Hedlining: the love/hate story of a college newspaper & its editor

Thank heaven for the crazies

The Editor — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:35:05 +0000

There was a fantastic incident the other day at Yale in which a “mini-preacher,” as IvyGate calls him, took to the campus condemning basically everyone — but my personal favorites are “dirty dancers” and “gangster rappers.”

There’s no question my entire campus would be heading straight to the underworld, but at least Patrick Swayze and and Tupac are there waiting for me.

Controversial diversity

The Editor — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:28:32 +0000

Another op-ed controversy.

In a faculty column, we added a definition of an obscure religious term with the intent to make the article accessible to all of our readership. I am still fully behind the decision, as leaving the term un-defined would have been insensitive. These are the sort of nuances that we are working to become more sensitive to in order to develop a better relationship with our campus. No assumptions are ever made, and everything is questioned.

Apparently, our decision was “condescending.” Apparently, everyone on my campus should know what it means. Apparently, it’s occasions like this that show society is going down the tubes.

Well cry me a river, buddy. I’ll continue to define anything that floats my boat.

It’s not our fault – Learn to read op-eds as op-eds

The Editor — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:46:28 +0000

I don’t know how I will go about doing this, but I want to write a book called “It’s Not Our Fault: The Media’s Attempt to Make Readership Understand.”

There’s this whole movement for media reform. All right. That’s fine. But what I’m more a fan of is the push for media literacy. So much of what is misconstrued as being the media’s failings is really just the readership not knowing how to read it.

At Thanksgiving dinner the other day, a family friend – who I truly cannot stand in the first place – brought the usual holiday drama to the table when he brought up an op-ed piece that he read in The Wall Street Journal. Now I’m a fan of WSJ, so when he started going on about this and that and global-warming-is-a-myth, it took all my energy not to throw my spiced yams at him across the table.

The problem wasn’t the source, the problem wasn’t the media nor the author nor the publication. It was him. He read an op-ed as an article; he read an op-ed as truth.

In my newsroom, we fact-check opinion pieces just as scrupulously as news articles. (In fact, we’ve caught a couple plagiarisms because of this.) But time after time, critics and skeptics of the paper will point to our viewpoints page as being representative of our biases.

There isn’t more to do than to label the page “VIEWPOINTS,” the same page every issue. I cannot watermark the page with “THIS IS NOT NEWS. THIS IS SOMEONE’S OPINION. YOU ARE ENTITLED TO YOUR OWN, BUT THIS IS NOT AN ARTICLE TO USE TO BOLSTER YOUR POSITION.”

It’s just not our fault that they do not understand.

Mis-Quotabled

The Editor — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:52:05 +0000

I saw this on a flyer a couple weeks back, and showed it to BestFriend/then-EIC:

“Love is loving someone at their worst. Is that romantic? No, but neither is love.”

Well here’s the thing. When I ran a quick Google search, I found no such quote. I only found this:

“It’s no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst. Is that romantic? Well, good. Everything should be romantic.”

It’s a Tom Stoppard quote, from “The Real Thing.” The thing is, they’re quite different. The reason why I loved the first one — and perhaps it was a phantom, and I made up the quote myself — is because I think it’s actually real. There are no flowers, no fireworks, no romance in love.

The reason that this relates is that my love for what I do is ugly. I barely sleep, I forget to eat and when I do, it’s instant Mac ‘n’ Cheese or a granola bar. I swear I’ll have gray hairs by the end of my term. But I love it. And that never goes away.

A week into the job

The Editor — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:53:40 +0000

I don’t remember when I decided I wanted to be a writer. Even foggier is when I decided I wanted to be a journalist.

The two are undoubtedly separate, and I intend to keep it that way. But a little over a week ago, I was elected as Editor in Chief of my college’s newspaper. I’m no stranger to the newsroom — I’m a junior at school, and I’ve been working for the paper since I stepped on campus as a wide-eyed freshman who wanted to go to gallery openings and meet artists. I wanted to be a writer. But last week, as I walked around the newsroom and watched my staff hard at work; as I edited a lead story on the campus police contract negotiations; as I waited for the printer to confirm that we’d been dropped in — I realized that I’d become a journalist. And I haven’t yet decided if that’s a good thing.

But one thing is for sure: Being at the helm of a college newspaper is an experience unlike any other. All the President’s Men, Shattered Glass and even “Gilmore Girls” took a look into the inner-workings of a newsroom, but no fictional representation could come close to grasping the reality of it. From that comes this blog. I can’t precisely say where it will go, where I will take it, but I do know that in the coming year, I will want to write down some of my trials and tribulations, and I invite you to join me.