In preparing for the March 2023 launch of this online magazine of Hunter College student journalism, Professor David Alm of the Film & Media Studies Department discovered that a print predecessor existed, with the same name. His tumble down that "rabbit hole," as he put it, led him to a blog post I wrote in 2010 commemorating a reunion of Hunter Arrow staff from the 1960s and '70s, which included my own reminiscences about working on the Arrow in the early Sixties and serving as its editor-in-chief during the 1963-64 academic year. When Professor Alm asked me to add some thoughts connecting that analog-era predecessor to this web-based
descendant, I agreed without hesitation.
In that earlier piece, I wrote that Jack Kerouac, speaking about chance as a determining factor in one’s life, once wrote that you can “make a turn down some alley and nothing is ever the same.” The Arrow office wasn’t exactly an alley — instead, a dingy, cramped space with beige walls, a ratty couch, several weathered desks, a manual typewriter or two, a telephone, and windows that had not seen washing for some decades, located in the top corner of an imitation stone castle intended to impress returning World War II vets there on the G. I. Bill. But that moment had the same transformative effect that any major turning point does. I wouldn’t say I saw myself as following a path in my life at that juncture; I knew I’d write as part of my future, but had no vision of what that would entail. Nonetheless, I can state now with confidence that my life would not have taken the shape it did if I hadn’t climbed those steps and crossed that threshold.
The original Hunter Arrow covered both the uptown campus in the Bronx (now Lehman College) and the 68th Street campus. The “downtown” campus, as it was known, was all-female (with coed night- and summer-school classes), whereas the uptown campus was fully coed; they shared one administration. The Arrow had offices and staff at both sites, and we had to coordinate, by phone, our assignments for coverage of events and issues on each campus. Periodically, to make editorial-board decisions and resolve other matters, we held joint meetings downtown.
In 2010, I recalled how our scruffy little office — and the premises of Citywide Printers, the grimy, low-ceilinged Lower East Side print shop where we produced the paper — became my home away from home during those years...The people with whom I worked so intensely became, as I suppose is usually the case, my extended family.
Given the combined student populations of the two campuses, Hunter had the largest enrollment of any school in the CUNY system, and the Arrow had the largest circulation of any of the CUNY newspapers. As I recall, we had a standard print run of 12,000 copies per issue. The Arrow came out weekly, and we alternated between 4-page and 8-page issues. Roughly 14 issues per semester.
While I worked on the Arrow I also pursued my undergraduate degree in English literature. The courses I took at Hunter – in English and the humanities – grounded me in the basics of scholarship: close reading; careful analysis; precise writing, quotation, and footnoting; and the construction of a reasoned argument with supportive documentation. All with the goal of eventually making a contribution, however small, to the literature of one's field.
At the time I considered journalism and scholarly research as separate and distinct. I've since come to see them as not just parallel tracks but interrelated, conjoined, and complementary. If Socrates had it right in asserting that, on a personal level, "The unexamined life is not worth living," then surely that applies to the life of a culture. Journalism and historical research in various disciplines serve as tools for examining our cultural life, past and present. And while their timeframes and platforms and audiences vary, and evolve over time, their underlying methodologies do not.
Both prioritize fact over opinion, first-hand knowledge and eyewitness accounts over second-hand reports, primary over secondary sources, critical thinking over conventional wisdom, and the questioning of assumptions over the parroting of received ideas. Anything presented as fact must be verifiable. Citation of sources is mandatory (with the occasional protective anonymity that some investigative journalism necessitates). Accuracy of direct quotation, and unslanted paraphrasing and synopsizing, are expected. Distortive decontextualizing of selected material is considered unethical. Plagiarism is anathematized; ideas get credited to their originators. Prompt public correction of errors is an obligation. I could go on.
Since 1967 I have worked as a freelance writer, specializing as a critic, historian, and theorist of photography and new media. I've been a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Times, and the New York Observer – before Jared Kushner's daddy bought it for him to ruin. I've written for monthly and bi-monthly magazines, both general-audience glossies and ones targeting readers in my chosen fields. I've published scholarly papers in peer-reviewed journals. I earned an M.A. in creative writing and undertook doctoral-level work in a media studies program helmed by the late Neil Postman. In the past 56 years, I have found that what I learned in my B.A. courses at Hunter and my extracurricular efforts at the Arrow underpins every one of my professional activities. Right now it's chic to use "English major" and "the humanities" as derogatory terms, so this needs saying.
Much of my work I would describe as long-form cultural journalism, intermittently entering the territory of investigative journalism. In 2014, I initiated a series of blog posts deconstructing the legend of Robert Capa's D-Day photographs and the supposed fate of his negatives – photojournalism's most potent and durable myth. Arguably the most widely familiar bit of folklore in the history of the medium of photography, this has embedded itself in the public consciousness to such an extent that an internet search will quickly turn up hundreds of versions of it in dozens of languages at websites worldwide.
The dismantling of this fabulation, conducted by myself and a team of experts under my supervision, will conclude this spring. As far as I know, it represents the deepest forensic dive ever taken into a set of iconic photographs and the stories surrounding them. This work has involved archival research, interviews, investigation, analysis of both textual and visual documents, and reconstructing and testing period technologies. Altogether the team has generated close to 100 substantial posts, which I have begun distilling into book form. While still in its early phase, it received the 2014 Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi (SDX) Award for Research About Journalism.
This is all to say, I am still at it, old enough to be a grandparent to the students who will contribute to this new Hunter Arrow, working with a toolkit I acquired at Hunter when I was their age six decades ago. I am writing this on my Mac Mini for publication online in pixels, yet I’m still putting into practice the concepts of journalism that I internalized in the middle of the last century, when my texts got set in hot lead on a linotype machine.
When Professor Alm invited me to write this piece, he specifically asked me to expand on this passage from my remarks in 2010:
Working on and writing for the Hunter Arrow didn't just develop in me the ability to write rapidly and well, an awareness of solid journalistic practice, rudimentary editorial savvy, and the sometimes unwelcome skill of immediately identifying typos in any printed material that passes before my eyes. It made a full citizen of me, in the deepest sense in which I understand that word, by teaching me the price you have to be prepared to pay when you embrace that role.
The late civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis said, "Democracy is not a state. It is an act." By the same token, citizenship is not a noun. It's not a condition. It is a verb. And while paying taxes and obeying the law and voting certainly matter, that's just the start of it. Full participatory citizenship involves standing up for what you believe in, regardless of what opposition you face – taking a position and making a commitment. Not anonymously, as with taxes and regard for the law and voting, but in public, on the record, with your face and name attached to your action.
We journalists do this as a matter of course, and quickly come to take it for granted. Gone are the days in which a newspaper would publish a report from "Our Boston Correspondent" or someone calling themselves "Achilles." Instead, our bylines accompany our articles. Nowadays some version of a headshot often gets added. This has become so commonplace that it goes unnoticed. Yet it models, for everyone who reads periodicals, the participatory engagement that I think of as full citizenship. At a time when journalists and journalism itself are under unprecedented attack, we need to remember this.
As an emissary from the first incarnation of the Hunter Arrow, I offer our blessing on this new version thereof, and on those who produce its content: Do thou likewise. Keep the faith. Carry it on. Go forth and multiply.
A. D. Coleman is an internationally known independent critic, historian, and curator of photography and photo-based art. His work has been translated into 21 languages and published in 31 countries.