Cultural Studies
By Ruth E. Kott, AM’07
Photography by Lloyd DeGrane
Making the Maroon
More than 40 students work on each issue of the Chicago Maroon, published Tuesdays and Fridays in the fall, winter, and spring quarters. Photographer Lloyd DeGrane follows staffers as they interview, shoot, edit, and design.
Maroon staff spend a lot of time in the Ida Noyes basement, where the newspaper’s office lives.
With about eight Macs for design work and ten PCs for Internet access and article revising, the office is home base for story-planning meetings, editing, and production.
Covering major events such as the Mandel Hall viewing of Barack Obama’s inauguration—shot for the Maroon by photo editor Shahzad Ahsan, ’10...
The paper also reports smaller community projects. Ella Cristoph, ’11, interviews U of C students building bookshelves for Fiske Elementary School.
Production night: from 5 p.m. to about 2 a.m. the night before an issue runs, the staff finishes the paper. Photographers—like Jeremy Ian Martin, ’11, looking at an electronic proof sheet of images—may work through dinner.
Art director Tom Tian, ‘10, uses an electronic tablet to draw editorial cartoons, like this image of Provost Rosenbaum.
At any point in the evening, there are ten to 12 editors and five designers in the office, working to lay out the paper with Adobe InDesign.