2008 Woodie Awards
The Integrator is striving to be better
Siobhan O'Leary
Issue date: 11/5/07 Section: Opinion
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Going to our annual newspaper conference can be a humbling experience. Meeting over a hundred other student newspapers gives us perspective on what we are doing well and where we can improve, especially.
Here are some of the things we are doing well: our overall design is solid. Even as we make adjustments, such as to our flags and our headlines, our editors do a good job of laying out pages. Despite the fact that we are at an engineering school, we have writers and staff members who submit articles every week. People pick up the paper and look at it; usually, by Friday, most of the copies that we distribute are gone. Our features section is growing well with interesting content, and writers are not afraid to cover news. Our copy editing has gotten better, and though we still make mistakes, we make fewer than before.
Where we need most improvement is content: not printing articles that we shouldn't, making the articles that we write better, and writing the articles on things that we should cover, but don't.
Conflict of Interest and Advertisements
As a newspaper, our readers should be able to trust that we are reporting independently and not just promoting some other organization or cause. We've become much more strict about conflict of interest, which happens when people write articles about things that they are involved in. If the CUSA Public Affairs Director were to write an article about CUSA, it would be unethical of us to report it as news- he is obviously biased. We may put it in features, if it's a more intimate account of an event, or we might put it in opinion, but not in news. Conflict of interest is hard for a staff as small as ours. Our staff is involved in so many things that we have to be wary of who we assign to an event, and we're not about to tell our staff writers and editors to quit all their other clubs.
We constantly run into problems with people who want to submit an "article" that is actually an advertisement. These people view us as just information for students, not a real journalistic paper. Therefore, when they are doing something that students may be interested in, they write about it and tell us to put it in the paper. We tell them that we won't (and mention our extremely affordable advertisement rates of $2.50 per column-inch for students). We do have integrity.
Here are some of the things we are doing well: our overall design is solid. Even as we make adjustments, such as to our flags and our headlines, our editors do a good job of laying out pages. Despite the fact that we are at an engineering school, we have writers and staff members who submit articles every week. People pick up the paper and look at it; usually, by Friday, most of the copies that we distribute are gone. Our features section is growing well with interesting content, and writers are not afraid to cover news. Our copy editing has gotten better, and though we still make mistakes, we make fewer than before.
Where we need most improvement is content: not printing articles that we shouldn't, making the articles that we write better, and writing the articles on things that we should cover, but don't.
Conflict of Interest and Advertisements
As a newspaper, our readers should be able to trust that we are reporting independently and not just promoting some other organization or cause. We've become much more strict about conflict of interest, which happens when people write articles about things that they are involved in. If the CUSA Public Affairs Director were to write an article about CUSA, it would be unethical of us to report it as news- he is obviously biased. We may put it in features, if it's a more intimate account of an event, or we might put it in opinion, but not in news. Conflict of interest is hard for a staff as small as ours. Our staff is involved in so many things that we have to be wary of who we assign to an event, and we're not about to tell our staff writers and editors to quit all their other clubs.
We constantly run into problems with people who want to submit an "article" that is actually an advertisement. These people view us as just information for students, not a real journalistic paper. Therefore, when they are doing something that students may be interested in, they write about it and tell us to put it in the paper. We tell them that we won't (and mention our extremely affordable advertisement rates of $2.50 per column-inch for students). We do have integrity.
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