It’s Nov. 3 and it’s a Tuesday and the sun is shining into our office. Ayden is playing “Peaches en Regalia” by Frank Zappa from the speakers of his MacBook and Vlad just walked into the office with a handful of tabloid proofs. The three of us are silent apart from the asynchronous click-clacking of our keyboards.
October was a typical month at the Community Edition office in the way that the mundanity of our day-to-day operations was seasoned generously with a dash of the unplanned and a hint of the absurd. This newspaper is a wheel that turns at a constant pace and so when you introduce friction it can be tricky to coordinate your timing and strike between the spokes.
One thing we have had on simmer for a while is our collaboration with The Walldog, which we’ve been coordinating with editor Shalaka Jadhav over the last few weeks ahead of our submission deadline. In short, we are cross publishing their second issue, which will also be live on their Substack by the time we go to print. You can head over to page nine now if you want to see how that turned out and I’ll spare extra details to avoid spoiling anything. Suffice it to say, we are all excited about this partnership.
The unofficial theme for this issue of The Walldog concerns “the mechanics of expansion”— “expansion not as growth, but as ‘relaxing into it’”—and I’ve observed this thread and the way it binds some of Jadhav’s recent creative projects. I should also throw a nod here towards our coverage of Jadhav’s Container Garden on page 7. Her work points to the vessel that carries as a tool of virtue, which got me thinking about containers and what they hold: the contents of the community, the contents of the home and, of course, the contents of this newspaper.
Viewing the work of Community Edition through this lens of expansion is helpful. It encourages us to be more capacious, placing us intentionally into our environment and helping us focus our efforts on filling the gaps in the local media landscape with our reporting. Our goal is not to outgrow the container; it is to grow into it with purpose and a strong sense of discovery.
We’ve got all the parts we need here; now, how do we arrange them to forge new connections between disparate ideas and nurture pathways for collaboration and engagement?
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