Letter to the Editor: some advice from The Honk to Mount Holyoke News

By The Daily Honk

Beneath the grand, expansive conifer tree located behind Creighton Residence Hall, The Honk's editorial board convened to commune with nature, and an explosive and previously unknown publication that claimed to be called the Mount Holyoke News was recovered from the forest floor. 

As passionate champions of student journalism, we are dismayed to hear that you’ve been experiencing difficulties with printing and publishing, and we wanted to inform you that there are actually printers in Williston Memorial Library. The loss of the print edition would deal a devastating blow to our ability to cut words from your paper and paste them on letters addressed to certain elected officials. We would be bereft to lose such an important campus institution, so we here at The Honk would like to give you some tips on establishing a consistent publishing schedule. 

First off, as an independent publication, we understand your refusal to take a faculty advisor. We would just like to say that our faculty advisor has been instrumental to our publishing process through our weekly meetings at Counseling Services. 

Secondly, as a very serious publication, we suggest you ensure articles that are immediately relevant to Mount Holyoke College make up no more than 20% of the paper. People on campus simply aren’t interested in these articles, and, unfortunately, your bias toward the College makes your publication look unprofessional. It is essential that the Mount Holyoke News focuses on what really matters: giving us the latest updates on boygenius. 

Including diverse perspectives is vital to our publication, so we make sure to gather a wide variety of voices from our four best friends on campus. Our thorough fact-checking process is modeled after the Mount Holyoke News’, but we’ve made some improvements: Our articles go through an extensive 20-step editing process involving many administrative committees, including but not limited to the Honor Board and Dining Services. This process takes place between 5:03 a.m. and 5:24 a.m. the day our papers are due to hit the presses to ensure we only publish the most relevant news from two weeks ago. 

Inspired by the Mount Holyoke News’s transparency, our training for new staff writers involves blindfolding them, leading them to an undisclosed location and forcing them to attend a Senate meeting. Some of our journalists are actually former MHN staff writers, and we are happy to report that they say the transition to The Honk was extremely smooth. (We also just wanted to give you a heads-up: The Office of Student Involvement has informed us that we are “required” to let staff writers use the bathroom at least once a day. I know, we’re bummed too.) 

From all of us here at The Honk, we hope the circumstances around your publication improve soon so you can return to what the Mount Holyoke News is known for: hard-hitting journalism.

Editor’s note: The Daily Honk is a satirical newsletter of unknown origin that first began publishing in Spring 2022.