T HIS IS the time of year that the "student" in student newspaper becomes especially relevant. The Cavalier Daily held its annual elections Saturday, and a new group of people now occupy various positions. This week is transition week, when previous titles remain the same as the new office-holders get a crash course in their jobs - next week, their names will be accompanied by their new titles.
Last week was the final week of work for many staffers. Much like the agony of writing the final pages of a research paper when there is nothing left to say, sometimes the last few nights in the office find staffers lacking motivation to do their best work.
Tuesday's sports section was a nice example. Its front page contained a column, a men's basketball preview and an Associated Press story, with a photograph, devoted to a Carolina-Vancouver NHL game. That struck me as odd - The Cavalier Daily is normally not a hotbed of pro hockey coverage. The second page of the sports section often has a non-University wire story, which is useful for national sports stories, but seeing this on B1 was strange.
I exchanged e-mails with the sports editor who put the section together, and it turned out that the last week of the term had something to do with it. He told me that he is both a hockey fan and player, and that after a year of some of the sports columnists deriding the NHL - which he said was about the only hockey coverage in the newspaper - he decided to cope with a slow University sports day with some NHL copy.
To his credit, the sports editor acknowledged that the decision may not have been the best journalism-wise, but it was something he felt like doing. Now, this is where I would normally take the editor to task for possibly being too lazy to come up with another University story, for being too selfish in choosing NHL coverage, and perhaps for not serving his readers as well he should.
In most circumstances, those points would be valid. But the one-year terms at The Cavalier Daily, and at most student newspapers, make the normal standards of journalism and professionalism a little harder to apply.
As I have noted before, most of The Cavalier Daily's staff receive no pay. None of them receive academic credit. They generally get feedback only when someone is upset with their coverage. And yet they put in anywhere from 10 to 60, 70, even 80 hours a week, depending on their job. They put in a year of attempting to make each day's issue perfect. It can be hard to walk away from that without some sort of gesture, and a small one like an AP hockey story is relatively harmless. Devoting two pages to columns by departing staffers - well, that's another matter that may arise later.
Unfortunately, Friday's sport page provided another, more serious example of last-week doldrums. Thursday's men's basketball game against VMI, which started at 7:30 p.m, did not receive a story, only a picture with a score and an explanation that the game "finished too late for this edition."
Thursday night was when the staff finished up the last issue before Saturday's elections. I assume the traditional party took place after the issue was finished, and that finishing early was a priority in order to start the party. But this comes in the same week that an editorial admonished, "true fans would fill the house even though the Keydets don't stand a chance." Talk about hypocrisy - wouldn't a true student newspaper have covered a home game of its top-10 team (especially one that started at 7:30), despite the opponent or other circumstances? If you're going to talk the talk, you need to walk the walk, and The Cavalier Daily failed to do so.
I normally do not address letters to the editor, since publishing one serves its author's purpose, but there was one in Thursday's edition that contained an inaccuracy - an inaccuracy I have attempted to clear up before.
The reader claims that the editorial cartoon appears without disclaimer and that it is "a reflection of the thoughts and opinions of the editorial staff of the newspaper."
It is true that there is no disclaimer in the immediate vicinity of the cartoon. But on the same page, in the lower left-hand corner under "The CD" are the words "Cartoons and columns represent the views of the authors."
At the same time, I can understand how the misconception may arise. The term "editorial cartoon" may lead readers to attach it in some way to the editorial, which runs down the left side of the same page. Perhaps "opinion cartoon" or some other term would help emphasize that the cartoon and the cartoonist are completely separate from the editorial and the Managing Board whose opinion the editorial represents. Sometimes expecting readers to read the fine print may be expecting too much.
(Matthew Branson can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.)
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