The Issue:

Presidents are being paid increasingly more money.  Less so than previous years, but still an increase.

Ohio State University Lantern

OSU has the dubious honor of having the highest paid president in the entire country; E. Gordon Gee.  I can’t comment on E.’s job performance; but neither can they.  I can find an op-ed complaining about his inability to answer questions honestly, and some

UConn President Hogan -- you see what I mean right? He's a nice guy, but you're getting this right?

videos of him answer questions very dishonestly, but not so much an opinion on the matter, which I was anticipating.  If UConn President Hogan was named “world’s richest professor” I’d write about that.  Hell if he was named “world’s greatest lover” I’d probably write an opinion piece on that (commenting that you should need better hair to qualify).  But anyway:

Rick Schanz (does it rhyme with pants?  or mains?  Is it a “shh” sound or a “Sk” sound?  I’m not a good enough writer to know) wrote a news piece on the topic, and let’s be honest; that lede is great.  It’s not particularly interesting or stylish but god-dammit does it tell you what you need to know without any bells or whistles.  I can’t tell you how many ledes I read these days where that would be loaded down with the name of the survey, the date it was announced, his annual salary, and Gee’s personal measurements.

“What’s going on?”  ”Gee’s fucking loaded” BAM!  THAT’S ALL YOU NEED.  All those other details can go in the nut!

Shit, this makes me happy.

The body is good; all the information you need is there.

E. Gee -- America's richest educator/worst dressed professor

Some things I hate: there is no student comment here.  I think it would be appropriate to ask the student government president his opinion on that sort of thing if he’s supposed to be representing student sentiment.  It would provide a good context to the stuff about his charity work.  Sort of a “yeah this sounds nice, but do his constituents approve?”  I would doubt they do.  Even if they did; there’s just no voice in this piece that isn’t administrative.  Maybe that makes it an opinion piece after all.

Also, I hate this phrase:  ”Gee said through a university spokeswoman.”  Because it sounds like he astrally projected out of his own body and — Boston Brand-style — inhabited the spokewoman (who is unnamed, which means I can’t verify if she actually said this or not, which hurts credibility).  That’s just dishonest.  It carries a bizarre sense that Schanz actually talked to Gee when he didn’t.  Even though he’s not actually lying, the tone it sets is deceptive.  I can’t sign off on that.  That is dog shit.

“Spokeswoman Jerky McGee, speaking on Gee’s behalf, said…”  practically the same sentence; massive ethical change.

By the by, he makes $1.6 million.  Even giving a bunch of it to charity as he does, does that not make anyone else’s skin crawl?  I’m just trying not to think about the salary figures of people on wall street.  Sometimes this country feels like a fucked up willy-wonka factory.

I grew up in New Canaan, okay?  I’m very aware of how ashamed some people should be and aren’t.

University of Alabama Crimson White

Man…There’s something about the name “Crimson White” that makes me think simultaneously of a Stripper and a Superhero.  It’s neat that Alabama can break the usual naming conventions for newspapers, and there’s something in that name that just sound…cool.  Although I doubt it took long to choose the name that just is your school colors.  But then I edit “The Daily Campus,” so I think I’ll keep quiet on criticizing names from now on.

Williams Evans wrote a news piece too.  Which is making me wonder why I bothered having an opinion at all on this…But Evans had the benefit of having a campus spokesperson comment on the survey; which brings it closer to home, and the realm of news.  (To my knowledge our own president — and indeed most president — just kind of took the survey in stride; but then he isn’t making a million dollars, so whatever.)

Yeah, I don’t want to ruin the surprise or anything but everyone probably pretty much figured out that Evans didn’t write a lede as well as Schanz did.

UA President Robert Witt. Worth around $600,000 apparently.

I think I see what Evans is trying to do though.  He’s setting up a mood of despair to heighten the feeling of relief at news that everything has balanced out.  But it’s a goddamn headache to read, and it doesn’t hold my attention even a little bit.  You finish the line and you ask yourself so what?  That’s a statement of the times, nothing happens in that lede.  Times are tough, what’s the point?

Maybe if he’d had the denouement in the lede, the full payoff on one paragraph, but it would have been bulky.  Better to kill the line and modify the second paragraph.  Try something like this:

“Despite budget cuts, UA has been able to retain most of their faculty and programs said a spokewoman today.”

