So, on Sunday, while checking your interwebs, you may have stumbled upon this:

Hey! That was us!

Yes, reporters became the reported (a fascinating subject in its own right) on Sunday (and Monday…and Tuesday…) as a fast-acting, hyper-contagious virus spread through the 300 delegates at our national journalism conference, starting at around 10pm on Saturday night.

All told, six of our delegates got ill, but everyone went through the giant stress of waiting up most of the night to see if we would be allowed to leave the next day, and then it was up early to catch a ferry to Vancouver, minus several sick senior editors, to put out The Ubyssey.

You can quickly scan it here. I’ll wait.

Um, why?

A quick perusal of the issue shows that it wasn’t up to our normal level of quality (insert joke here). We had a page entirely of Sudoku on page 9. Our “Scene” page was a column that had previously run in another paper.

But we persevered. A paper was put out. And we did it for…you! The readers! You demand a Monday Ubyssey, and you got it.

Well, partly.

The main reason is that a newspaper doesn’t come out because everything is ready—it comes out because it’s time for the newspaper to be published. Advertisers pay lots of money (in our case, thousands of dollars an issue) to have ads come out on a specific day. We have an obligation to follow through, and because this happened on a Sunday, talking with them to see if they would be fine pushing back the issue was an impossibility.

And because we put out a print issue twice a week (one of only three campus papers in Canada to do so), it’s not like we could do 90% of the newspaper before the conference began. Unlike “real world” newspapers, we don’t have access to content from newswires like Associated Press/Postmedia/etc.

So, we made do, and decided honesty was the best route. To help with the recovery period of editors, we’re only putting out a 8-page issue on Thursday, down from our usual 12. We made light of our situation on the Sudoku page. And, without our amazing Video Editor around, we put together our Weekly Show, which sort of summed up the whole situation.