Another Anti-Daily
Columbus, Ohio, as you probably know, is home to Ohio State University. The New York Times reports that the OSU student newspaper, The Lantern, is getting some competition from a for-profit corporation.
I say good. When I worked at WMU's Western Herald, we found competition in the Kalamazoo Gazette, the city's afternoon daily. The Gazette sucked then and still sucks now, in much the same way that the Ann Arbor News sucks. The Gazette just wanted to inflate their circulation numbers so they could charge national advertisers more and didn't tailor their coverage to students in any fashion. It seemed to be more or less a flop. However, I would have welcomed a serious challenge to the Herald, because we could have used the competition to make us develop some actual reporting skills. While I was opinion editor and a columnist, our news editors sucked -- they didn't even know what was going on in the city generally, let alone having the wherewithall to do some investigative reporting. As the author of the daily editorials, I was regularly stymied by having to wait for the news department to do a story on a topic before I could editorialize about it, which could take days or weeks.
From what I've seen, campus newspapers generally suck (with the Michigan Daily being merely mediocre), so to anything that can help better inform students and/or increase total newspaper readership, I say "bully!"
I say good. When I worked at WMU's Western Herald, we found competition in the Kalamazoo Gazette, the city's afternoon daily. The Gazette sucked then and still sucks now, in much the same way that the Ann Arbor News sucks. The Gazette just wanted to inflate their circulation numbers so they could charge national advertisers more and didn't tailor their coverage to students in any fashion. It seemed to be more or less a flop. However, I would have welcomed a serious challenge to the Herald, because we could have used the competition to make us develop some actual reporting skills. While I was opinion editor and a columnist, our news editors sucked -- they didn't even know what was going on in the city generally, let alone having the wherewithall to do some investigative reporting. As the author of the daily editorials, I was regularly stymied by having to wait for the news department to do a story on a topic before I could editorialize about it, which could take days or weeks.
From what I've seen, campus newspapers generally suck (with the Michigan Daily being merely mediocre), so to anything that can help better inform students and/or increase total newspaper readership, I say "bully!"
4 Comments:
The Daily is just mediocre? Glad I never had to read WMU's Herald then. Wow.
I find at least one story a day in the Daily that is interesting or informative.
Is this a reference to the Anti-Daily newspaper that ran from 96-99 - the Onion-esque indie rag that made fun of Michigan Daily editorialists and inspired the Every Three Weekly?? if so, email me fsimmons@umich.edu and I'll send you the back issues.
I'm doing just that. I remember one crazy issue about a woman giving birth to a full-grown undergrad and the byline for Chris Bunn (a Michigan distance runner) "He's OUR Kevin Sullivan."
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