The TV in the corner of the newsroom first said that Al Gore won Florida. Then the vote was too close to call. It was a little after 2 a.m. when I finished a story that said George W. Bush had narrowly won Florida’s vote and would be the nation’s next president.

I lay down to nap on the couch in the Optimist office, knowing I didn’t have time to go home before I would need to send the paper to the printer downtown. It was still dark outside when the office light snapped on again and the managing editor told me we needed to update the election story.

“It’s OK,” I said. “Already changed the story for Bush.”

“Well, it changed again,” she said. “Get up.”

The weeks of deliberation following the 2000 presidential election gave a very campus-oriented Optimist staff a greater sense of obligation to national news, even though national media clearly offered more complete coverage. Those outlets were offering their best coverage for their audiences. We wanted to do the same for our audience, the ACU community.

The same attitude emerged less than a year later when the staff gathered around a TV to watch the World Trade Center towers collapsing. We wrote about students’ reactions and connections to the events of Sept. 11. We discussed our role as an information source in times of confusion and pain and our place as a public forum for people to share fear and anger about the event and its aftermath.

The staff had the skills and medium to gather the stories that people wanted to share. The Optimist’s coverage was a form of ministry for many of us as we told ACU’s story of Sept. 11 and shared President Royce Money’s exhortation to “pray, pray, pray” in response to the attacks.

Memories from fall days like these rolled through my head as I lay in a dark corner of The Tampa Tribune newsroom in September 2004 waiting for Hurricane Frances to pass through the city. I was working as an editor at the Florida newspaper, and the hurricane was predicted to make landfall early that morning. Many of us worried that flooding would prevent us from getting back to work the next day, so we camped at the office.

Big stories at the Optimist weren’t the only thing on my mind that night. As much as I loved full-time newspaper work, my new goal was eventually to work as a professor. And as I tried to get comfortable in my sleeping bag, I prayed for my future students.

I prayed that they would always love their jobs enough to do things like sleep in a newsroom. I prayed that they would be able to see disasters as an opportunity to do outstanding work but still respond with compassion to victims. I prayed that they would be safe in their reporting and that they would always know they had the support of a professor who cared deeply about their preparation for such moments in their lives.

And now on another fall day seven years later, those students I prayed for come to my class at another West Texas university. I often tell them that I hope they’re pursuing internships and student media opportunities because I remember the value of those experiences.

I learned to cover big stories at the Optimist. It taught me the importance of local media in a community. Those lessons shaped my behavior as a journalist and educator, and I am thankful. But the Optimist’s role is much bigger than teaching any one person. Its true value has always been its abiding presence for thousands in the ACU community as a voice sharing news both historic and mundane for a hundred years and beyond.

Dr. Jessica Smith is an assistant professor of electronic media and communications at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and can be reached at jessica.e.smith@ttu.edu. She served on the Optimist staff in 1999-2002 and was Optimist editor in 2000-02.