Journalism at UMD

Comments on the 4/8/09 edition of the UMD Statesman

Chris Julin serves as Public Editor this week.

The Statesman is on a roll. The news section once again delivers a pleasing and engaging blend of breaking news and enterprise work, and a healthy mix of on-campus and off-campus reporting.

We get news about financial aid and the economy – keep those economic and budget stories coming – and we get breaking news on the flood at Stadium Apartments and the strange UMD-student-didn't-really-disappear story.

We get two takes on the big Soulja Boy concert. I was happy to get the fun look at the alternative show offered that night. The two stories made for a nice page.

We get some news about UMD's off-campus connections, and I'm always interested to read about that. Both the story about the aquarium and the story about UMD students at Nettleton School give readers a glimpse of the university's ties to the larger community of Duluth.

Those leads (again)
On my regular subject of leads, this is a good-looking issue. We get several colorful narrative leads, and we get good old summary leads on some of the harder news stories.

Here's something to keep working on. Several of the harder news stories in this issue try to lay out what happened plainly but end up holding onto the crucial facts until the sixth or tenth paragraph. Try to tell readers what the heck happened right away.

My favorite example this week of a lead that does just that is found in Callie Good's story about the Great Lakes Aquarium.

One of Duluth's most popular tourist attractions may soon be operated by UMD. State Representative Roger Reinert has recently proposed a bill that would make UMD the new owner of the Great Lakes Aquarium.

You can't get much more direct than that. In 35 words I know what's going on, and I want to read more.

A bunch of new names
It was fun to page through the paper this week and see all the bylines. The past couple of issues featured a small pool of writers. As a reader it's a bit odd to see only a handful of names in the paper; as a friend of the paper it’s worrisome because burnout seems likely. It's a lot of work to crank out all the stories and assemble the paper. On top of that, the more writers and editors who work on the paper, the more ideas that get considered and expressed. It's healthy to have a goodly number of people working on the newspaper.

So I was pleased for all sorts of reasons to see so many different bylines this week.

Cleaner copy
The "hurdels" in the photo caption on the sports page are a bit unfortunate, but I caught far fewer typos this week than in some recent issues. Good for you. It's worth the effort. The paper is more readable and certainly more credible when the spelling and grammar are good.

-Chris Julin

Posted by Chris at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comments on the 4/1/09 issue of the UMD Statesman

Prof. Juli Parrish from the Writing Studies Department takes another turn as the Public Editor this week.

This week's issue of The Statesman left me feeling inspired. After reading, I wanted to turn off all the lights, ride the bus, pick up trash, drink less coffee, support street musicians, and help people in flood zones. And in a way I really didn't expect—because I could not at first get past the dragon slayer analogy—Jesse Meehl's opinion piece on EPA regulations served to pull these separate gestures of good sense together. Until the energy business is regulated, Meehl suggests that we “stick to things that we know help,” and this issue made we want to do those things more.

In the spirit of making small gestures, I offer this list of other things this week's Statesman made me want to do. I hope some of them help.

Open the paper. The front page effectively captures my attention with its striking photo and promises relevant and varied coverage within the paper. And this may not have been intentional, but I liked that the first line of Eric Ludy's article on Dean Krug's resignation as CLA Dean echoed the front page photo. Perhaps we all have new mountains to climb.

Learn about broomball. UMD students are an active, varied lot, and they win national titles in sports I didn't even know existed. Kudos to the sports writers for coverage that highlighted the accomplishments of a range of students in readable, informative prose.

Connect global struggles with local contexts. Of the many pieces that do this, I particularly appreciated Meghan Buttler's take on the budget crisis. This is a welcome continuation of budget-related coverage, and I hope someone takes seriously the wonderful suggestion that students could share expensive supplies and other resources.

Wish I could see the forest and not the trees. Forgive me, but I can't help but notice that the paper misspells Its. Own. Name. And the name of its building. Twice. In ads inviting people to come and work for it. There were also two headlines with major errors—a subject-verb agreement and a comma splice. We all make mistakes, but these are big ones. Overall, I'd like to see the editors doing a bit more with issues of usage, too: “up the ante” and “ante up” do not mean the same thing at all, and “were being available” is a phrase I don't think I've ever come across before.

Ask Robert what I should be agreeing with him about. I enjoyed Dayna Landgrebe's article on Robert Duerst's understated gospel-spreading campaign. This piece was just one element of what seemed like a well-rounded issue. However, even after reading the whole story about agreeing with Robert, I can't figure out what I would be agreeing with if I were to agree with Robert, whom I actually often agree with, as he is a student in one of my classes. But I couldn't make the pieces of the article add up, and in the end, I wonder if the article needed to be a little less understated than Duerst's campaign.

Promote understatement. Lately, every time I see the masthead, I think of the similarity between “UMD Statesman” and “understatement(s).” I don't know what the staff might do with it: Use it as a title for the news briefs (which I echo Chris Julin in liking very much as a regular feature)? Retitle “Hollywood & Vine” or even use it as a way to bring that column's focus closer to the UMD community? Well, it could be a good title for something, and you can have it. As my favorite quote of this week's issue puts it, “‘Everyone responds to the word ‘free'.”

Learn more about how advertising works. The U-Pass story is good, but I kept wondering if there were a potential conflict of interest in running this story on page 2 while an advertisement promoting the same material ran on page 28. I honestly don't know. Another stumper: who exactly does Mara Minwegen-Mulcahy think reads this paper? Are there many UMD students needing help with patents, academic publications, fiction, and translated works?

Laugh. Eric Johnson, in his editorial on our caffeinated culture, says that “one would like to think 18- to 23-year-old college students are able to exercise some restraint and realize guzzling through energy drinks is not the best idea.” Hey, if I didn't like 18- to 23-year-olds, I wouldn't be a professor. But if they can't do it with beer, why would they do it with Red Bull?

Get out into the community. This week's issue of The Statesman was, for me, a coherent and compelling blend of pieces that made me both appreciate the UMD student body and also want to connect more with the rest of Duluth and the region. This was one of the best issues I've seen in awhile: it captured the idea that no change is too small to make a difference. It may have been the April Fool's issue, but that's no joke.

Posted by Chris at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)