Launch Night for ProComm’s Second Edition
One evening, one finished issue and the first chance to see a whole semester at once.
Written by Gregory Ferraro for GF Creative House BlogPhotographed by Leah Korenberg (@leahkorenberg_)
A magazine spends most of its life unfinished. For months, ProComm’s second edition existed as files, notes, contact sheets and half-built pages, something only the staff could really picture. On launch night, it became something you could hold.
I didn’t expect how quiet that moment would feel. The patio was full of music and conversation, but when I opened a copy as a reader instead of an editor, everything around it seemed to slow down. I wasn’t checking margins or rereading captions. I was just turning pages.
Page by page
Every spread carried a memory of how it got there. A photo brought back the afternoon it was taken, a headline the version it replaced. Some pages came together in a single sitting, and others took far longer to find their shape. Seeing them finished and side by side, the order finally made sense in a way it never quite did while I was inside it.
The cover held the most of that for me. It began as an idea I carried long before the shoot and ended on the last night of a trip to New York I still think about. On the patio, it was simply the front of a magazine people picked up off a table, and I liked that. The work no longer needed me to explain it.
Launch night at College Park Patio
The Spring 2026 ProComm launch.
Who came
My parents came, along with my grandma, my aunts and my friends. They had heard about this issue all semester, in pieces and in passing, often before any of it made sense outside my own head. Handing them a finished copy felt like finally showing them what all of it had been for.
Destiny Morris’ family came as well. Destiny worked beside me on Tusk, and this issue carries a memorial I wrote for her. Standing with her family as they held the magazine open to her page is the moment from that evening I have returned to most.
“Some work is made to be seen widely. That page was made for the people standing in front of it.”
Giving it back
Before the night ended, I wanted to turn the attention toward the people who made the issue with me. Every staff member and contributor received an award written for what they specifically brought to it, and so did our adviser and the dean. Putting those awards together meant looking back at the semester through everyone else’s work instead of my own, and it reminded me how much of this issue I only saw once they handed it to me.
The ProComm awards
An honor for every member of the Spring 2026 team.
After
In less than a week, on May 20, I graduate, and ProComm’s second edition is the last issue I will lead as a student. I think that is part of why the launch has stayed with me. It wasn’t only a release. It was the first time I could step back far enough to see a full semester at once, and to recognize myself somewhere inside it.
“Most of the work behind a magazine is invisible by design.”
For one evening, all of it was out in the open, and the people who mattered most were there to see it.
Launch night on Instagram
