underground out day. So Jim was a mentor on the prep news, and not just in the mechanics of it, but just the spirit. A podcast about the prep news would be incomplete. Without taking a moment to hear the voice of Steve's mentor, the 23 year moderator who took the paper from typed Mimio Sheets into the computer age, who turned an aspiration to be a weekly publication into an unfailing weekend, week out reality, who created a culture of real, journalistic reporting, writing and editing that endures to the present day. Jim Raderman stepped down from moderating the prep news in 1996 and has been retired for years, but we reached him by phone to ask if he might share a few memories and reflections. He began our call with characteristic humility. Hello. Hi, Jim. Jim here. Hi. I hope I can help. I don't know if I can. There's no. I have no doubt, Jim. Really think of this call. It's a celebration just of the prep news, and it just is. It is just wonderful to have your voice as a part of it. For 23 years, you were at the helm as the moderator and so much happened during those years to transform that paper. I know it might feel a little bit like bragging, but when you think of those 23 years where you started it and where it ended up, what are you happiest about, you know, in terms of where you handed that paper off as opposed to where it started? What do you feel really good about when you think back on those many years? Well, what I think about the editors, the people, the guys who worked on the prep news, that was terrific. I mean, there were the early volumes, oh, it was demanding late at night intensity, and they worked so well on it. They were so proud of it, and we realized this was very important, a very important to the school, because on Friday mornings we distributed, and the school would be absolutely quiet, because everybody was reading it. And I just was, but working with the guys was, it was a wonderful experience, exhausting, and I did it for a long time, 23 years, and I'm very proud of it, very proud. Steve, carry on the tradition and developing it, and oh my gosh, that's great. I have lots of memories of you late at night in the corridors, when I would be here for some reason. Of course, you were here every week. The light was on up in the office, and you were, even when it was late and very demanding, it seemed to bring you joy and energy. You were just energized by the work, and excited about the next day's edition coming out. Oh my gosh, yes. I had a friend, Mrs. Morgan, I've apparently I did, and she told me I would love the job, when I hired, when I was hired, take the job, you will love it. And I still remember her telling me that because I did, I worked with great guys. We worked very hard, and I think we really thought what we were doing was very important. Well, hey Jim, before we end this call, I have to talk about one more thing, that the motto of the prep news, if nothing else value the truth, what would you say about that motto over the years of thinking about it? What's your comment about that as a motto that's been across the banner of the prep news for all these many years? I think everywhere that is so important, value the truth. And when you get back, you're closer to reality rather than illusion. So yeah, I don't know where the statement came from. I have the feeling I borrowed it from somewhere. Well you know that sounds as contemporary and as insistent and important as ever these days when despite the multiplicity of ways we get information, somehow our notion of how reliable that information is isn't any more secure. So I'm really happy that if nothing else value the truth is stretched across that banner, and I just have to let you know that you served it so well Jim. Oh, I loved it. I loved it, but with the demand, you know, I went for 23 years. 23 years? Yeah, and that last year was wonderful, but I could tell that it 23 years was a lot. Yeah, well Jim, you know, we're celebrating the prep news and it just wouldn't have been a program without hearing your voice and having an opportunity to say on behalf of St. was you high, thank you for your years of service and for molding and shaping the prep news into something really extraordinary that Steve was able to take and continue that kind of growth and zeal of mission that you brought to it. So thanks for being with us. I agree with Steve there, all my guys, the prep news would continue to improve. So our certainly continue to function as well as it does. When he took it on, oh my gosh, I knew it was in great shape. Yes, it asks someone to be all in and you were and Steve was and that's what we're celebrating this morning. So thanks for taking a couple of minutes of your morning to talk with us. The listeners will be really happy to hear your voice along with many alums and we're grateful to you Jim and thanks so much. Oh, you're more, I mean, this brought back so many memories. Oh my gosh. Glad to hear it. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Well, I'll look forward to seeing you soon, Jim. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Bye. Yeah. You know, we're talking about the intensity of the prep news and the authenticity of it. I really carry around with me the prep news model. It's very heavy. It is heavy. It's very tough. It's nothing else. Yeah. Value the truth. Yeah. The value of the truth side is really beautiful. It's transcendental. You know, it's inspiring. But the first part of that, if nothing else, really reminds you of the difficulty of life. Oh, can you, Jim, where'd that come from? I mean, I think Radiman used to say it. Jim? So that's a great question. So only, and I would love to hear, Jim could give you the full picture of it. Okay. The piece that I think I know is that I think, I think it came from, I always heard him talk about Sievers and Gartner. Sievers and Gartner was this dynamic duo and they happened between my time here as a student and my time here in the ASE so I don't know either one of them. But they were kind of legend and Jim's pantheon. I think they were super, super talented. And one of those guys, I think, was the one who proposed that model. Wow. I think I know, but that should fact check with Radiman. I will try to track