I didn’t mention the president’s salary in the lede I just wrote because reading the piece, it’s not really the focus.  If you want to go the other way though; assuming the piece is angled more towards the president’s salary, I’d go with:

“The president’s salary — like many programs at UA — has remained static this year, in spite of significant budget cuts.”

These are just examples: it could also be something much better.

Aaaanyway:  is there something in Alabama and Ohio that make you guys terrified of commoners?  I was born in Akron, my memories are that everyone is very neighborly if you don’t shit talk the Browns.  Connecticut’s supposed to be the uptight bullshit-elitism state.  Come ON.  Bring back the conventional stereotypes, duders.  You’re going to sit there and tell me there is no facutly member willing to comment on his job security or lack thereof?  No student group happy to receive the quota of paintballs they request?  No student group unhappy that no one gave them money to record their shitty a capella CD ignorant to the fact that no one does or ever will like a capella?  (I’m looking at you Conn-Men.  Every time I go home, my parents ask me if you’ve disbanded yet.  That’s how unimpressed they were when they saw you on parents weekend.  It was like, four years ago and they still actively wish for your demise.)

The body is fine except for two facts:  You rely on quotes a little more than I like, and you don’t have any figures to back up what the spokewoman said.  These kind of numbers — which should be easy to find — can make the story much more effective.  Especially if they contradict her.

Thoughts

I’m going to stop this at two, ‘cuz it’s running long but before I go I’d like to echo my sentiments regarding commoners.  It’s our job to give a voice to the voiceless, gang.  We hear nothing but from authority figures, and they’re usually full of shit.  If your newspaper isn’t populist, you’re doing something wrong.

Secondly, the only reason I went out looking for stories about this topic is that it seems ripe for commentary.  News stories, that’s a given.  But in order to really give the news story impact about what it philosophically implies about the university’s spending habits; you need someone to be laying it out for people.  There should always be a synergy between the news and opinion departments, I feel.  At the end of the day we’re trying to inspire the populace to act on what we tell them after all.  And while it’s just and right to keep our opinions out of the basic information, sometimes you need to lay out an argument to get the fires stirring.  Maybe this was a bad example — I’m learning people don’t care much for what I care about — but I hope the point is taken that facts and opinion working together can accomplish marvels.

If people start reading newspapers, anyway.

Put it this way, if you forcibly changed your perspective, and tried to forget something you learned in elementary school.  You had to admit he had a point.

Consider this, and the following cartoon, as we approach the point:

Now consider the following comments I discovered in my researching the UC Berkeley beatings for the last connparison:

“And who’s going to look into the actions of the students who initiated this crime?”

“I hope they are investigating why the cops were so gentle. Maybe they should send over some Iranian Revolutionary Guards to teach crowd control.”

No, thank YOU urban dictionary.

“Why do any tax dollars go to supporting education that tears down the principles of America’s founding? Get rid of all the commie professers and tuition would be a lot cheaper.”

“students – just because the police didn’t have hempbased riot gear nor did they offer you free-range, macrobiotic, pygmy distilled water…..that isn’t ‘brutality’”

“What’s this? . . . “they” think its “their university?” Since when did these left wingers start paying taxes to State of CA? So their tuition is going up. U can blame that on the Dems in the State Legislature who dont seem to know when to stop spending and have dug this monumental “budget deficiet” of a hole. So they’re majoring in Middle East Studies and Political Science. Just what this country needs . . . another batch of non-profit/profit making community organizers Let’s hear it for ACORN 201″

They’re not ALL like this.  But there are ENOUGH like this.  More than I posted.  I try to be a man of the people, but I cannot care about any of these.  There were really stupid liberal comments too, but they tended to be long-winded and pointless rather than succinct and insane and generally quotable like the right.

Comments on the internet?  There’s no conversation.  Ideas are formed and distributed in a vacuum, and there is no temperance of ideals, or emotional cues with which to better express the nuances of communication.

This is not the case with a news article, because a news article has no argument to make.  Though this may be the case with an opinion article…but then I’ve never said many of those were particularly good either.

You really want to read what a tool like this thinks about the cops?

Audience participation.  Jesus.  They’ve nothing to add to an objective report, and they’re just another voice in the wind in a subjective one.  We all freak out of the accessibility the internet offers but forget that your average citizen has nothing to say.

