Student Life, Newspapers, and Community

I realize that after four years of blasting WU's school newspaper for their tabloid, sensationalist tendencies and inexcusably poor writing, I still wonder: Why bother with this travesty of a journalistic endeavor?

Notions of civil society, hegemony, and power jump to mind due to the nature of a paper I need to complete by Wednesday but, for everyone's sake, I pass them by for another thought.

School newspapers like Student Life record everyday events in the hope to capture what has been colloquially called, "the pulse" of the campus. Friends do this often. The mere knowing of a buddy's silly quirks, airy whines, and busy schedule often speaks to the degree to which these trivial items matter to you, how much this friend means to you. This is a part of community. Who cares how ineloquent you sound describing your day, how much you exaggerate a particular incident to the delight of your friends' insatiable appetite for juicy details, or how tomorrow's events will most likely overshadow the clutter you've accumulated from previous days?

So Student Life strives to strike a personal tone through an impersonal medium. The tri-weekly production becomes an endeavor of creating cohesion in a "diverse" student body. Sounds honorable enough.

But what really happens instead? Students nab a copy before their General Chemistry lecture, during their lunch break and proceed to skim the pages for something that screams out from the nondescript black and gray. They become consumers of other people's lives, thriving on words such as "giant explosion" and "gigantic burst." We are all guilty of such voyeurism. And then what? We quickly scan for other events that interest us in the editorials, the photos, the sodoku.

And of course we don't really receive all the information. We just get fragments of the selected stories we do choose to read; the headlines become an admissions committee. Of course we'd never really capture everything even if we wanted. Student Life isn't about to send its tentacles to every nook and cranny of the campus and we're not about to investigate ourselves why Bear's Den pasta tastes so awful. And that's a good thing.

"Just give us enough to wet our palates," we say. Then we can move on. Like a friend saying, "Tell me what happened, but keep the details to yourself so that I can get back to my business." A community of consumers.

If you want to know how a friend is doing, there's a phone, an email, or, better yet, an actual visit. And in these situations, details matter, headlines don't, and best of all, bad writing isn't really an issue. But to be fair to this whole situation, the attempt to build a community is both understandable and admirable. The difficult part is establishing a basis on which you can build it, and an equal, if not more difficult, challenge is the process of fighting to develop this community. I say to myself, "I know what it ought to look like," and yet I know there are times where I am stingier than I ought to be when it comes to paying the price.