After nearly four years of involvement with The Daily Eastern News, I thought I had done it all. My first story as a lowly freshman staff writer was a short blurb on Eastern’s hockey club. And now as I’m in the midst of my final week as editor, I realize I’ve done a lot in between then and now.

Before last week, I thought I had been faced with every task there was to do. I’ve written sports stories about every Eastern club or team under the sun as well as numerous sports columns. I wrote news stories, shot and developed news and sports photos and edited sports and news stories. I’ve written opinion columns, penned editorials, designed pages and copy edited stories. I, like several others at The DEN, have even taken part in the unenjoyable experience of stuffing newspapers with special advertising inserts until 3 a.m. And now as editor, I’ve had the responsibility of overseeing all those activities and more.

Yes, I thought my four years at Eastern had provided me with the most diverse college journalism experience I could possibly have had. I thought I had done it all, but I was wrong.

After rolling out of bed at 8 a.m., I was making my sleepy way to class when I was confronted with the newest of my newspaper challenges. Some kind of circulation mix up had left all the campus editions of The Daily Eastern News undelivered and stacked in the press room.

That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 newspapers without home and a couple hours late for delivery. It was made apparent that I had no other choice but to try and deliver them my self. As the phones began to ring off the hook with students, faculty and staff seeking their papers, I phoned a couple of editors to help me with the giant task.

I soon found myself hiking through the cold wind and rain, dropping off hundreds upon hundreds of papers. We piled the papers in our cars and delivered the bundles to the dozens of campus locations students pick up their copies of The DEN from every day.

An hour and a half later, the phones had stopped ringing, I had missed my class and was left in a puzzled state of exhaustion. That’s when the old adage of a newspaper’s production being a daily miracle popped into my head. And that’s especially true of The DEN. Eastern is the second smallest school in the nation to have a daily newspaper (The University of Mississippi is the first).

So with a small enrollment to draw from, putting out hundreds of editions a year truly is a miraculous feat. There’s a small number of regular editors and staff writers that work long, grueling hours (often 40, 50, sometimes nearly 60 hours a week) in addition to their full-time class load.

And don’t think those individuals are getting paid on an hourly basis. Many workers, including staff writers, don’t get paid, and editors rarely make more than $5 per day, many much less. I’m not pointing out these facts for sympathy’s sake, but to truly show how difficult it is, and how much motivation it takes, for this newspaper to publish five days a week.

Students don’t work at The DEN for the money, but for the experience. They do it in hopes that dedicating themselves now for little rewards will pay off in the future. That of course makes working at the paper a learning experience.

And with learning experiences come mistakes. Except unlike any other students studying in a particular field at this university, when a journalist at The DEN makes and learns from a mistake, the entire campus sees it. That’s an impressive amount of pressure and a big spotlight for young, often time inexperienced, journalists to be under.

I was reflecting on all these facts as I was making my way home from my rain soaked newspaper delivering experience. I began to think of what a complex puzzle The DEN really is. Numerous editors, photographers, staff writers, designers, copy editors, advertising representatives, advertising designers, business workers, press operators and circulation workers all must work in unison for all the right pieces to fit together. The process begins at 8 a.m. each day and finishes up around 2 or 3 a.m.

And if one of the dozens of variables in the equation doesn’t work, then the whole puzzle falls apart. The 12 pages of newsprint you hold in your hand right now literally took hundreds of hours of manpower, many of them unpaid, to create. It truly is a daily miracle, especially when it’s entirely run by college students taking a full load of classes.

So as you flip through today’s paper, realize that dozens of your fellow students designed each page and advertisement, wrote every article, edited each story, proofread each page, took all the photos, sold all the ads, helped run the press and bundled thousands of papers. It truly is quite a miraculous operation.

Of course in the end, all that hard work is for nothing if one person isn’t there at the crack of dawn to deliver all those papers. That’s just another equally important piece of the puzzle, one I didn’t take into consideration much until last week.