I think it’s flatly inarguable that the accessibility the internet offers is the biggest boon for a journalist.  But, it’s the flawed communication standards it employs that makes it’s expressionism weak.

It’s ain’t a perfect world — mass expression isn’t as beautiful as it should be.  I’m not going to stand in the way of it, obviously, but let’s not kid ourselves when we talk about the fuckin’ leaps and bounds the internet is providing us. And every time we talk about feedback and participation, let’s not forget the negatives of that as well.

But I’ll think of the positives as well…hmm…well, If we consider twitter as an example of accessibility and internet expression, then we could also say that its finest triumph was in the Iranian election.  Two things to that effect:

1)  Iran has no free press like America has a free press.

2)  That didn’t really turn out very well for the tweeters.

Elitism is not a great basis for the founding of a society, but I think you have to admit that at least it has its place when we recast it in terms of meritocracy and review.

I’ll leave you with one more quote; one I’ve always felt summed up the problem with the internet.

“I’m just trying to rid the world of all these fevered egos that are tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.”  –Bill Hicks, on hunting and killing Billy Ray Cyrus on live television.

The police were pretty obviously out of line in California last week.  Lets compare journalism.  That’s clearly the most pertinent thing to talk about:

The Daily Californian vs The San Francisco Chronicle

(Alt link for The Daily Californian)

The Issue: The protest ends

The Nutshell: … the protest ended last week.

I want to first of all point out the disparate ledes here, the Chronicle writes:

“Forty protesters who barricaded themselves inside Wheeler Hall for 11 hours Friday didn’t win back the 38 custodial jobs they demanded, nor did they persuade the UC regents to rescind their decision to increase tuition by 32 percent next fall.”

The Californian writes:

“The more than 12-hour occupation of UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall by a group of 40 protesters ended with their release at about 7:30 p.m. Friday.”

They have way nicer racks than we do, though. Shit.

What an interesting tonal shift.  What works better?  The Daily Californian is more workmanlike, it focuses solely on the “what happened” which is that the protest is over.  But the Chronicle’s take on “what happened” is that the protestors failed.  How pertinent is that to the barest bone news that Wheeler Hall is open again?  And how critical is that extra hour in the Californian’s title?

Consider the nut graphs while you think.  The Chronicle:

“But their daylong protest spoke directly to the mood of students, faculty and university workers, who demonstrated their frustration with ever-increasing fees and ever-decreasing jobs.”

The Californian:

“As hundreds of other demonstrators cheered, the building occupants were ultimately allowed to exit the building without handcuffs after occupying a room on the second floor of the campus building beginning sometime before 6:30 a.m. Friday. There were an estimated 1,000 people in the crowd throughout the day.”

Some more detail in the californian’s, and both stories completely reliable, but look at the tone.  Cheering demonstrators?  Unshackled protests that do not reflect the arrests made?  Noting how many people were cheering/there?  Tell me that’s not bias.

And this is something I haven’t really addressed.  Student papers have lots of good contacts — it’s a real strength of theirs — but then they are students at the end of the day.  They’re going to sympathize with and make students look good.

To the credit of Jamie Applegate, Mihir Zaveri, George Ashworth, Angelica Dongallo, Tomer Ovadia, Javier Panzar, and Zach E.J. Williams — who must have had a huge fight over who got to hold the pen — the piece balances itself late in the game with quotes denigrating the protestors, but you have to wonder how many people get there, given how long the average person’s attention span is for an article.

I think that the big difference between the pieces is that the Chronicle is much more interested in the implications of the protest — but more negligible in representing the police action.  In that, we’ve essentially got two major issues in one story.

But lets at least recognize that both papers utilize a consistent, well organized style and appropriate, reliable sources.  The pieces both technically impress me, which is everyone’s goal OBVIOUSLY.

VERDICT:

San Francisco Chronicle.

I really like both the pieces, and I really hate that the brutality wasn’t more stressed in the SF’s piece, but I feel like the information they focus on is more useful to me in the sense of how things went down and what exactly the next step in the story is going to be.

I didn’t mention this earlier and I should have: It’s really cool that the californian embeded videos next to their article.  But videos and text aren’t interchangeable.  Though, damn but it changes your perspective on the story.

