This page is under construction. The narrative is only partially written. Stay tuned! I’ll finish it when I can.
As I started high school, I was concerned about the impact that publishing The Living Room Times would have on my ability to keep up with other aspects of my life: schoolwork, extracurricular activities, and my social life, such as it was. These concerns led to my decision to scale back my publishing schedule (which had been almost daily throughout the seventh and eighth grade), and convert the LRT to a “weekly” paper in ninth grade. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up creating so many “extra” editions that this effort at time-saving proved rather ineffective. My “publishing bug” was too strong to be constrained by a weekly schedule.
Thus, later in the year, as you’ll see, I strongly considered ending the Living Room Times altogether; I flirted with the idea of starting up a re-branded newspaper to reflect the new realities; and then I ultimately fell back on a slightly altered status quo, a less-frequently published Times with the subtitle “NHS Journal.” The whole sequence of events will sound very familiar to blog readers who recall my various flirtations with quitting my blog, renaming it, redefining its frequency, and so forth. My tendency to be a drama queen about such things is nothing new. :)
Anyway, …
Toward the end of freshman year, I began wrestling seriously with how to continue publishing the Living Room Times in subsequent years. I was already very busy, and I knew I would only get busier — classes would get more challenging, I’d want to get more involved in extracurricular activities, and trying to keep up with everything was leaving me no time for any sort of social life. I began to feel that, going forward, I simply wouldn’t have time for the Times.
I decided in April 1996 that I would probably stop writing the LRT altogether the following year. I started drafting an issue announcing this tentative decision, which I decided to publish when my count of Times issues reached #300. I drafted the banner headline: “LR Times prints 300th edition; may call it quits after this year.”
[front page of 300th issue]
The issue was ultimately published on May 8, 1996. You can see the front page above. It included, in a gray box on Page 3, the following rumination on what might follow:
This year’s Times was supposed to be a weekly newspaper, but it hasn’t worked out that way. This is the 51st issue I have written in 36 weeks of school. Only 26 of those 51—barely half—have been “regular weekly editions.” The rest have been “Extras.” My tentative idea for a replacement for the LR Times next year is a new publication which would be written between 10 and 20 times during the year. There would be changes in how the articles are written. For example, each sports season, there might be one issue previewing the season, one at the end of the regular season, and one after the postseason tournaments are over.
I even created a sample layout for this hypothetical publication, which I tentatively named “NHS Life & Times.” As you can see, it was hideously ugly:
[NHS Life & Times PNG]
I also began putting together the planned “final edition” of The Living Room Times, to be published on the last day of school, June 21, 1996. Each word of the newspaper’s title was to be printed in a different font design, reflecting the various different banners that I had used in the 30 months I had been publishing the paper. Here is the layout I created:
[LAST-LRT PNG]
But then I changed my mind. I was inspired in large part by my classmates, who, upon reading the May 8 issue announcing the newspaper’s “probable” demise, were bereft at the thought of the Living Room Times ceasing to exist. One of them — I think it was Todd Stigliano — made the rather obvious suggestion that I go ahead with my tentative plan to publish a newspaper “between 10 and 20 times during the year,” but simply continue calling it The Living Room Times. Why destroy the LRT brand?
After mulling it over for a while, I realized Todd was right. So, in the May 20 issue, I announced:
After stunning the school two weeks ago by announcing that his paper would probably “call it quits” after this year, Living Room Times chief editor Brendan Loy began to rethink whether he should rename the newspaper when he starts writing a publication which should come out 15 to 20 times a year in 1996-97.
Although no final decision has yet been reached, Loy now thinks it is likely that the Times will continue in
some form.
I finalized this decision in June, and the season finale edition ended up looking rather different than the one I had been planning a few weeks earlier. Instead of “Times ends 2 1/2-year run,” the headline was: “_____.”
[finale edition]
I shelved the name “NHS Life & Times” — it would resurface more than two years later, as the name of my website — and decided instead to tack on the phrase “NHS Journal” to the retooled Times sophomore year. But to read more about that, you’ll need to go to the 10th grade history page.
