Well, it’s been a year, and IIT News is about to celebrate its first year in operation. Our parent organization, Irkutsk Ice Truckers, celebrated its first anniversary back in October, but since we published our first news on the eve of the Winter Trip last January we’re getting to almost a year exactly with the public-facing side of IIT.
Since our first short articles and only one writer, to 273 published articles as of today and ten writers and editors we’ve come a long way and have a lot more in store for all you readers with dozens of articles in progress, new plans for excitement when the semester starts back up again at WCC.
Thank you all for your loyal readership and we’re hoping to become even better next year. As we reflect on the experience of this last year, here’s our top then of our most popular articles by views.
10. A Short Guide to Understanding the Dating Culture at WCC
Jeremiah Davis Smith’s great guide has helped many freshmen couples understand their relationships already and corrected many mistaken upperclassmen who needed a little clarification in such matters as “pseudo-dating” and “religious dating”. And it’s still just as true as when it was published at the beginning of last semester.
9. Death of Culture at WCC Continues with Bawdy, Pointless ‘Fight Night’
Why? Just why? Were the fight nights caused by NOLSeys, the mysterious “masters”, or are they a sign of deeper, cultural problems at WCC. Hard-hitting and reflective, S. Ezra Smith and the Average Muslim Liturgist, collaborated on this piece, and with the recent incident surrounding John Wayne, similar questions are still being raised.
8. Freshmen Relearning How to Walk
It’s been a while since our interviewers have had a chance to see how his condition is improving, but IIT staff here cover the story of freshmen trying to move beyond what some doctors have called an “addiction to riding longboards”.
7. Pre-Season Rundown – 2019-2020 Dating Scene
While the season was as wild, in retrospect, as we had predicted, it was so in some unexpected ways throughout the first semester. We were right in predicting the unique challenges dating would face this year and there’s still time for some of our particular predictions to come about.
6. Change in Handbook Wording Spells Concern WCC May Become the Wild West of PDA
Yet another dating related article cracks our top ten, but this time S. Ezra Smith comes from a more critical perspective, examining a change in the handbook wording almost everyone else had glossed over but his IIT mindset uncovered. Prefects and the Student Life office have attempted to assuage the concerns Smith investigates, but the questions asked, for many, are still quite open.
5. Sponsored Pre-Mass Announcements
One from our small but expanding slew of international and Church-related coverage, IIT reports on a Georgia church’s attempt to monetize microphone time at Mass. This article, at first obscure, soon became one of our most popular when Dr. Peter Kwasniewsi, one of our highest-profile readers yet, took interest and shared it with his worldwide audience.
4. Milligan’s Now an Endangered Species Says WCC Nature Club
While the problem has been half-solved with Ryan Milligan now in the WCC freshman class and several more possibly coming back next year, the fear the WCC community had this year when Kevin was the only Milligan left is still tenuously there… IIT reports on attempts to address threats to the long-term presence of Milligans at WCC. We’re a little behind on this story, we admit, as the Milligan New Deal Sophia discussed earlier this year is now in serious discussion, and there’s much to update. So an update will be out…soon.
Short, sweet, and poetic, an anonymous sophomore comments on the departure of Isabel of Solis to a Benedictine monastery. Quite unique in style, and related to this week’s news of her “canonization“.
2. Ruth’s Posse Swoops into Lander
Ruth, as we’ve found from searching our archives, is the most popular student in terms of mentions in our work, and the first article to feature her is still one of the most popular. Just who are Ruth’s Posse, and what are they doing here in Lander? Are they really Ruth’s friends?
1. Golden Calf: Amazon Synods’ Innovative Proposal
And our top article for the year was one of broader interest than WCC, that of what attendees at the Amazonian Synod were actually proposing for the Church. The Amazon Synod was a major subject for us this year as with AmazonChurch, the disinvitation of the Cult of the Tree of Life from it, and what we wrongly first reported to be Ian and Keegan but later corrected to a “generic Eby” being the one(s) to remove the pagan statues from a Roman church. But our most poignant and popular article, one of the two which Dr. Kwasniewski shared with his audience, was this one and while we’re happy for the popularization, it’s sad because the Amazon Synod was coming up ideas almost this crazy and just as bad.
Thanks for reading IIT throughout 2019. Merry Christmas – a Happy New Year – and Rock On! Stand by for IIT’s 2020 Predictions!