JOURNALISM is a day-to-day business. Cover what happened the day before, maybe cover what will happen next. Because keeping up with the day-to-day tasks can be so time-consuming, it is easy for a journalist to get into a rut and not explore bigger projects that can offer readers something different. Thankfully, The Cavalier Daily's Nov. 15 issue provided two great examples of staying out of the rut.
The most high-profile example was the "Hoops" supplement that served as a preview of the Atlantic Coast Conference men's basketball season. It contained the basic aspects of a season preview, such as capsules on each team and player features, but the issue also offered columns and non-traditional pieces like the hilarious "Hoos the Man?" contest.
In a letter from the editor on page two, the editor mentioned that "the point of this supplement isn't all the hard work that went into it, but the finished product that you are probably anxious to read." This is true, but readers should remember that the reason they have a nice finished product to read is because of all the hard work that went into it.
Staffers put a lot of time into The Cavalier Daily to begin with - for no pay and no academic credit - and remaining a top-notch college newspaper on just the everyday aspects of journalism can be a chore. Throw in an undertaking like a 40-page supplement, and it is especially difficult. The work for a supplement must be shoehorned into the normal schedule and means more work and more time for everyone involved.
Pages 6-9 of the supplement were entertaining and put together well. I found the combination of a quote about a player's skinniness and a piece on what the player eats at Observatory Hill Dining Hall to be quite amusing. Nothing like O-Hill food to bulk up.
The team previews were excellent as well. This type of writing has the danger of being just a here-are-the-players-and-their-statistics rundown, and the staff dealt with this well by adding "Our Take" and "CD Breakdown" elements for each team. A lot of readers may skip over the actual stories, and the extra elements help provide a quick-to-read but fairly complete picture for inattentive readers (that means most readers).
Inattentive readers also make newspaper series a tricky undertaking. Someone may go to great lengths to keep up with "Friends," but it is doubtful that same person will care if he misses part three of a newspaper series on some real-world topic. This brings me to my second example, the life series on "the facets of faith and religion at the University" that concluded in the Nov. 15 issue.
Although the six-part series was not like the supplement in that it appeared as a normal part of daily issues, the series showed how journalists can stay out of the rut. In this case, the rut is the one issue, one story approach that is sufficient for the majority of newspaper topics. With the series on religion and college life, the life department took on a complex and multi-faceted issue and treated it as such.
For the inattentive reader, the series was valuable in that each story could stand on its own - if you missed one, you could still read another without missing any references or information. The series did start at a logical point - the threshold issue of faith during college - but missing one part did not mean the rest of the series would be lost on a reader.
The series was out of the ordinary in other respects. Like the supplement, it required some advance planning, which can sometimes be absent in the daily hubbub of a newsroom focused on producing the next day's newspaper. The topic also set the series apart. It was not about frozen yogurt or clothes or bars or any of the other typical topics that can pervade college newspapers - it was about an issue (faith, or lack of it) that all students face at some point, especially in light of what has happened in the world this semester. College newspapers obviously cater to college students and therefore tend to be irreverent and less serious with the aspects of the trade that are not "hard" news. The series was a successful effort to be serious, and the packages of text and graphical elements matched the high quality of the stories.
I was going to end with a minor point that the phrase "between different religions" in the Nov. 15 issue should have been "among different religions" because there were more than two religions involved. But my dictionary calls my view "persistent but unfounded" and maintains that "between" has been used to refer to more than two items since Old English. Shows what I know. Just a valuable reminder that my view (even with "ombudsman" attached to it) is just that - one person's view.
(Matthew Branson can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.)
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