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Letter From the Editor
Dear Readers,
Thank you for taking the time to peruse our final magazine of the school year and my final issue as editor-in-chief. I wrote my first article for ZU Magazine as a freshman, and for the past two school years, I’ve edited and curated this publication as editor-in-chief. In this role, I have been blessed to work with several teams of aspirational, passionate journalists as well as our talented art director, Valerie Funez, to create works that capture the voices and questions of APU students. And I’m truly grateful for that opportunity.
So, as I’m about to graduate and my time here comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on all the work put into this publication and all the content we’ve produced. And my question is, “So what?”
Why does it matter that we write these articles? Why do we publish student writing? Why do we work to curate these issues of the magazine?
In an age of media overconsumption and overproduction, we’re prone to ask these questions when we come across any form of content. Why does this matter more than everything else? Why should I care about this when there are so many other things to care about? Why should I spend my precious time on this when my attention is being pulled in a million other directions?
To address these questions, our focus in this issue has been to uncover depth and meaning in stories that may seem simple on the surface. You may notice that this issue of the magazine has more pages and longer articles than previous issues. In order to uncover the depth of each topic, this issue of the magazine contains solely long-form content.
Instead of splitting attention between the two issues we normally produce per semester, our team of writers has spent the semester diving deep into topics they’re interested in to produce detailed, long-form articles. Our writers have tackled stories from international conflict to local change and topics from personal inquiries to others’ stories. Each of these articles is the product of curiosity to ask big questions and a tenacity to get to the root of what matters.
In short, we’ve asked, “So what?” And these are the answers we found.
Best Regards,
Jesse Watson