Editorial

Just foolin' around...

Melissa Vasey - Co-Editor-in-Chief

New residence isn’t being torn down. Collin Gordon isn’t secretly a world champion polo player, Seth Rogan won’t be visiting TRU and a deadly spider isn’t loose on campus.

I think most people have figured all that out by now, but it’s still my responsibility to set the record straight: last week was our annual April Fool’s spoof issue of The Omega.

The spoof issue is a tradition for The Omega, and may be the only one we really have.

Omega staff (feel free to call them “Omegatrons”) look forward to the spoof edition all year, and the storyboard discussion has been open for months.

Last year, “The Omg” ran a story titled “TRU is broke” that put a great number of international students into panic mode and added to the workload of TRU World. Suddenly inundated by international students attempting to withdraw from the university, TRU World was left to explain the concept of April Fools and that the story wasn’t real.

Unfortunately, many students still didn’t believe TRU and thought that their explanation was just another layer in an elaborate conspiracy.

The year prior to that, The Omega ran a story about Heroes being shut down. Heroes displayed signs for weeks after the event, reassuring students that their beloved campus pub would still be around to serve alcohol and food.

The amount of work that goes into the issue is no laughing matter. The Omega has a legacy to live up to, and that sort of responsibility takes a great deal of time and preparation.

The readers’ ability to trust our paper is important to us, which created a challenge in creating an issue that was full of lies.

Myrissa and I put a lot of thought into how we wanted our paper to look this year. It had to be clearly labelled as spoof, yet still believable on first glance. It was a tough balance to maintain.

We began by going through the previous issues of The Omega, to see what past editors had done. We pulled out the elements we liked, like Jen Robertson changing the flag to “The Omg” and Sarah O’Connor turning part of the paper upside down, combined them and then added our own touch.

We also didn’t run spoof issues involving real people without their consent. The manager of new residence gave us permission to write that the building was being torn down, while Kathleen Scherf chose her rock star lover and even photoshopped the picture of Keith Richards and herself.

But now it’s time for us to stop revelling in the afterglow of our spoof issue and get back to the cold, hard facts.

So on that note, it is our promise that from this issue forth we will run nothing but the truth. ...Well, until next April 1st.