First let me say that Twitter and CNN are regular pimples on the ass that is my life, and that the twitter realCNNchyrons pops both of them instantaneously.  I have no idea why the writer’s following is so low, but I badly want to change that.

Reading “HOW DO YOU LOSE AN EMBRYO?” devoid of context doesn’t just make me laugh…it also…makes me hope.

I don’t know anyone who isn’t following FakeAPStylebook, but it’s also a goldmine.

Although the joke ‘Avoid use of the word “indian.” Refer instead to the pet cemetary at the “Native American burial ground.”‘ has a fundamental flaw in it.  Cool people know what I’m talking about.  Cool people?  Feel free to smugly dismiss the squares with me.

*PSSSSSSSSSSH* SQUAAAAAAARES!

There was a rumination on how student papers and locals can team up, justice league style

A Connparison to apologize for calling the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin a vomit-stain

And a look at twitter in non-twitter formats that winds up being more sarcasm and slander than an actual point.

BAM–on the house.

And let me clarify briefly: saying “local” I do mean small-town papers.  It’s uncertain in my mind if the same problems and benefits might apply to larger city papers, but I think the two kinds of publications actually have similar problems and coverage, and some sort of agreement could be mutually beneficial.

Reading over the newspapers I compared in my last post, the rural Whitman Pioneer and Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, I didn’t see a lot of overlap in coverage.  The stories I finally set upon to cover regarded swine flue preparedness, but I was ill-at-ease because the Pioneer focused on the Whitman health center with an angle towards the people already infected, and the UB focused on the Public Health Department’s reaction.  And they felt a little bit more like companion pieces — or even two halves of one story.

So it got me thinking; could we get some of these papers co-operating in an Associated Press-style bureau?  Think about the problem with smaller locals; I would say that their biggest flaw is that they are understaffed.  I can’t speak to the U-B, but I think that my hometown weekly has something like eight people working at it.  It’s not unusual to see every front page story have the same byline.

Locals could use student reporters to fill in some gaps in coverage.  The paper gets more stories, and the students get bylines.  Ideally, they’d also get paychecks, but perhaps at a reduced rate, or as a kind of internship.  There would have to be some system to make sure the students aren’t being exploited, but there’s no denying the fact that extra clips (and experience) is going to look good on a resume.

Similarly, it would give student papers a chance to cover things outside campus.  These sorts of generalizations don’t apply across the board, but I think it’s fair to say most college publications focus overwhelmingly on the school and not the little town outside of it.  There’s also a distinct advantage in having some professional oversight from a copyediting perspective.  Though that depends heavily on the quality of each respective paper, and the involvement of the student advisor — if one exists at all.

I’m being purposely vague on the nature of such a collaboration because I think every agreement between any of these organizations is going to have to be very carefully tailored to the situation.  But I’m envisioning something between an agreement to cross-publish certain prominent stories, and a full-on merger.

(The latter may actually be possible, but I think requires too delicate of a balance of power between students and pros to be that fruitful.  A student paper’s independence is an important lesson in its writer’s journalistic development, and there would be too great a possibility that the professionals could bully/exploit their junior partners in some way.  Plus, the student paper’s affiliation with it’s university may bring up some sort of legal issues, especially if they get money from the college).

Most importantly, it might be a way to revitalize lagging advertisers.  This could be — again, gotta be vague — something like a simple referral system or in the extreme as a full on partnership where ads run in both publications and the revenue is split via a ratio that reflects each publication’s respective circulation.  Advertisers will see that as having a few extra thousand people seeing their ads, and they might buy ads when they wouldn’t have before if they were concerned about the amount of people actually reading their ads.

On the other hand, it means that advertisers who might buy two ads — one in each paper — will only buy one, the result being halving the revenue.  Then again, if the papers were fully merged at that point, the cost that that might save could potentially be worth the decrease in revenue to which I just alluded.  But we’ve managed to wander in the miasma of speculation, from which I will now extract us by means of a non-committal, inconclusive segue:

Any kind of financial agreement is ultimately going to depend on the financial situation of the region, but if at the very least there will be some benefit in a combined team of sales representatives.

Because of the sensitivity of the information, I’d rather not comment on the specifics of the relationship between The Daily Campus and The Chronicle, our publisher and local newspaper, but I will say that it has always been both positive and fruitful, and I see no reason why any other student and local paper might have a different dynamic than that.

