Auspicious Objects

In my last post, I briefly mentioned – in polite and fair terms, I think – that I have a great hatred for student dailies published and distributed on college campuses. Now, before I go any further, I will preface that this is entirely directed at the newspapers made on campuses I’ve studied at; obviously, there are many more student publications out there that I have never read, and, although I certainly could read many of them thanks to the proliferation of the internet, I don’t have that much free time on my hands (but since you’re reading this blog that I waste my free time writing, you already know that’s a total lie). The most I venture outside of my small Wisconsin world is pointing my web browser to IvyGate, and while they certainly do their share of ragging on student publications, I’ve still heard that The Daily Pennsylvanian is quite good.

My discontent with students wasting paper goes all the way back (read: less than four years) to my high school days, when our school’s newly-instituted student paper had an illustrious run amounting to about one school year. I honestly don’t remember anything about the paper (not even it’s name), save that the only column anyone enjoyed reading was Heap of the Month (yes, so little happened at our school that the paper was published monthly), where a student would detail the idiosyncrasies and deficiencies with their car. The writer of the column was not gifted with expressive language (you can’t fault him/her though; this was high school after all), but the humor of the situation nevertheless shined through. The paper ceased production my senior year, although no specific reason was given. It probably had something to do with the general laziness of high school students, our school population’s collected loathing of the teacher who oversaw the paper’s production, and the fact that the paper was terrible in every regard. I’m not saying that we should hold high school newspapers to high journalistic standards, but the very least they could have done was prevent it from being little more than a sheet of biased gossip – which is exactly what it became.

But that’s all in the past. We can’t expect a team of high school students looking to pad their college applications to write Pulitzer Prize material, but isn’t it reasonable to demand that a team of college students – who are, for the most part, majoring in journalism – rise above those high school inclinations towards biased, emotionally charged, and/or narcissistic writing? Apparently that’s asking too much. Here I would normally insert a quip about no one caring about this problem because of no one reading the papers, but I know that’s not true; every college campus I’ve been to is populated with students reading their school’s publication(s), and every college campus I’ve been to also has a problem with students discarding issues of the student newspaper on the ground rather than in proper trash receptacles. Obviously, people are reading the papers, and that’s also part of the problem. If a good portion of the student body is reading the student newspaper and simply shrugging off the numerous flaws on the printed page, they are doing nothing to advocate change. Also, the staff of the paper take notice of how many people around campus are reading their work, and their ego automatically inflates itself.

If student newspapers are so bad, though, why are students reading them? The answer is simple, especially if you are or have ever been a college student: boredom. If you have some time in between classes, reading a newspaper – regardless of it’s quality – is a good way to kill time. When I was a student at Point, I had a small gap of time in between my philosophy class and psychology class, which I would regrettably spend reading The Pointer. Even just hearing that name makes me livid to this day. I’ve already said this publicly, and I don’t mind throwing it out again: The Pointer is an absolute piece of garbage. It was before, and it is now. I know that it still has a chance for redemption, as do all student newspapers; we just have to wait for the paper staff to completely change as current members graduate and move on (hopefully not to a career in journalism). The problem, of course, is that the staff does not completely turnover all at once, and this gives current staff time to corrupt new staff and bully them into conforming to shitty journalistic standards. It’s a vicious cycle.

So, why do I loathe The Pointer as much as I do? The biggest problem they have had for the past few years is a completely obvious bias towards the Student Government Association; the two are practically in bed together. For the entirety of the 2008-2009 school year, every week’s front page was either entirely dominated by a cover story detailing some SGA affair, or at the very least, featured a quote from an SGA official on a topic that had nothing to do with SGA. Why would this be the case? As it turns out, many of the current staff have served on SGA at some point in time or have friends in SGA. Look, you’ve got to at least try to maintain a neutral viewpoint when you’re a journalist. My friend Scott Asbach is now the president of SGA. Hypothetically, if I were a journalist for The Pointer and I had to be critical about something stupid SGA did, I wouldn’t hold back, because it wouldn’t be about Scott and I as friends, it would be about Scott and I as SGA president and journalist, respectively. Save your feelings for the op-ed page, where they belong.

Sadly, The Pointer has proven time and time again that they are very bad at maintaining a neutral viewpoint, and this deficiency can be felt even in the executive editorial decisions of the paper. Last year, UWSP suffered the tragic death of a student on-campus. Instead of doing some actual journalism and writing the in-depth article the situation was worthy of, Pointer staff member Justin Glodowski slapped together some official details sloppily and included a quote that sounds like it came from the first person he found anywhere near Thomson Hall:

“I had only met Andrew a few times during the semester, so I couldn’t really call him a good friend of mine because I barely knew him, but he was a nice guy every time I did see him. I know he had a bright future ahead of him and it’s sad his life was taken so soon,” said Ashley Tabaka.

Thanks for that, Ashley. You really offered some insightful perspective into Andrew’s life. Now just stick that quote in between a few paragraphs poorly rephrasing the official coroner’s report, and Justin is out of the office by five. But wait, let’s not be too harsh on our friend Justin just yet! He is the same guy who wrote this article – which took up the front page of the paper – about a former student at UWSP who went missing in California. It even has pictures! But why would we give so much more attention to an alumni who went missing on the other end of the country from Point’s campus? If you guessed that it was because she had friends in SGA, you are growing wise to the ways of The Pointer. Like most articles in the paper last year, this one starts with a quote from Katie Kloth, then-president of SGA. I’m not saying this shouldn’t warrant press coverage – certainly the disappearance of a person is tragic and important – but the imbalance of coverage between these two events is not only unprofessional, it’s downright insulting.

The Pointer has cleaned up it’s act a little bit this year, revamping it’s front page design and losing some of the SGA love (though I’m not sure if that’s due to a change in writing staff or a change in SGA presidency), but it’s still not as good as it could – nay, should – be. I am not quite sure what is holding it back, but I think it may have something to do with the person who wrote the worst student newspaper article ever now running the paper. Go ahead, click on that link, read that article, and I defy you to not shake your head in the process. There is no substance to it whatsoever. It does not even attempt to masquerade as journalism. It’s simply naval-gazing of the lowest form published in the completely wrong medium (it should be on blogs like this, if anywhere), and nothing more. My favorite quote:

I chose to write with a pen name because of the high profile I hold on campus.

It makes me laugh because this “high profile” is largely self-imagined (as I can tell you from being on campus when this was written), and perfectly sums up the vein, narcissistic nature of many college journalists. I have a lot more to say on this subject – and really, I think I could go on for days – but I’m getting way too angry to continue, so I’ll just leave you with that.

Next time (if there is a next time) on “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Klug!“, we’ll look at sex columnists, Burnellgate, terrible attempts at impersonating The Onion, crappy newspaper comics, and we’ll also take shots at both The Daily Cardinal and The Badger Herald. Oh boy.

David Surely You're Joking, Mr. Klug! anger, college, idiocy, wisconsin