that down. So let me throw you this question. If nothing else value the truth is this time honored slogan for the prep news. Do you ever think of it? Does it mean something to you? It's kind of a hard-hitting slogan. Anybody want to say something about their connection to that slogan? Well, I would say at face value it's a very daunting thing. Especially you see it everywhere around the prep news office and not every mass-tid. But I think it's very important to, in my reporting, a lot of times I come up on that question. I guess to me, it kind of means not just like, not lying. It's like discovering the whole story and being able to write fluently about it. Yeah. I've always been struck by the phrase starting with, "If nothing else," it's kind of tough. You may not be able to count on anything, but at least, hang on to what you know to be true. I think for a thing that has value the truth, it kind of has the same importance as dedicating all our thoughts towards the actions of the grid of glory. God. It's like, you know, I think it's students and like faculty and whatever. I think we forget to do that sometimes. And we just have to take a step back and remember that that's part of our core values. And especially here, like Zoom did on prep news, that's what we did. We value both those things. So, you know, whether that's like writing a story or even just doing like an assignment for like art or an article, I think it's important to stick to that as well as like other flu sayings. Do you guys carry the legacy of the prep news kind of heavily? And you come down here to work to say, "Geez, we're a part of this pretty grand enterprise that has this great tradition." Is that a thing? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think you articulate that tradition. I think that like, especially when you go back and look at, you know, where the 88th edition and so when you go back and look, you know, it's special to see not only how we've grown, but just how our stories have changed. And I think even when you're writing something as little about, as like about scenes from Shakespeare or just some small article about maybe a faculty member, you know, it's still part of the history. You know, everything that goes into the paper is part of the history. And so I think it's just really cool to look at the grand scheme of things and how you're impacting the prep news. We'll conclude this episode in a moment with the final part of our interview with Steve to talk about his perspective on the enduring legacy, the formative importance of the prep news on our students. Many hundreds, of course, have worked on the paper across the decades. It's remarkable how many report that their experience was our foundational influence, both in their professional lives and in the development of their character and values. But dozens of prep news alums, more than we can list here, have gone on to distinguished careers in journalism and communications. Their ranks include Sam Fentress, Assistant Editor for the Atlantic, Tim Elfrink, Morning Mix Editor for the Washington Post, Dave Madder, Longtime Sports Writer for the Post to Spatch, and current Athletic Director for Storytelling and Communications at Mizzou. Connor Gehrin, Science Writer and Reporter, Podcast Producer, and widely published freelance writer. And Nick Fandos, New York Times Politics Reporter, and Sandy Hume, Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, winner. And the prep news will soon be the subject of a new documentary film. Slough Softmore Stephen Gorsuch is a budding filmmaker in the hot house of Slough Student Media. He thought tracking the process of how the prep news gets made would make a great documentary. He checked in to see how the project was coming along. We did two full night sessions here at Slough, so that was like a, I'd stay after school, and then I would just film with the guys while they were working all Thursday night. And then we did two interviews, one with Mr. Missy, who's Steve Missy, he's the prep news moderator, and one with Drew Figgie and Grayson Stevenson, who are seniors, who just graduated. Are you happy with what you got? Oh, so, and you heard it and saw it? You liked it? Uh-huh, I loved it. It was, I mean, they did such a good job. It's so interesting. It almost has, it has me involved in the paper now. It's, it's awesome, really. Oh, that, that's fantastic. Last question. Do you know what the prep news motto is? If nothing else, value the truth. What do you think of that motto? I think it's, I really think it's awesome, because for a school newspaper that they verify all their stuff. They have a whole, if you watch the documentary, they see a whole step of their process is them going back over the paper and saying, okay, is all of this true? Do we have everything correct? So they're telling the truth, and it's really cool to, the truth part, gets me every time. And sickness is available on Spotify, Apple iTunes, and on the SLU website at www.sluh.org. Just search for "Insignus the SLU" podcast. If you enjoy this episode, share it with friends and family and give us a plug on social media. Some of the music you're hearing comes from live student performances by the St. Louis U.I. Jazz combo, band and orchestral ensembles, and choral classes. Other selections come from "Late Great thrills," a new album getting national attention on band camp by folk options, headed by SLU alum Will Lanaires. Let's go to one more play, Steve, because we've kept you a while. We have these alums, and we hope to talk to a few of them. We're out there. Making a living and making careers in journalism, some of them in some pretty high cotton. What do you think, and what do they say about their experience in the prep news that has created pathways for them out there in the world of journalism? I mean, I know I'm asking you to brag a little bit, but some of these things are pretty transferable. What are some of those guys saying about this world and that one that they entered? I think so far nobody's made it who I pissed off while they were here, so nobody's made it out there and turned around and begged on me. I'm sure there are those guys, but I'm just not aware of them yet. I've been lucky that the