THIS WEEK'S column gives a break to The Cavalier Daily's writers, in order to address reader concerns about photographs and the Web site.
One reader wrote to express her discontent with art on the Life page. She said that while the quality of writing on the page is still high, there are too many cartoons and graphics and not enough photographs. Cavalier Daily editors acknowledge the high number of graphics. They told me that editors generally prefer to use photographs to illustrate the stories, but that when a photo falls through or isn't available or a story is not photogenic, they use graphics instead. Life editor Katie Sullivan noted that she thinks many of the graphics used on the page are high quality and give the artists an opportunity to showcase their skills.
I agree with the reader that more photographs should be used. The Cavalier Daily's graphic artists are clearly talented, and they produce some fine drawings, but their work is often better suited to the opinion pages, where they can illustrate concepts promoted by the columnists. Graphics work well on the Opinion pages because it is much easier to promote an opinion in a graphic than it is in a photograph. News photographs, as a general rule, provide visual information, visual facts. Just as papers should avoid injecting editorial opinion into a story on a news-content page, they should avoid illustrating their stories with art that is less than objective.
Of course, not all graphics illustrate an opinion. But because any graphic illustration of a fact is subject to the artist's interpretation, it's just safer and more utilitarian to use a photograph. With that in mind, I think the staff should attempt to use more photos on the Life page, which, as a news-content page, should provide photographs of the subjects of its stories.
Another reader expressed dissatisfaction with the daily headline e-mails that some readers subscribe to. I am on that list too, so I know that sometimes the e-mails come and sometimes they don't. Some days I'll get two e-mails, and sometimes they'll come in the morning and other times in the afternoon. I have conveyed several messages to the Online department over the last week with no response, so I don't know what they plan to do about it. I am reluctant to come down too hard on the paper about this service, because I just don't feel it's that important. However, it was an advertised service at one time, and its purpose then was to draw more readers to the Web site. By providing shoddy service, the newspaper shoots itself in the foot, and that's not wise.
But this brings up another topic: the Web site. In 1999, the Web site underwent what I believe was its first significant redesign. At that time the newspaper staff created an Online department that was eventually going to be tasked with running the Web site as a separate news publication. For various reasons, that was deemed too ambitious a project for a college newspaper, but the staff did begin working toward smaller concessions to the online media age. One of those concessions was the e-mailed headlines. Another was the use of the Web to publish stories that broke after the nightly deadline but that were too important to wait for the next day's newspaper. These concessions were small steps toward creating an online identity for The Cavalier Daily. But the newspaper was still confused about the Web site's role. Four years later, the confusion continues.
This staff has made progress with the Web site in including its corrections online -- a very important step especially because any errors The Cavalier Daily makes are archived online for all to see. I think it would be wise for the staff to go back into the erring stories and provide links to the corrections published later so that people doing research don't come up with the wrong information.
The purpose of this historical discussion is to provide some background when I begin to talk about the April Fool's edition. The staff opted not to post the April Fool's edition online for reasons of propriety. I agree that an online April Fool's edition, which would then be archived along with the rest of the (serious) newspaper, might lead some people to take other days' online content less seriously. But the problem here is that what's good enough for the print edition ought to be good enough for the online edition. There should be consistency. I don't think there's a right or a wrong answer to the question of whether The Cavalier Daily should publish an April Fool's edition. But whatever is in the print edition should be online.
(Masha Herbst can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.)
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