I try to put all things Triangle-related out of my mind for obvious reasons. Nothing’s more pathetic than a twenty-something who dwells on his glory days as editor of a college newspaper. The exceptions are if said person is merely reminiscing with his college buddies or is actively involved in newspapering. It was a great time, and I held on longer than I should have anyway.
I can’t help thinking about whether or not I screwed things up when I passed the torch. I can live with all the decorations changing and other office changes since it’s not a place I work in anymore, though it would have been easier it would have been if I could have somehow gotten my hands on some of the stuff they threw out. Still, it’s their office now, fine. I even learned to simply shake my head at the glaring punctuation errors and blatant misreporting of the facts that I’ve come across on a weekly basis. Like I try to remind myself: it’s a new crew with their own kinks to work out.
The part I wrestle with somewhat regularly is the change in purpose that’s been pretty obvious ever since current editor Chris Duffy wrote a commentary about how…. This is where I would have pasted in text from Duffy’s commentary, snippets claiming that previous editors were tools of the administration or some such nonsense, except that the Student Newspaper at [otherwise technologically savvy] Drexel University’s web site was recently handed over to College Publisher to host and the archives were lost. However, without knowing exactly what Duffy said that irritated me so much, I can only point out that whatever he had to say about previous editors should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, Dianna Dale slobbed Duffy’s knob by calling him “the best editor [she’d] ever worked with”. If Dale had said something like that to me, I would have immediately known I was doing something terribly wrong as an editor of a newspaper. Working well with administrators might be fine for a member of the USGA but is a far cry from the healthy adversarial role a newspaper should be able to play at a moment’s notice. Even with that aside, Duffy is the last person who should have been criticizing other editors for being too detached from the students.
Without getting into more specifics I’ll say that Duffy seems to be pushing his whole “listening to the students” thing to disturbing new levels. The driving force behind this entire rant is an e-mail I received from a current staffer that informs me The Triangle will soon be publishing without an Entertainment section — in its place will be a Living section, whatever that means. There is no doubt in my mind that the change is a result of some off-base reader poll that someone passed out; and instead of attacking the heart of the problem — the lack of edgy, witty or funny writing — someone decided to do away with the entire section altogether. And this is only the most recent of the poor editorial decisions (in my mind, naturally; after all, this is my blog) I’ve witnessed from afar. The most egregious change is the “come one, come all” attitude that currently prevails in the Ed-Op section. Rather than exercise any selectivity, Ed-Op Editor Vivek Thuppil has made the newspaper a home to a wide spectrum of dimwits, none of whom are great writers. Everything is either poorly written or a slight variation on something that has already been written a dozen times before. I simply don’t see the Puzak or Castle creativity or the Urbano bite. What’s worse is that there are often three or four pages of this garbage. The two or three best commentaries should be chosen and the rest sent back to their authors with a note explaining that their writing needs work before it can be presented to any type of audience.
My problems with Duffy stem from the fact that he seems to be more concerned with his audience’s opinions than those of his writers. He’s been extremely vocal about his goals of making The Triangle a better newspaper by simply getting more people to read it. That was a point I always tried to emphasize to critics when defending my staff and our newspaper: that unless we were getting paid to produce our product, then we were beholden only to ourselves. We weren’tt overly concerned with the distribution numbers, we donated our time to print a paper that we would like to read, the rest of the campus be damned. Whether anyone agreed with that opinion or not, it was our right. And you know what? Not everyone liked the newspaper we put out, but those who did got something that we could be proud of. Even the readers that were turned off still had a hard time denying that our News section was first rate. I doubt that Duffy has increased readership by pandering to a vocal minority, he’s only swapped it out for a less discerning one.
Even if I’m completely off-base in my reader/writer philosophy, I still won’t concede that Duffy has achieved his goal of student-friendliness. I’ve detected different types of hostility in the paper where there never was before: funny comments that seemed out of place after serious commentaries, news stories where angry student reaction was forced in by a reporter or the administration wasn’t given a fair chance to respond, or notes following “Letters to the Editor” that didn’t allow a reader to have the final word on a subject. These are transgressions which I would never have allowed to stand yet am appalled to find on a weekly basis.
The editor-in-chief of a student newspaper is responsible for ensuring quality. That means mundane things like catching mistakes in the copy, noticing widows and orphans in the layout, and educating as many people as possible about the difference between libel and slander. It also means serious things like making sure that you constantly strive to be truly great. Nathan said it best this weekend when it came up in conversation, “They’ve turned a great newspaper into an average one.” While it’s an admirable goal, by making The Triangle accessible to everyone, they’ve made it special for no one. The comics are completely innocuous; they won’t offend anyone that’s for sure — things that aren’t funny never do. The opinion pieces won’t generate any backlash because they can’t be taken seriously. And with the dissappearance of the Entertainment section, no one will ever have anything to complain about ever again.
