The Omen

= Submitting =

Submit all articles you wish to have published in The Omen to omen@hampshire.edu. Remember, if there is no name attached, we cannot publish it.

= Introduction =

The Omen is a biweekly student publication. It prints everything submitted to it by members of the Hampshire Community. Everything.

The only things that The Omen ever rejects are those which are overtly libelous, or contrary to the laws of the College or of the Nation. Both of which, for our purposes, are exceptionally ill-defined.

The Omen loves you.

For further details and schedule changes, we encourage you to join the omen listserv

The Omen is Hampshire's open-submission free speech publication. Founded in December of 1992 by Stephanie Cole, the Omen has been published continuously in the years since, making it Hampshire's longest-running publication. Since its founding, the Omen has maintained a policy of accepting all written and graphical submissions from members of the Hampshire community, provided that they are not anonymous, pseudonymous, or libelous. As a result, a great many controversial things have been published in the Omen, which tends, for some reason, to make some people angry at the Omen.

Archives
We are currently in the process of scanning every single back issue (that we have) of The Omen and uploading these as PDF files (thus to get ourselves. These will be made available on our web site sometime next semester.

The Omen Office
The Omen office, currently located in the basement of Merrill A, is home to a couple of Macintosh computers, a very expensive and now presumed dead laser printer, a mini-fridge of dubious functionality (and its friend, the microwave), a surprisingly comfortable fold-out couch/bed with one quilt scavenged from a free pile and two thin pillows, some chairs, and the Omen Archives, which contain every issue of the Omen dating back to its fourth semester or so of existence (with some random exceptions). Given Hampshire's astounding lack of institutional memory and cyclical patterns of on-campus controversy, a jaunt through time via the Omen archives can be very illuminating.

Officially, the place is called the Publications Lab, we think.

Layout
We meet every other Thursday at 8pm in the Merrill A Basement in a lovely little room formerly known as the Publications Lab. Well, I guess it still is the Publications Lab. '''Fall 2015: September 24th October 8th October 22nd November 5th November 19th December 3rd

Getting Involved Or, So You Want To Sell Your Soul to The Omen

The easiest way to get involved, you lazy jerks, is to submit content to the Omen. This can be literally anything. Seriously, we don't care what it is. If you're feeling inspired after submitting all that juicy content, you can come to layout! At layout, we lay out the Omen, lay about the office, and eat food. (It's like a vomitorium, but with more Adobe Indesign and no vomiting) If just being at layout has whetted your appetite for more civic participation, you can be a section editor! You make choices about what content goes where, and how it goes there. As long as it's legible, we don't care if it's attractive! Still not enough? You feisty creature you. You can participate, for CEL 1 credit no less, in our Omen Online-Archival Project System (OOPS) Come to an Omen layout to find out more!

Distribution
When The Omen is ready, an email will generally be sent to the mailing list soliciting help with distribution. If you care, you should get on the mailing list.

To find a copy of the Omen, look by the whiteboard in Saga or in the mailroom on each Thursday between layouts.

= History =

Since the Omen was founded, its editors and the Omen as an organization have been hauled in front of the Community Review Board multiple times for alleged violations of community norms. Major kerfluffles: That thing with the unfortunately timed posters, Jacob's editorial about smoking, Lauren Fraser's racism article, probably some other shit, who knows. NEW SHIT DISCOVERED: The Omen went before the CRB for an article titled "We Accuse Council of Being a Bunch of Lily-White Mama's Boys, And Demand That They Kiss Our Asses and Give Us Their Lunch Money" in Issue 16.1 written by Michael Zole.

Anniversary Celebrations
Every 5 years that the Omen survives, we hold an anniversary celebration on the library lawn with a pig roast, attended by current Omen staff and alums. The most recent celebration was the 20th Anniversary on March 30th, 2013. The next one will be the 25th Anniversary, sometime in Spring 2018.

Editors



 * Stephanie Cole, Founder: Spring 1993-Spring 1994
 * Jon Land, Fall 1994–Spring 1996
 * Jordan Strauss Fall 1996–Fall 1997
 * Michelle Beach Fall 1997–Fall 1998
 * Jacob Chabot Spring 1999–Spring 2000
 * Michael (Benni) Pierce Fall 2000–Fall 2001
 * Michael Zole (aka Alexander Michaud) Fall 2001–Fall 2002
 * Justin Philpot Fall 2002- Fall 2003
 * Jeffrey Paternostro Fall 2003–Spring 2004
 * Abby Ohlheiser Fall 2004- Fall 2006
 * Jacob Lefton, Fall 2006–Spring 2007
 * Lindsay Barbieri, Fall 2007
 * Jacob Lefton, Spring 2008
 * Lindsay Barbieri, Fall 2008
 * Evan Silberman, Spring 2009–Spring 2010
 * Ian McEwen, Fall 2010–Fall 2011
 * Rachel Ithen, Spring 2012–Fall 2012
 * Fiona Stewart-Taylor, [ Editrix] Spring 2013-Fall 2013
 * Jonathan Gardner, Spring 2014
 * Grace Willey, Fall 2014-Spring 2015
 * B Corfman, Fall 2014-Fall 2015
 * Chloe Omelchuck, Spring 2015-Present

Omen-Newspaper Relations
The Omen is not a newspaper, and does not currently purport to be (though it is possible that it did, briefly, at the beginning of its existence). It does, however, maintain an unofficial policy of hating whatever "actual newspaper" is operating on campus at the time. The Omen has outlasted all of them so far, and has a 12-year head-start on the current iteration of the Climax. A previous Hampshire newspaper, the Forward, actually contained more content downloaded from the Internet, on average, than the Omen did.

Past Issues of The Omen
Past issues of The Omen are currently available at http://bork.hampshire.edu/~omen

We're in the process of scanning our archive and making it available there. The website is a work in progress, but is fairly functional at the moment.

Random Photos
= Inventory =


 * A gracefully aging 22" iMac
 * A PowerMac G4
 * A table
 * Some computer desks
 * Some chairs
 * A mysterious collection of mix tapes
 * DeathFest prizes from about four years ago
 * A really old printer
 * A fridge
 * Some homebrewing equipment
 * Another fridge
 * A gigantic archive of most of our history
 * At least two Mount Holyoke College yearbooks
 * At least one issue of The Forward
 * A couch and chair, contributed by the 2009-2010 denizens of 71