Contributing to The Brock Press for the past four years has been the most rewarding professional experience of my life, making my now imminent farewell that much harder.
When I first came to Brock in 2020, inopportunely at the beginning of a global pandemic, I was full of an uncertainty which was not even largely due to the then nascent global health crisis.
COVID-19 aside, like many humanities students, I was uncertain about what exactly I would do with my degree — studying English and rhetoric — and more than that, what else the school could offer me beyond my immediate studies.
Just before I came to Brock, I had been running an amateur music blog on social media for a couple of years, where I reviewed and catalogued music, built up a small community and got some notice from even some mainstream artists. My experience blogging taught me that doing creative work which I could relay to people who found it resonant in some way was something I was passionate about. However, translating that into what a university English program had to offer employment-wise wasn’t clear to me at all at the outset.
These threads of my life all came together in a serendipitous way, though, when I had the lucky coincidence of learning about The Brock Press through an academic advisor in early 2021. This occurred right alongside the unexpected death of one my favourite artists, the masked rapper MF DOOM, which had a deep impact on me as a major fan of his idiosyncratic artistry. His death inspired me to contribute a volunteer piece to the paper as an homage to the rapper, as well as to tie up of the chapter of my life doing music-related writing with an actual publishing credit in that lane. It was also just something to do that I could bring passion to with all the downtime I had given that the COVID-19 lockdown was in full swing.
But after that piece was published, I caught an itch and just had to keep contributing. I pitched a couple more pieces which got published, and come the year’s end, Press leadership at the time suggested I apply for their assistant editor position for the 2021-22 publishing year.
I applied and got this assistant editor position, finding what would become a professional and creative home for the next four years.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that The Brock Press has been there since the beginning of my adulthood. Although the lines demarcating “adulthood” tend to be somewhat arbitrarily drawn in the abstract, I am a firm believer that the sense of adulthood for individuals — like most largely social designations of the kind — comes mainly from social processes based on institutions which confer symbolic statuses on those individuals. Said statuses come to shape us if we choose, unconsciously or consciously, to identify with them and take on the responsibility implied in that identification.
The Brock Press — and especially the two years I’ve spent as Editor-in-Chief of the paper — had this shaping effect on me, catapulting me into something I’d call a sense of meaningful adulthood and the beginning of a career.
The responsibilities I’ve had the honour of bearing as a result of being Managing Editor, Editor-in-Chief, and a director and chair of the board over the years at the Press fundamentally changed me. While large chunks of this change often came with lots of stress — especially with the long, uncertain bureaucratic and media battles spurred by antagonistic groups trying to silence our independent student voice and ability to speak truth to power — the personal mental toll of these spats was always worth the preservation of what we do best: unbiased, independent student journalism.
But, as I’ve just argued, a role is nothing without other people to reflect it back to you through their expectations and support. And in that vein, the true magic of the Press for me — where I learned the most and felt myself shaped the most here — came from the wonderful individuals I’ve gotten to work alongside with over the past four years and change.
It would take far too long for me to list every single name that had a significant impact on me at the Press, but I do want to specifically mention four individuals I’ve known during my time here who had the most impact on me and who I feel a great debt to.
First is our Managing Editor, Christian Roethling, who I’ve worked with for three years now, serving as my right-hand man on the editorial side of the organization for two of those three years and who reignited my belief in the value of humour and levity even at work.
Second is former Editor-in-Chief Noah Nickel, who offered me my first job at the paper and who stewarded a sense of confidence in my journalistic abilities, so much so that he suggested I apply for Managing Editor after working only a year at the paper as an assistant editor. I would never have considered attempting such a ladder jump in positions without Noah instilling a sense in me that I could and should do it.
Third is Holly Morrison, who was my editorial senior for all but the past two years here and who was the Editor-in-Chief of the paper when I was second in command as Managing Editor. Holly, like Noah, inspired a sense of confidence in my leadership and journalistic abilities as she prepared me to be the eventual head of the paper, and I owe many of my interpersonal approaches as a leader to learning from her.
And finally, I have to mention our acting Business Manager of the last two years, Kevin Diep. Kevin has been through thick and thin with me in maneuvering — sometimes this was a painful crawling — through the tangled weeds that have come with both maintaining and innovating the corporate-governance side of the company to help strengthen our independent student voice and internal accountability processes.
Speaking of accountability processes, one of the greatest unforeseen pleasures I had working at the Press was spearheading the implementation of the worker-management system we began using as the base model of our governance structure and practices in 2023. This model was formed on values of workplace democracy: worker self-determination, systematized shared accountability and power over management.
Through the conjunction of workplace elections for a majority worker bloc on our board of directors and an employee ratification process over all policy and governance items at the Press, we’ve ensured that our internal governance structure remains accountable to and directed by the student workers who put their essential labour into the Press. Ultimately, it is their work which keeps the lights on.
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I am endlessly grateful to the Press, and although my future is uncertain as I move on as a writer and journalist, I know that wherever I end up, the Press’ influence over me will continue to show in abundance. Moreover, having worked with and gotten to know personally those who will inherit the leadership posts of the paper in the near future, I am confident it is in safe hands to continue producing excellent work for Brock students, the Niagara Region, the city of St. Catharines and anyone who happens to stumble on our work around the world.
And on that note, I’d like to conclude by thanking all the readers of the Press over the years for giving us the reason we do what we do. Your support is our lifeline, and it was a personal honour writing to you over the years.
Thank you.
– Haytham Nawaz