Journalism at UMD

OK, here are my thoughts on this week’s Statesman and in no particular order. First, my qualifying remarks: I love the Statesman and everyone who works for it. Journalism is hard work and balancing reporting, editing and all that with courses and jobs and life is not easy. My hope is that those who do see the reward – even if it is in the form of criticism (which is usually what you find in a critique).

My question is for those who are NOT writing: Why not? Come on down. Fill out an application and get to work. I want more names.

The JOUR 3101 awards
My Editing class assisted me in the critique of this week’s paper and that includes our awards for our favorite headline, favorite lead (or lede if you’re old school) and our favorite story overall. The winners:

BEST STORY
This went to the snow sculptor story about Harry Welty and his amazing snow art. This story is written by Kathy Choh and is a very nice piece of journalism that gives us the back story on something that we all might see but might not know about. One thought we did have as a class was whether the lead – which is a good one – could be removed and that the second paragraph might be an even stronger start for the story. Something to consider.

As a side note, this is also one of the best-designed pages of the paper. While I wish we had a photo of Harry himself, the page is built around dominant and contrasting art and nice, large headlines.
Still, a great setup to this story that transitions quickly and nicely to a cute quote from Harry.

BEST LEAD
This award went to another enterprise story: David Cowardin’s “Open water threatens the safety of fishermen.� We agreed this narrative lead told us the story right away and drew us into the topic. Another well designed page, though, again, it would be nice to have some people in the photos – though probably a bad idea to ask anyone to go out and stand on the unsafe ice just for a good picture.

One question: Should “junior� be identified as UMD junior in the opening? Maybe.

THE LEAD ITSELF:
What junior Andrew Chadwick saw before him was an eye-opener. As he drove his Subaru onto the frozen surface of Wild Rice Lake, he was greeted with open water. Lucky for him, he stopped 10 feet shy of disaster.

"I drove that way close to 70 times," Chadwick said.

BEST HEADLINE
That belongs the Variety page as well.

Literary Guild finds its ‘muse’

So, it was a good day for the Variety page.

OK, now a few thoughts from me in no particular order.

SUBMITTED PHOTOS AND BROKEN BONGS
When I first saw the image, I thought it was a tribute to Michael Phelps, but no, it was an article about all the stuff campus police confiscated and then broke into pieces. Bongs and guns and weed… oh my? I think about these images and this story at the same time I think about the photos of the students holding dry-erase boards in a story about textbook costs.

These articles and images share something: They were news events staged by organizations designed to get the media’s attention. I think about this in the context of Obama’s first week in office when his office refused to let media take a picture of him at his desk and instead released its own photo of him working hard at his desk. It’s a lovely picture of the guy, but several wire services refused to run it saying that the job of the journalist is to gather the information themselves.

My question, then, is when should we use submitted stuff and when should we demand that we do the work ourselves?

The MPIRG story is an interesting one and the page 1 layout using those images is a very creative approach. I like it a great deal. However, I do think we owe it to the reader to explain where the pictures came from and what the project involved. I would probably do it in the cutline on the first page. But somewhere.

The bong story is not one I’d run, I don’t think. The photo feels staged and I guess I am not sure why I’m reading it. Veronica does a nice job with the details of the story, but as a reader I feel somewhat manipulated by this story. The “news� may be hiding on the jump where Huls talks about how scary Airsoft (brand name so upper case – and be careful that all were in fact this brand name, which is unlikely) are.

CUTLINE AND PHOTOS
Here’s a few rules that need to be adhered to:

DESIGN RULES
Here they are: big art, big headlines, no jumps. The pages look a little crowded and like a little more thought needs to go into what’s going where. I recommend sketching out a story budget matching stories with pages so you don’t design yourself into a hole. Readers don’t follow jumps and if you make them jump for two paragraphs on an inside page, you’ve just made them grumpy. Grandma is going to be especially mad that, not only is her grandson not named in the mock trial story, but also she can’t even see his face with her reading glasses on.

A FEW GRAMMAR AND STYLE RULES
When do you use “towards� in journalism? Never, says AP style.
To hyphen or not? On the front page we say “…evidence gathered over the last year-and a-half.� The rule is only hyphenate a compound modifier if it is before the noun: year-and-a-half worth, as the headline says inside is correct.

OK. That’s enough.

-John Hatcher