[Vision2020] students away from home

[Saundra Lund]

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to all!

 

I apologize for the delay in responding, but things got away from me with
the holiday, and I didn't want to let this pass without thanking Keely for
her thoughtful post.  I think she makes excellent points.

 

One of the enduring criticisms I've heard about the Daily News over the last
several years is the disproportionate number of "fluff" (or human interest)
stories about NSA & Logos compared to other local educational institutions
when looking at enrollment.  Other area schools have great things going on &
inspiring students as well, something readers of the Daily News wouldn't
have much - if any - idea about.  Indeed, this clear preference is one of
the reasons a lot of folks have given up on the Daily News providing
unbiased coverage.

 

Personally, I find the clear preference for NSA & Logos fluff stories -
although not the individual human subjects themselves, of course --
repulsive.  Perhaps it's as you imply - that NSA, and Logos, presumably -
simply excel at shameless self-promotion.  Nonetheless, it's the job of real
journalists to do a decent job getting the stories when "government" and
other local school teachers & administrators are focused on providing
quality educations rather than on finding time for shameless self-promotion.
Human interest stories shouldn't be limited to what shows up on someone's
desk virtually written for the reporter; at least, that's not the way a real
newspaper operates.

 

I challenge the Daily News to - for 365 days - provide the same number,
based on enrollments numbers, of human interest stories about schools other
than NSA & Logos as they provide for those two schools.  How about it, Daily
News - are you up for the challenge?  You might actually find your
subscriber numbers increase if you paid the same attention to students at
the other local schools as you give to the two local schools that excel at
nothing so much as shameless self-promotion.

 

 

Saundra Lund

Moscow, ID

 

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do
nothing.

~ Edmund Burke

 

***** Original material contained herein is Copyright 2010 through life plus
70 years, Saundra Lund.  Do not copy, forward, excerpt, or reproduce outside
the Vision 2020 forum without the express written permission of the
author.*****

 

 

 

From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com]
On Behalf Of keely emerinemix
Sent: Thursday, November 25, 2010 12:26 PM
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] students away from home

 

Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving, Visionaires --

I wonder if anyone else noticed a particular story in this morning's Daily
News, which, as most of you know, is what the Alford family has decided will
pass for print journalism on the Palouse but which once again has proved to
be nothing more than a shill -- a flack, a PR job, a booster -- for New St.
Andrews and all things Kirk-related.  If you think the D-N does a great job
covering news from Latah and Whitman counties, you might be offended if you
read further.  If, on the other hand, you recall ever having read a real
newspaper, and kind of thought newspapers were a good thing, you might share
my dismay.

I'm referring to a top-of-the-page spread reporting on the scintillating
Thanksgiving holiday plans of two NSA students -- one from Texas, the other
from Toronto -- who might have dinner today at Roy Atwood's place and then,
you know, like, hang out and have a snowball fight and do some studying.
This gripping account of two nice, if somewhat bland, young men, neither of
whose stories demonstrated any particular angle or interest except for the
fact that they could free up time for an interview, covered a good 12 column
inches and included fascinating revelations about how people from Texas and
people from Toronto have different past experiences with snowfall.  Now, I
want to be fair here -- perhaps the reporter was going for a lighthearted
piece on "Thanksgiving Plans Of People From Places That Begin With The
Letter 'T'," but I'd have to then point out, in the interest of consistency,
that Texas is the state and Toronto is the city, and so Texas and Ontario
are the parallels, and they begin with different letters, and so there goes
the angle of the story . . . which kind of begs the question, then, of the
news-feature value of the Thanksgiving plans of two out-of-state guys at a
small college with a demographic that's remarkably, and purposely, similar
in every respect.  Of course NSA might be the home of someone with a
newsworthy or even feature-worthy holiday story, but in this case, it seems
that simply being a St. Andy's guy in November was all that was required.  

The editors of the Daily News, dazzled as they are by our local Oxford
Donnabees and their students' perspicacious views on snowfall and studying,
might have forgotten that there is in Moscow another college -- a
university, in fact -- that has nearly 40 times the number of students, many
of whom are not upper-middle-class conservative, white, Christian Americans,
and some of whom likely have really newsworthy Thanksgiving plans, even if
they're not learning Latin.  I can't help but wonder if the away-from-home
experiences of someone from Ghana or Guatemala, Poland or Papua New Guinea,
might be at least as gripping, perhaps even as educational, as those of our
Texas and Ontario students.  I wonder if, in a university community of eight
or ten thousand students, there might be someone conquering enormous
hardship during the holidays, or spending his or her week off rescuing
endangered sea turtles, distributing AIDS medicines to the poor, or
organizing a food drive for prisoners' families.  I'd even bet that there
are folks in our community who open their homes to all sorts of different
people for Thanksgiving dinner -- maybe even people they don't know, but
who, as is always the case in university towns, are away from home for the
holidays and need a place to feel welcomed.  There are a lot of interesting,
uplifting, edifying feature stories available to newspaper reporters during
the holiday season; I know because I've written quite a few myself.  But
there's something terribly skewed when a local newspaper blithely skips over
the rich fields of genuinely news- or feature-worthy stories and instead
consistently runs straight over to the least-likely-to-be-significant and
far-less-relevant arena of carefully groomed, judiciously packaged, and
energetically promoted "movement" that is New St. Andrews.  I hope the two
young men interviewed have a great Thanksgiving, but my hoping so is about
as newsworthy as is the description of their plans for the day -- or mine.

I don't fault NSA for heartily promoting itself.  It's a disgrace, though,
that its efforts are augmented so readily by a local institution that ought
to exist to promote something else entirely:  The responsible, unbiased, and
robust reporting of NEWS, not NSA.  

Keely
www.keely-prevailingwinds.com



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20101201/768ebdef/attachment.html