This lazy, underhanded shit has gone too far.

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m on the staff of my school paper. Our advisor is the head of the journalism department at this university and is also the editor of a suburban weekly paper. I’ve had my disagreements with him over the semester, but now he’s using me to get back at a professor he hates, and I’m tired of it.

All semester long the paper has looked like crap, because the current editors don’t know how to use InDesign, plus they have so many little office-political fights and relationship problems (don’t ask) that every production night, someone walks out screaming that they’ll never come back. They aren’t bad people, they just never learned how to layout pages or use the software and their frustration makes for crappy-looking pages. In addition, no one knows how to use Illustrator properly, so every chart and infographic has looked pretty bad as well.

At the beginning of the semester, I started an independent study with my Layout & Design professor continuing with more advanced work from where we finished last semester. As part of this course, she suggested that a good project would be to redesign the suburban newspaper the advisor works for. She said she’d heard that they were looking for some new ideas for their front page. I went to the editor of the paper and asked him if he would be interested in having me do some extra graphics work for the school paper. I also asked him if he would be interested in having me come up with some new ideas for his suburban paper. He said okay, we’re not really thinking about doing much, but sure, what the hell, go for it. But apparently, according to the grapevine, he was quite offended by this remark. It seems he’s upset with the fact that my Layout professor spent a lot of the class dissecting the school paper and its faults as lessons in what not to do. He thinks she needs to mind her own damn business and she thinks the school paper would look a lot better if they’d let people who knew what they were doing work on the layout and production.

So fast-forward to today. I’ve done some graphics work for the paper this semester. I improved our internet-poll pie graph from a poorly drawn sort-of circle to a nice, mathematically correct pie chart with shading and a drop shadow. I would teach the current managing editor how to do this - it would take about five minutes - but they seem to prefer having me drive down every Tuesday night and do it myself. Fine, whatever. But today, the advisor started going off on how the graphics in this semester’s paper have been very poor and hey, how about we get someone on staff who knows how to do graphics?

THIS IS WHAT I OFFERED TO DO IN JANUARY, YOU LAZY BASTARD. I offered to make improvements, but it seems you don’t want your precious babies (the school or suburban papers) touched. Fine, be that way, but don’t come complaining to the class about the lack of graphics quality when everyone knows that I offered to improve things and because of the work I’ve done, some things look a damn sight better than they did earlier this semester. I haven’t fixed everything - our logo for election-year stories is an outline of the United States with an American flag inside, except the flag has pink, white and black stripes - but really, a lot of things look a lot better than they used to.

I think this guy seriously needs to retire. His class is redundant - we go over all of the stuff we learned in the prerequisites and even though it’s called “Newspaper Production Workshop,” we don’t work on the paper and we’re not allowed to do interviews. It would be a lot more useful for me to learn good interviewing technique than to listen to him drone on about typefaces or infographics using handouts from the late 1980’s. He hasn’t changed his exams in a decade and everyone knows it. He doesn’t care about improving the paper and he’s basically deadweight, sitting in the middle of the road, blocking any progress toward improvement we might otherwise be able to make.

And I have to play nice to him until next Monday, since I’m applying for the position of Managing Editor for next semester and he’s on the Publications Board. Of course, with my luck, he’ll be reading this. If you’re reading this, please take my advice: Either let me on the paper and let me make improvements or retire. If I don’t make managing editor, I’m not going to work on the paper after next semester. You’ve been an underhanded, insulting bastard to me all semester long - calling my stories “adequate” and my writing “competent” without offering suggestions for improvement and while writing your own biased stories for your paper. You have no sense of humor, you waste class time telling pointless anecdotes and you’re in my way. Stop the bullshit and either let me on the paper or tell me to fuck off.

2

Don’t feel bad, Sani. My university’s paper also sucks. The layout is lousy, the writing is abysmal, and the editing and fact-checking are absent. A recent editorial had a quote from Supreme Court Justice Steven Bayer. Who? Oh, I think you mean Stephen Breyer. They also don’t want outside help with editing or fact-checking, so it’s the same incestuous thing over and over. And it’s a weekly paper!

It’s something of a joke, now. The shame of it is is that the advisor is a very talented, competent professor of print journalism.

Robin

3

Good luck! I hope you become Managing Editor. Sounds like you deserve it for putting up with all of this garbage. :slight_smile:

Our university paper is a daily paper, with monstrous fact-checking problems. Usually, when you write a letter to the editor, they verify that you wrote it and you’re who you say you are. Yesterday, they ran an editorial written by Ivan Greenefields, a turfgrass science major. Of course, Mr Greenefields does not exist. A guy in my class named Andrew wrote the letter. I guess they didn’t verify that one!

4

It could be worse. My tenure at the school paper ended with me trying to beat the crap out of the news editor. :frowning:

5

I recommend you all transfer to Indiana University, home of one of the best Daily college newspapers in existence.

I worked layout for a year and a half. A few students are displeased by the paper, but really, it’s above average.

Basically, I feel for you. If the paper doesn’t strive to be professional and you WANT to be professional, then…well, it sucks, I know. Keep trying though. It’s worth it.

Aside: One of our worst screwups when I was at IU was the headline: “Plam trees arrive in Indiana”
Yes, it was a headline, no, no one caught it, yes, it was published that way, no, it wasn’t my fault (thankfully).

6

I hated my school newspaper (weekly) and yet I read it every week. It had horrible, pointless articles, and didn’t ever ask anyone for their opinions on anything OTHER than a particular Student Association executive member who claimed to be the “voice of the students” but was rather a hateful man with EXTREME (and or STUPID) points of view (eg boycotting Remembrance Day ceremonies because he felt they SUPPORTED war, and announced this decision during his work as the SA member, making a whole bunch of people, including national news services, believe that our campus was anti-remembrance day). He had a personal vendetta against the school President, and when the president left, he took the opportunity to write an article taking cheap shots at him, knowing full well that the former president likely would never have the chance to respond.

Arrgh, just thinking about that executive member drives me nuts!

7

Current place doesn’t have a paper, but the place I used to go had one. It was dreadful. Half the articles were from the AP and the others were mostly poorly-written; I went down twice to volunteer to edit the thing and nobody ever contacted me about it.

My freshman year, one guy decided to write lots and lots of letters to the editor. That’s perfectly fine, of course, but his argumentation was atrocious and his fact-checking was worse. So, of course, he’d have his letter in the paper almost weekly (the paper ran twice a week) and, not often enough, someone would write in with an appropriate rebuttal to whatever dreck this guy had written (I’ve since bleached most of the relevant bits out of my brain).

The year after that, the newspaper decided he was such a good and faithful servant for providing them with content where they’d otherwise have had to either A) not print as much or B) take more AP stories … so they had him as a regular columnist. And he continued to blow chunks. I wrote in more than once to correct him, and I know other people who also wrote in correcting him.