With the position of editors-in-chief comes a lot of responsibilities but also a lot of rewards. Readers do not often see what it is like to run a newspaper staff from behind the scenes. For our own entertainment and for the sake of our sanity, as well as the intent to show our readers another side of the newspaper, editors-in-chief Sarah Darby and Jill Applegate decided to write a blog from their points of view. Every week they will write about a specific event and share their thoughts and emotions on the happening:

“The Hacking Horror”

Sarah speaking:

Over the summer, Jill and I started a Facebook page to keep our staff informed. On that same page we promoted our website and got a mysterious comment one day. A staff member had gotten a virus from our website! After talking to our tech guy about it, I was informed that we had been hacked and someone had put “malicious code” on the site. After all of our hard work, the word malicious scared me to death. I wondered how I would break the news to Jill…

Jill speaking:

Thursday, Aug. 4, 8:47 a.m. I receive a text from Sarah. I figured she was just asking me about when I would be at the school to work on stuff for the paper. I open the text and my heart drops. “Hey, so Brandon wasn’t crazy when he said he got a virus. We got hacked and they put a malicious code on our site.” My first thought was something along the lines of: Oh, no! A Malicious Code (immediately the word ‘malicious’ became a type of hacking code, and in turn, a proper noun). It was only until I got to the school and saw Sarah that I found out she was merely being very descriptive with her adjectives.  Thankfully, we were able to fix the site that weekend. But with that said, I think we both learned some valuable lessons that day.

1. We need to make our passwords a little harder to hack into, leading to passwords that look like something along the lines of 99dkjR399d8tdIsDeMJk.

2. To be a little more stingy with our adjectives.

Lesson number one of being an editor-in-chief: check.