By: Dr. Ghislaine Lewis | Critograph Faculty Advisor
The 2026 Critograph Staff from left to right: Devin Tapia, Jacob Clavijo, Peyton Saunders, Ellie Simmers, Taylor Burton, Jamie Smith, Aisha Abdulbary-Knotts and Victoria Williamson. | Dr. Ghislaine Lewis.
When I joined the faculty at the University of Lynchburg in 2017, I did not expect to fall in love with Tuesday.
But nine years of Tuesday editorial nights in The Critograph newsroom will do that to you. The deadline pressure, the arguments about layout, the students who came in looking lost and left looking like journalists. It got under my skin in the most endearing way. Advising the campus paper quietly became my favorite part of the week.
I came to Lynchburg after living in Southeast Asia, carrying the mantra that storytelling is a responsibility. What I didn’t anticipate was how much this institution, and this newspaper, would become the place where that conviction was tested and refined. As Lynchburg became home, the Critograph became a significant part of my “why.”
Nine years is long enough to watch students graduate, become professionals and start families of their own. Long enough to see the paper make mistakes and recover from them with grace. Long enough to understand that Tuesday nights are less about journalism and more about building confidence.
Every story we choose to tell, and every one we choose not to, shapes how a community sees itself. I’ve built my career on this, from my graduate work in New Zealand to my community work here in Central Virginia. When you cover a student protest, a professor’s retirement, a Code Red game or a policy quietly changed, you are not just recording history. You are deciding what history looks like. That is extraordinary power. And on this campus, it deserves intentional care.
In nine years, we have never missed a publication week. Not once. There were semesters when I was not sure how we would get there. Students juggling jobs and grief and full course loads, newsrooms that were half the size they should have been, weeks where the stories just weren’t coming together the way they needed to. But every single time, someone stayed late. Someone made the call. Someone decided this issue of paper would be published because that is what we do. I never had to manufacture that commitment with the staff. It was already there, passed down from one editorial team to the next like institutional memory. Nine years of cohorts who didn’t always meet each other but somehow arrived at the same conclusion:
The Critograph is worth it.
I am so proud of that.
In the Dell taking photos with my students. | Jonathan Suarez.
I have never apologized for my standards in the newsroom. Nothing goes to publication without at least two sources, and nothing goes to publication with anonymous sources. That rule has cost us. There were stories we knew were true, stories the campus needed to hear, that sat in a folder because we could not get a second voice on the record. I have had to make peace with that every time, because a story told carelessly does more damage than a story told late. Accuracy is not a style choice. It is the only thing standing between journalism and rumor, and I was not willing to blur that line, not for a deadline, not for a scoop, not for anything.
From my first Editor-in-Chief, Sarah Irby, who taught me that a student journalist’s instincts can be razor-sharp when given room to breathe, to my last, Ellie Simmers, who leads with both precision and heart, I have been in the presence of students who take this work seriously. Every editor between them did the same.
With my first cohort of Critograph staff in 2018 at AMF Lynchburg Lanes. | The Critograph Archives.
When COVID shut the world down, we decided to stop physically printing the paper. I grieved that transition. But the readership didn’t leave. They showed up online the same way they had shown up at the newsstands, and that told me something important about what The Critograph represents. It is not just ink on paper. It is the audience who reads every issue, who stops a student journalist in Burton to say they saw the story, who brings it up in class and in faculty meetings. Our Hornet community has kept this paper alive through the hardest stretch any of us has seen. I am in awe of our HIVE.
I am also eternally grateful to the faculty and staff who have graciously and repeatedly opened their doors to my students. You answered emails. You sat for interviews between classes, during office hours, and sometimes in the middle of lunch or a game. You treated student journalists like the real storytellers they were becoming, and that generosity shaped them more than you know. On behalf of every student who ever showed up with a recorder and a list of questions, thank you.
The 2020-2021 Critograph Staff who weathered the COVID storm together.
I will miss the rhythm of these Tuesday nights. The organized chaos. The campus gossip. The debates about what belongs on the front page and what belongs in the trash. The students who came in unsure of themselves and left carrying bylines like armor.
To the students who will inherit these Tuesday nights: the world does not suffer from a shortage of content. It suffers from a shortage of stories told with care. Ask the questions no one else is asking. Sit with the student who no one else is listening to. Write the story that makes someone feel that their life is worth documenting. That’s the job.
I already know what I will miss most: not the advisor title, not the year-round calendar block, not the payroll on Monday morning, but the sound of a Tuesday night, the pressure, the arguments, the exact moment someone realizes they have something worth saying.
Working with The Critograph has been the honor of my career, every single Tuesday of it. And no matter where I am, I will be reading and celebrating Lynchburg student journalism.
