Ouch!
It’s a painful time to be the campus editor of The Daily, what with letters to the editor accusing the paper, and my section in particular, of being disconnected from student life here in Evanston.
Well, I’m not going to take it lying down. We’ve been wrong plenty of times in our 121-year history, but we keep proving we’re worth keeping around for when we’re right.
In separate letters, two Weinberg freshmen, David Wengert and David Osborne, basically accused our newspaper of sucking, albeit in witty, tongue-in-cheek prose.
They claimed that we pay too much attention to what happens in Evanston, within the central administration of Northwestern and inside some of the more active student groups on campus. Overemphasis on these issues, they say, means we’ve forgotten about the average student.
Those claims definitely have a pretty strong foundation. The front page of The Daily is more often than not littered with stories about campus and city leaders. It’s not because we don’t care about the average student – if we had an infinite amount of space, time and resources, we’d write 500-word features about every student on campus. Well, except maybe Wengert and Osborne, whose schedules are so empty they have time to write to a newspaper to say they don’t want to read it.
Within these limitations, we try to include the most important and interesting things possible. Does that mean we ignore the interesting individual quirks of most students? You’re damn right it does. We’ve got news to cover.
Imagine this scenario: Administrators announce they’re going to fill in a fifth of the Lagoon, but we hold the presses because Dave’s mom sent him a care package with Oreos in it, and that’s hilarious because Dave doesn’t even like Oreos.
Or this: There’s a murder in Evanston, but we don’t cover it because our reporters are too busy reporting on why Dave likes “The Simpsons.”
The Daves would rather not hear about murders and alterations to the campus. They’re very happy living in their Willard Residential College bubble, and they don’t want to read about anything that might burst it.
Both Wengert and Osborne seem to think we cover the goings-on in E-town because we’re the only daily paper in the city. Not true. We cover it because we live in Evanston, and we’re affected by what goes on in the city.
Was anyone surprised when two students were attacked in consecutive days last week? The Daves might have been, seeing as how they’re uninterested in the three or four crimes we report every day that occur in Evanston.
Wengert’s also concerned that average student input never reaches the paper. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t ever read all the stories. At the end of most stories, we get student comment on the issue. But Wengert wants more. He wants us to ask random students smoking outside Kresge Centennial Hall who their favorite professor is.
Here’s an idea: Why don’t you ask them yourself? A newspaper should be many things to a community, but a way to find out if that cute girl in Intro to Sociology thinks Charles Moskos is cool isn’t one of them.
And as for our tendency to report every single breath taken by members of the Associated Student Government … well, there are some things we just don’t have any excuses for.