kids I have good relationships with, those are our guys who are coming back and saying nice things. When I think about it, you guys, the people Sam Fentress wrote that really lovely thing for the SLU magazine, and that was kind of overwhelming. But I really think I think it's an authentic kind of peak communal experience. I think that's why it's so powerful for kids on the prep news. The journalism part matters and they're getting good training because they're doing it, but I mean, this is not falsimility. I am not a journalism guru. I just read stuff and I know what I like and I'm trying to teach kids how to do that. I think I've made a spot that feels that's authentic, like the work matters, the reporting matters, the principles for what makes good reporting are actually pretty simple. I think I'm a good reader. I think I'm good at giving kids feedback about what could make a thing better. They like that. That's a lot of one-on-one attention and they use that to talk about their work. But the group, I mean, you came to production, you know, you've been around. You had this with cross country. I'm not going to go on and do journalism. But what they remember about the prep news was this was like this peak. The group, it was so intense and it was so real and my friendships felt so deep because we were all working together. We weren't sitting around on a couch playing a video game. They do that too, but we were doing this meaningful thing together. It was week after week after week. We're together for hours at a time. There's a meal in the center of it. I mean, there's just this whole, it's like this. We have a Christmas party over here. It's like a family. You're saying it's a genuine place of intimate kind of contact. Yeah, mutual effort. Places where kids all of a sudden they've got a place and they feel really great about that place. It's a physical place and it's a people place and the work inside that place matters. So I think when you take that out into the world, if you're lucky enough to land in a spot that's going to value, that's going to give you a chance to do that again because not everybody is lucky enough to go out into a spot where they value meaningful authentic work. I mean, people are going on to jobs that are just, yeah, this job sucks. You've got to hoof it and hope you can get home and build your life over there or something. But the kids have been lucky to go on to other kinds of workplaces. I think that's what they take with them from the prep news. Oh, that's really beautiful. That's really great. My first guest was Kevin McCurnen way back when we started this podcast and he said one of the things he loved about Slu is we do the real stuff. That's right. That's what I'm hearing you say. Yeah, you know, it's the real stuff. And that is well said. Yeah. And that is echo. That has been my experience since the time I walked in the door. Like it's, it may not always be a little idiosyncratic at time and we're trying to, we ourselves are working institutionally on being a little less idiosyncratic all the time everywhere. But that idiosyncratic that's right. Like, well, what do you need to do to get the job done? Let's do that thing. Yeah. You know, like I think that's, and I think that's Jesuit too, don't you? I do. I do. The Jesuits were heroes of specific disciplines, cartographers. They weren't just pedestrian, you know, visitors. Yeah. Really entered into it. Go and get into that culture. Yeah. What's going on here? Yeah. Get into it. And to that point, you sometimes do have to sort of let your ideology go. Yeah. I don't mean let your faith go, but let go of faith having to color the terms of everything. Yes. You're entering a process that is itself, you know? I was just telling, I was having a bit of a hard conversation, Jesuit with a guy for next year about what his role is going to be and it's going to be an amazing role. It just isn't going to be exactly maybe what he initially had hoped. And I was telling him the story of Connor Geer and who's one of my most talented guys ever. Connor's amazing. And Connor is, I think. I was telling it and I haven't got back in check since yesterday. In my memory, he's the only kind of columnist figure that the prep news has had in my time on the prep news. Where it was his voice and his thing. And regularly my column. Probably nine or ten times. You know, he didn't do it every single week, but he did a lot of them. And they were amazing. Connor's a beautiful writer and his very, I think it was his first one. Now I'm going to really go back and look. But one of his very early ones, Connor's dad was a professor of education. He's involved in education and some capacity. Connor talks about his dad coming up while Connor is doing his homework and tapping on the page and saying, get into it. The secret to school is you get into it. You just, you got to, you got to just get into that thing and learn how to take. And Connor is a person who takes great delight. Like he gets into stuff. Yeah. So you said get into it and that just seems right. I mean, that's totally right. Yeah. Well, Steve, it's a great note to end on. Thanks for pouring yourself into this project of the prep news with all the passion you have. And for really getting into it and making it the authentic community that it is, it's a treasure. And that's why we wanted to sort of set some time aside both now and next fall to kind of zero in on what's going on here. So I really appreciate it. Yeah. Especially in a busy May day. Thanks for all the great questions and the chance to think about it. Yeah. Thanks, Steve. Yeah. The Insignus theme was written by the Slu jazz combo under the direction of Mr. Jeff Pottenger, performed by Christopher Hartung on guitar, Teddy Gerard on drums, Sean McLaughlin on bass, Jack Schweitzer on electric piano, and Thomas Kurt and Joseph Hartung on trombones. And Insignus was recorded in production facilities at St. Louis, U.I. and was edited and engineered by director of digital media, Will Lanaires. If you enjoyed Insignus, please share it with friends and promote us on social media. This podcast was made possible by the students, parents, faculty, staff, and benefactors of St. Louis U.I. for the greater glory of God.