Words in the Wild: The Mac Weekly
By Daniel Graham ’26 and Callisto Martinez ’26
The basement laundry room of Bowman Hall may not be the hottest spot to spend your Wednesday nights, but that is exactly what we have done for the better part of the last four years. Each week, The Mac Weekly meets in the depths of Macalester’s dorm buildings. Our staff pitches, writes, edits, and publishes an eight-page issue each week, complete with our own photos, graphics, and crossword puzzles.
Macalester doesn’t have a journalism major, and it only offers a few newswriting classes. Unlike big schools like the University of Minnesota, The Mac Weekly can’t pay most of its staff. It’s a club — one that has survived well over a century now.
The Weekly embodies the best of the small liberal arts school experience. It puts you in the driver’s seat right away: come to a meeting on Tuesdays, and within a week, you can have your first article in print.
We have both been editors-in-chief of the paper (Callisto holds the position right now!) so we’ll each give the rundown on how we came to the paper — and why you should join too.
Callisto:
I would never have come to Macalester if not for The Mac Weekly.
In my high school American history class, we read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair — a riveting, and quite frankly, disgusting, exposé of Chicago’s meat-packing industry. Ever since my history teacher called journalism the fourth branch of government during that lesson, I’ve been hooked. I joined my high school paper (which admittedly strengthened my ego more than my writing skills) and started looking into liberal arts colleges with strong journalism programs. Macalester was not on that list, but I applied anyway.
During my campus visit, I was lucky to stumble upon a copy of The Mac Weekly. I thought, “If this place will teach me how to tell stories like this, maybe I don’t need a journalism major after all.” So, the first email I sent from my Macalester email was to The Mac Weekly, asking how I could join.
My first week on campus, I dove right in. I started by covering the student government and found something quite addicting in unpacking all the nitty gritty financial details, getting to know the different committees, and, of course, the emotional devastation of my first correction email. I ended up getting promoted to Associate News Editor by the end of the semester, and I found myself juggling longform reporting on accessibility in residence halls, the college’s textbook rental program, and, of course, covering the bulk of student government meetings.
That wasn’t what made me fall in love with student journalism, though. It would have to be the hours that former Editor-in-Chief Mandy Week ’25 and I spent debriefing the entirety of a seven-hour layout on the Wallace residence hall stairs, the times an interview ended with a student I had only met 20 minutes ago with both of us bursting into laughter, and most importantly, every time I had someone reach out to say that something I wrote made a difference in their life.
The best part and the worst part of The Mac Weekly is that a small group of less than 30 students carry the burden of writing, editing, and circulating the important goings-on on campus and in the surrounding community — big or small, happy or sad. Which is to say, I struggled a lot with burnout due to the simultaneous pressure and mundanity of the three years I spent as one of the News Editors. I also had the opportunity to cover things, like the college’s faculty and staff background check procedure, that most journalists aren’t able to cover until much later in their careers.
For most of my life, the people that I work with will not be the people that I dance with, party with, laugh with, and eat Super Sour Scandinavian Swimmers (a classic Mac Weekly snack) with at midnight. It’s a rare gift, to laugh at a joke your co-editor made for so long that your stomach hurts, and the next morning, join them in interviewing members of the senior leadership team.
If that sounds like fun to you, join The Mac Weekly. You still have so much time to become exactly the person you want to be, but at the same time, you’re only a college student and student journalist for so long.
Daniel:
My route to the paper was a little bit more circuitous than Callisto’s. I wrote for my high school paper (shoutout to the Omaha Central Register, oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi), but I didn’t think I had any real interest in journalism — I took the class because it was one of my school’s only writing-based electives.
As a result, I didn’t join The Mac Weekly until my sophomore year. The features section had a pitch to write about our very own Professor Emma Törzs and her best-selling Ink, Blood, Sister, Scribe, so I jumped at the opportunity. Interviewing Prof. Törzs about her work reminded me how much I loved journalism, and I was all the way back in.
Then, sports editor Noah Riccardi ’25 got a hold of me. I had been working in the athletics department as a livestream director and broadcaster since I arrived at Mac, and I was an avid basketball fan, so the sports section was an easy sell. The catch? Noah was studying abroad in the spring. He made me associate sports editor when I wrote my fourth article (you only get the title of staff writer on your third). I wrote one more article that fall and then took over the sports section.
My jump into the deep end represents the best and worst of a small student newspaper like The Mac Weekly. On the one hand, I had an entire newspaper section to take care of without much guidance. On the other hand, it took me four months to go from not being on the paper at all to being an editor. It didn’t matter that I got a late start; I got hands-on experience right away.
That first semester on the paper was a struggle. There are a few articles I’m proud of, but mostly, I’m glad I survived each week. It’s always difficult to find staff writers, so I ended up writing an article or two for almost every issue.
I studied abroad in the fall of my junior year, then returned to a sports section that had three editors at the helm. We wrote some of the best content of my career at the Weekly that spring. Around that time, I began to see a future for myself in journalism. I loved the long feature pieces where I could dive into Macalester’s history — like my story about men’s basketball coach Abe Woldeslassie ’08 leaving — and the wacky stories that emerged like chess-wrestling.
That summer, The Mac Weekly got me the thing that college students covet the most: an internship. I worked as an editorial intern at the Mpls.St.Paul Magazine — an outlet that loves to hire editors from our paper — until this past January. This aspect of the paper can get overlooked, but if you want a writing job post-grad, The Mac Weekly is a great way to get there, even if you don’t want to do journalism.
I won’t tell you that The Mac Weekly is always easy or always fun. I can remember many times when it was neither. But since I joined the paper in my sophomore year, I’ve never considered leaving because it can be so rewarding. Few other times this early in your life will you be handed all the tools you need and told to go make something of your own. That is what college is about, and that is what The Mac Weekly is about. You get to do it yourself.