THE CAVALIER Daily primarily covers news at the University and in Charlottesville, but that doesn't mean the paper can't take on stories outside its circulation area.
Newspapers, including The Cavalier Daily, frequently "localize" stories, putting local angles on state, national or even international news. Localization can involve talking to experts in the immediate area, finding people somehow affected by the distant news or relating the news to something on the local level.
Readers care most about a localized story when the reporter writes about the local angle in the lead, or first sentence, and gets back to it quickly after discussing the larger news event. One of the better examples of this technique was an article about suicides on other campuses in Tuesday's Cavalier Daily ("NYU, UNC see recent suicides," Sept. 28). The reporter, Becca Garrison, didn't mention the University in the lead but got the U.Va. connection into the article by the third paragraph.
Garrison quickly gave University students a reason to care about suicides at New York University and the University of North Carolina. Unfortunately, many of last week's other localized stories on The Cavalier Daily's News page tended to focus more on the background of the larger news event and less on why the news was important to U.Va.
An article in Monday's newspaper described an ordinance proposed by Boston's city council that would create a database to track college students living off-campus ("Boston floats database to track off-campus students," Sept. 27). The article described why the city wants the database and why students in Boston are not happy about it.
Cavalier Daily readers might have wondered early in the article if Charlottesville has thought about a similar database for U.Va. students. The article eventually revealed in the seventh paragraph that Charlottesville's mayor doesn't see a need for local law enforcement to maintain such a database. This information is the main reason The Cavalier Daily's audience would be interested in this story, but it's buried too deep in the article.
The Monday edition also contained a story about binge drinking, an important subject on many college campuses ("Binge drinking takes lives of Tech student, two from Colo.," Sept. 27). The reporters talked about the alcohol-related deaths of three students on three different campuses within the past month.
The University connection showed up in the lead of this article when the reporters wrote that "University officials remain optimistic about local binge drinking efforts." But readers of the print edition didn't see anything more about those local efforts until they continued the article on the inside page.
An article in Friday's paper discusseda racially motivated case of vandalism -- at Virginia Tech ("Tech's response to reported hate crime criticized," Oct. 1). The incident touched off a controversy on the Blacksburg campus over whether administrators are doing enough "to make [the school] welcome."
The U.Va. community, of course, has struggled in the last few weeks with its own response to a racially motivated case of vandalism, so readers could easily identify with what happened at Virginia Tech. A quick paragraph or two somewhere in the article could have created an instant comparison between the two incidents. The Cavalier Daily never made the obvious connection, leaving its readers hanging.
All of these articles addressed topics that should be of interest to U.Va. students, and they show the reporters who wrote them are working hard to find news relevant to their readers. When writing these articles, however, news writers must always ask, "Why should my audience care about this subject?" They have to answer that question early in their articles, or readers will simply get bored and move on to something else.
Keeping an eye on Honor
The Cavalier Daily's lead editorial Tuesday ("A step forward for Honor," Sept. 28) announced that the Honor Committee has agreed to release more information on honor trials to the newspaper in an attempt to make the student legal system as transparent as possible. The newspaper will print the information on the Monday or Tuesday following the trial.
The managing board praised the Honor Committee for "recognizing the importance of transparency to student self-governance." The newspaper deserves some praise of its own for helping to bring about this change.
One of the many roles of a newspaper is to keep watch on people in power, whether those people are the president of the United States or student leaders. The Cavalier Daily apparently spent quite a bit of time talking with two top Committee members to work out an arrangement that would maintain student privacy while opening a window into the student judicial process. The information should help the newspaper -- and students -- evaluate the effectiveness of a system with a huge impact on the University's academic culture.
Jeremy Ashton can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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