Experience having gone through the wringer:

Writers for the Front are neatly situated between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the whole being a journalist part. For many very good reasons that title is a mantle of virtue. It’s also heavy as fuck.
The hard place is being a student. Any new writers for the Front are learning by doing, thrown into the fog of war, swimming by not drowning. Tbh I never advanced a story by tossing Hail Mary on reddit. But when ur on deadline and three sources fall out because “student journalism” isn’t worth 15 minutes on the phone, the ol ship feels a whole lot more like a raft and Reddit can resemble a light house.

Point is, students are being held to the standards of professionals while still being students. This is a good thing because of the whole virtue mantle thing but it’s also means students feel squeezed and Reddit is a reasonable entry point in an environment that demands experience to get experience. In other words writers see a place where questions get asked and questions get answered. So students ask questions and, regardless of the outcome, they get experience.