Hello, one and all.
If you were around last year, you may recall that for half of the school year an alternative newspaper on campus sprung from nowhere. It was called The Mineshaft to keep with the theme of the origin of the school as well as the "underground newspaper" aspect. It was created by a dedicated core of students who desired an alternative to the journalistic options on campus and who wanted to show the it did cost an exorbitant amount of money to produce one.
The notable thing about The Mineshaft is that the writers were not paid. They wrote because of their desire and enthusiasm for such a project. In other words, the paper was produced at cost with the generous donations from contributors.

After receiving a nearly unanimous positive response only half-way through second semester last year, it was decided that we would seek Recognized Student Organization (RSO) status. We achieved this and then applied to student funding to buy a printer, paper, and ink. We recently received that money.

Now, to my point. As with any student organization, we depend on students taking an interest in what we do and joining the organization to keep it alive. Now that we are gaining the materials needed to print and are preparing to do so, we need your help.
Yes, we are looking for writers to join an exciting new organization and keep the standard that we have set (if not raise it).

If you would like to write news articles or editorials, we want you.
If you want to be an assistant layout editor, we want you.

Examples of news articles would be current events, MS&T/Rolla related news, national news, and international news.
Examples of editorials would be humor columns, cooking/recipe columns, music/movie/video game reviews, etc. The possibilities are endless, really.
Layout editors need to have some experience with Adobe InDesign and be willing to learn more with it.

If this interests you or you have any questions, please email themineshaftreturns(at)gmail.com or me at bjwd3b(at)mst.edu.
If you have a writing sample available, please include that in your email. Thank you for your time.

Yay! We might even get to see three whole issues!

The point isn't to do whatever we can to get as many issues as possible out this year. The point is that we want to fully organize and get to a full force before we start scrambling around. I understand your frustration, especially if you enjoyed our publication, but there are issues that are simply out of our control, mostly cost-related. We probably would have been able to start printing before now if we had gotten all the money for our supplies at once, but we had to go through one fund (in the first semester) to get the printer and then another fund (recently) to get the rest of the supplies. I hope you can understand our difficulty.

I wasn't here to threadshit, just sayin'. You all already know my feelings

That said, you mentioned some types of editorials...I wouldn't mind writing for the rag if I got onto an interesting topic. I mean I don't want to run just another POLITICZ COLUMN HURR! or a SEX COLUMM OH YA!! or something really cliché like that.

I'll have to give it a whirl, think of something the general campus public would consume. MOTORBIKEZ COLUMN? FOOD COLYUMMNOMNOMNOM?

I think we've more or less ruled out having a sex column. Besides, who needs that when you're in Rolla, right?

Anyways, an auto/motorbike column would be just super! But yeah, if you're interested and want to know more you know where to find me. Being an occasional "guest writer" or whatever (I can't think of the word right now) wouldn't be out of the question.

If it gave advice on making sex with yourself more pleasurable, I think it would be quite useful in Rolla.

Zing! But really, I think we decided that we felt sex columns are just too useless, juvenile, and simply pointless. We'd rather fill space with more entertaining or informative things.

Not reely intrested en writin, but I might be willing to take photographs (as my time permits), if there were a need for such a thing...

Well, I might be interested in writing a music column...I would prefer to write reviews of music from a site with many random bands. I may give the whole article writing a shot, and see if I like it or not though.

I was wondering if you guys were going to do digital copies again as well. It was kind of nice to have a newspaper in my inbox to read in the morning.

Why yes we will be. In fact, not only will there be copies in your inbox (if you subscribe) but we also have a website that should be up and running by then so you can access the current and all past issues online at any time.

I do prefer the PDF copy over the format that The Miner (and most other newspapers) use for their digital copies.

Even though I would prefer to have the PDF copy mailed to me, where can I get a hard copy?

Yes - will you be emailing out PDFs to the people on the old mailing list? Is there a new list we need to sign up for, or are e-versions of the Minshaft no longer possible...

We will still have an electronic mailing list, don't worry!