That The Daily can consistently put out a newsletter five days a week has always amazed me.

While editor-in-chief last year, I was acutely aware that there wasn’t a great reason why a bunch of 20-somethings should come together to write 20-40 articles a week. No one has to do it. Most staffers don’t intend to become journalists.

And yet.

I guess what sort of perplexed me was that many things at Stanford can feel self-serving. You take a class to try and find a mentor. You join a club to help you get into medical school. You do research with a professor to try and get a job.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with these types of motivations — I think they’re pretty rational. But I could never draw a clear throughline on why someone might contribute to The Daily. Or more directly, what The Daily might contribute back to them.

When I joined The Daily my frosh year, editors would commonly say, “The Daily is not The New York Times.” Originally, I thought this was a self-own. We’d never be as good as The New York Times; our standards were lower; we were bad reporters, etc.

Over time, I realized two things. First, these insults don’t have to be true; we can do good work if we set our minds to it. Second, the saying wasn’t really meant to be an insult in the first place. Rather, its purpose was to state something obvious: The Daily is different from The New York Times.

While The New York Times is entirely a workplace, The Daily falls somewhere in between a workplace and a club. It’s an incorporated California nonprofit with a board of directors, tax returns, payroll, accountants and a lease. But it’s also a group of friends.

While The New York Times publishes to readers the world over, The Daily is fully ingrained within the community about which it writes. As I stated in my reflection on The Daily’s 50th year of independence, this puts us closer to the stories we tell, but it also means there is additional pressure to do a great job telling them.

While The New York Times is expected to send reporters into war zones, trailing the cars of celebrities and throughout the halls of the White House, The Daily got flamed on Fizz last fall when I made the call to send a few reporters into Crothers after a man pretended to be a Stanford student and lived there for months. (For what it’s worth, had I known we would get royally roasted online, I 100% still would’ve sent those reporters into Crothers. It was a very important story and we urgently needed to talk to sources!)

Because The Daily isn’t the same as a national newsroom but also isn’t exactly a club, its value is different for everyone who enters. You might improve your writing. You may come out a better leader. Hopefully, you’ll make some friends. You’ll definitely eat a lot of Treehouse pizza. Regardless, I think these unclear and nonprescribed driving motivations are what make The Daily special. Unlike so many things one could do on Stanford’s campus, it is truly much more of a “choose your own adventure” than a pre-charted course with a fixed destination.

The Daily is not The New York Times. But it might be the adventure you’re looking for.