Tonight the hard working student-journalists at The Samford Crimson are putting to bed the last issue of the 99th volume of the award winning newspaper. Most of the editorial staff is graduating, and I can say I’ve had the good fortune to be around many of them since they were freshmen.

They’ve all just grown so much and gotten so big!

Zach Brown, the departing editor-in-chief, was in an introductory class I taught. He changed over to a history major and still managed to land the top spot. He’s done a great job, is a thoughtful, smart young man and a pleasure to be around. He also let me take this picture of him, which might have been ill-advised:

Zach is also one of the best collegiate illustrators in the southeast. And, last week, he received word that he is now a Fulbright Scholar. The same day he got engaged. (How was your Friday?)

Zach has worked on this paper for two-and-a-half years now. He started as the editor of the opinion section and he never let one challenge get by him. He’s the kind of guy you hope to see on a project like this, truly. But I could say that about everyone that has devoted any serious time to this project.

Take this guy, Clayton Hurdle. He’s been the sports editor for two years. I had him in an intro class as well. He’s been writing for the Crimson for three years and he just gets better and better every time out. I just wrote him a letter of recommendation and I couldn’t have been more excited to do so. He’s also one of the best sportswriters in the Southeast.

He’s won that sportswriting competition two years in a row. We’re presently trying to talk him into grad school for a try at a three-peat.

Just completed my last ever @samfordcrimson spread. It's been a great two years. Pick it up tomorrow!… http://t.co/sio0g1ckZX

— Clayton Hurdle (@churdle76) May 7, 2014

There are others. Our features editor is one of the most highly regarded students in the major. Our opinion editor this year is graduating with a degree in education and, for having never even used InDesign before last fall, has done some really neat things. We have two great photography editors and a cast of writers and copy editors and others that always work on the edges and in the gaps and can produce nice work.

So it is a sad and fun night. Sad, only slightly, because it will be a while before we see some of these people again. But you are happy for them too. They’ve learned a lot from a fine faculty and they’ve worked hard across big handfuls of projects and conflicting deadlines and they somehow keep it all together and do it well. The student-journalist is an under-appreciated thing, really, they carry as large a workload as anyone on campus.

And it pays off for them, too. Previous editors with whom I’ve worked are people who work at Apple, one runs a small magazine, another works at a magazine. The two most recent editors, in their first two years out of school, run social media for a six-state retail chain and an independent photography business. Zach, meanwhile, is going to go teach English abroad for a year. Former section editors work on campus, do mission work, have amazing non-profit roles, work in book publishing, headed to graduate school and so on.

I always tell them that an editorial staff position, helps get them places, teaches them skills they can use there and sets them apart from their peers. It is more about their ambition and quality of work they produce than the role, but there’s a great deal of truth to it. They prove it every year.

For example, in one of the drawers of my desk a 1990s-era student — whom I’ve never met — signed his name. He wrote:

I’m still waiting to sell it on e-bay, but that guy has worked at MySpace, Netflix, Entertainment Weekly and at a YouTube analytics startup.

I occasionally joke that the best part of my job is that the students have to do the hard work. But, really, the best part of my job is that there are students willing to do the hard work.

Things to read … because life would be hard without reading.

Not to be biased, because there is some other impressive stuff going on in other buildings around campus. Samford students win cash in Regions business plan competition

Can an algorithm solve Twitter’s credibility problem?:

The Twitter commons have a credibility problem, and, in the age of “big data,” all problems require an elegant, algorithmic solution. Last week, a group of researchers at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (Q.C.R.I.) and the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (I.I.I.T.), in Delhi, India, released what could be a partial fix. Tweetcred, a new extension for the Chrome browser, bills itself as a “real-time, web-based system to assess credibility of content on Twitter.” When you install Tweetcred, it appends a “credibility ranking” to all of the tweets in your feed, when viewed on twitter.com. Each tweet’s rating, from one to seven, is represented by little blue starbursts next to the user’s name, almost like a Yelp rating. The program learns over time, and users can give tweets their own ratings to help it become more accurate.

Maybe. But people would work, too. I refer you to the key components of evolutionary algorithms, which were inspired by biology: reproduction, mutation, recombination, and selection. We can fix our own problems online, and Tweetcred could help, but it is also seeking your help to help it help you.

I get seven blue stars.

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