Dear The Lowell,
It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me. Today marks the two-year anniversary of my “departure” from The Lowell. I still can’t believe I was kicked out of the publication for working too hard as a reporter! I used to work every day just to produce the highest-quality writing human eyes have ever seen. Naturally, in my absence, the last two years of articles and magazines have been worse than ever before.
What makes a good publication? Some would say the writing, others would say sourcing, investigation, or even the newspaper’s images and style. Your publication has none of these qualities.
Your writing is abhorrent. Every sentence I read makes me gag in repulsion. Every other paragraph has a glaringly obvious typo left unedited by your lazy editors. Who writes these things? All the “facts” you present seem to be copied straight from Chat GPT or plagiarized from superior publications like the Lincoln Log. Suspiciously, your sources are all from upperclassmen who happen to be friends with the writers or “a student under a pseudonym.” At least get real sources if you’re trying to make a credible publication. Your articles are also very clearly Taylor Swift-biased and written by snowflake liberals, yet you still pumped out the most ignorant opinion piece about pronouns. What you need are some skilled journalists with a good work ethic running things — like me!
As a former The Lowell writer, I have had the pleasure of returning to the writer’s room to visit. And let me just say, calling the staff members lazy would be an understatement. At my last visit, only a few months ago, I walked in to find not a soul typing away at a computer but instead a group of teens listening to a guy with long hair talking about trains. At the back of the classroom, I stumbled upon six photographers playing games on their phones. Why do you need six photographers? Who’s in charge of these buffoons on the staff? Somehow, though, you still manage to get some sort of writing out for your audience of dozens.
Now, onto your magazines — I thought the writing was bad, but talk about low quality, am I right? They’re made of toilet paper and compost! In fact, I use the magazines as toilet paper just after reading them. Every magazine page is see-through, exposing even more of the horrible writing on every page. The only real good part of the magazine is the poorly designed crossword that you can do in your classes instead of learning. Luckily, your magazines only have the displeasure of reaching audiences every other month.
It’s not just the writing that makes The Lowell so bad. For a publication with a website, 99 percent of your articles end up as a 300-word Instagram post that gets a few hundred likes out of your thousands of followers. And on your poorly designed website, even if you’re lucky enough to get to an illustration through the mountains of text, every illustration or graphic is clearly AI-generated. The accompanying photography looks like it was taken by an 80-year-old man with Parkinson’s taking pictures on an iPhone 4. I do not recommend reading anything from The Lowell if you are prone to eye damage.
You do have one last chance of redeeming yourself, though. If you hire me back as the new Editor-in-Chief, I will make The Lowell great again.
Written with love,
A Student Under a Pseudonym
