By Michael Walsh
Last week at The Recorder’s weekly critique session, where we both praise and tear into our very own newspaper, a letter was handed to me by my adviser, Dr. Vivian Martin.
The letter, dated Dec. 15, was from CCSU professor Andrew Moemeka and his Communication 345 class and was titled “The Recorder: Need for guidance and writing upgrade.”
The gist of it is as follows: Moemeka sees our newspaper as a tool to teach students how not to write, particularly in his writing for the broadcast media course last semester.
My amazement upon receiving the two-page letter lead to this column, not to defend my writing skills or my staff’s writing skills, but to question the merits of actions and the point of the letter, if there is one.
Moemeka, who I can only assume wrote the letter that was signed “Comm 345,” gets a few things right. It’s right to say that The Recorder is a learning environment and instrument. We’re all learning as we go. The staff, myself included, makes mistakes, that we ourselves use as examples to better ourselves. None of us are oblivious to that. It’s also right to say that the newspaper is only cared for by a few usually busy students. But those sentiments, which seemed only in place to soften the blow laid upon us, is where my approval of the letter ends. It’s not that we take huge offense to the accusations the letter makes, we just believe it could have been handled a little bit differently.
Anytime you receive a letter that calls the work you obsess over “disturbing,” you’re not going to forget it. I can take a little constructive criticism, but this letter contained none of that. It was more like a memo informing us that we suck and that we should know it. Being compared to an orphan and being told you fall so “way below standard” that you give the university a bad name and image fits into the same category of astonishment. I do hope that the class knows what the standard is for a college newspaper, because it’s typically not very high. Reading an assortment of student publications on visits to college journalism conferences across the country has given me a standard to shoot for, one that I think our remarkably small staff surpasses on our best days.
I certainly don’t mind being criticized. It’s going to happen. I’ve dealt with it before at this newspaper and I’ll continue to deal with it until I graduate in May. What got me and my fellow Recorder staffers going was the sheer pointless nature of the letter vaguely explaining our faults. Ultimately, and I’m saying this on behalf of all my editors, it served no purpose. The process of deconstructing the writing of a student newspaper could have gone better if the nine students who signed the letter, who were studying writing for the broadcast media, had been encouraged to come down to the newspaper, or one of CCSU’s other media outlets, to take part in the process, or try their hand at writing an article or two of their own.
It’s not uncommon for me to receive stories from staff writers that need a little work. Print journalism is a beast of a vocabulary and a writing style unlike any other kind. Different from broadcast journalism, different from research papers and different than letters, cramming a large amount of sometimes heavy and complicated information into a small amount of space is not an easy thing to learn. My staff, which is made up of less journalism majors than you think (where are you guys, by the way), works hard at improving what they do. After the edits our top editors make, the pieces are typically fit for print.
But I’ll tell you what our standard of practice is: signs of growth and an excitement in what we do. Encouragement and constructive criticism is what a student needs, and learning comes best from experience. I propose that instead of sitting in a classroom and merely looking at stories written by fellow students in the campus newspaper, students should be challenged to get out there and create their own, especially in a class such as writing for the broadcast media.
Contents of the letter are also misinformed and not researched. The letter states that we aren’t given sufficient incentives to care for the newspaper like we should, which is false. All editors receive a monetary stipend for their time spent working on the newspaper and while nice, it isn’t the reason my editors and I stay in the office well past midnight on Mondays to finish production of the newspaper we’re so very proud of.
And although the letter correctly states that the newspaper is not an extension of the classroom, it skips a beat when it uses the word unfortunately before it. The Recorder has no supervisor, just a single adviser, who doesn’t have the authority or the ability to supervise our work and edit submitted articles, like the letter suggests they should. Our adviser critiques us and runs training sessions, but that’s as far as her helping hand reaches. And this is for the better. We have as much publishing freedom as any student newspaper does in the country and we only benefit from that.
Our mistakes are our mistakes and we at The Recorder wouldn’t have it any other way.