These are desperate times and there’s a power in numbers.  Why not start slow and see what develops?

Which I am.

The Whitman Pioneer vs The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin

The Issue:  Swine Flu.

Nutshell:  Everyone is going to die.

The Whitman Pioneer: 850

The lede here is functional…I’d say that’s exactly what the story was about.  But it’s also vague.  That students have the flu is pretty much assumed.  If you don’t want to go with a number, you can at least say “unusually high amounts.”  The biggest fault is that it doesn’t really address the angle of the hospital’s flu supply.  You can probably tack “as hospitals wait patiently for more vaccines” onto that.

This is the #10 image that comes up when you google image search "swine flu." You're welcome.

The rest of it is good from a technical perspective.  Organization, focus, etc.  I’m happy with all that, kudos to Leane Grin (or…is it leanegrin?  Like Madonna or Sting?)  But there’s a bit in the content that niggles at me.

The sense I get, by the time I finish the story, is that everyone is going to be okay.  But when I review the facts in my head, it sounds like everyone is fucked.  Consider the following statement:

“‘The [H1N1] vaccine is not available in the quantities we would need for the entire community,’ said Susann Bussham from the health department.”

And compare it to this statement, which ends the piece:

“Ness is confident students will receive the care they require.  ’The Health Center is prepared. The campus is prepared,’ she said.”

Because having students bring each other soup doesn’t read as readiness to me.  And not having the vaccine doesn’t sound like preparedness to me.  It sounds like they aren’t at all ready for H1N1 to strike because they have no vaccines.  One might say that they are the opposite of prepared.

So which is it?  Facts are meaningless if the tableau they present do not represent the situation fairly.  While that often means that a piece does not have a conclusion, in this case the two outcomes (preparedness vs unpreparedness) are mutually exclusive and easy to determine.  In fighting for balance, the work is defanged.  Too bad.

The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin: 252

“As the moment?”  Never mind the typo, the lede is what I was looking for in the Pioneer.

Actually I have little to complain about here.  It’s a painstaking account of the vaccine situation in Walla Walla.  The only unturned stone I can think of right now is how many people currently have the flu.  Still very much kudos to Sheila Hagar.

Thing is…it’s a little dull.  And I’m aware that this is kind of a petty thing to complain about, but narrative is a facet of writing no matter how dry you’re trying to be, and this reads much more like a public service annoucement than a story.  And there is a reason we call them stories.

I think that, if you don’t want to cheese anything up, then the best thing to do is add trivia.  I mean like, how it compares to the flu situation last year, or maybe a reaction to the department’s handling of the situation.  The latter gives an emotional hook, and the former creates a structure that implies some sort of motion or relative comparison with which to make judgement.  Without these things, I’m not sure the draw is there.

But that is nitpicking.

The Winner:  The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin

This is a very close match.  And I have to stress that the structure and emotional weight that the Pioneer piece conveys makes it a much, much more enjoyable read.  But at the end of the day, aesthetics have to take a backseat to facts, and the UB uses a much nicer economy to convey similar facts in a clearer way than the Pioneer does.

And you know this is the kind of thing where the angle of the Pioneer almost puts it in a different class of story than that of the UB.  I’m starting to feel a little bad to compare the two actually.  But I brought it down to weighing their relative faults, and “could be more entertaining” is the kind of complaint that birthed Fox News.  Gotta give it to the locals this time.

Final Thoughts:

Actually, my final thoughts on this matter birthed a whole second blog post.  So, read that instead.  I guess If we’re looking to close this up I can tell you an anecdote.

‘Cuz when I used the phrase “if you don’t want to cheese anything up” it reminded me of the time my French teacher (a native) asked me to define the term “cheese” when used in that context.  I, and every one of my peers, was utterly unable to do so.  Perhaps if we’d had a dictionary.  I think the best we got was “unrealistically sentimental” but even that didn’t translate to french, since those people have no real sense of limit.

Then again, this is the only picture of their first lady that you can find on the internet where she's wearing clothes. So you know, that lack of limitations has its upsides too.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Hedley

IS IT BECAUSE YOU INTERVIEWED A CARTOON, HOWARD KURTZ????? IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE IMPLYING HOWARD

KURTZ??? IS THAT WHY HE MIGHT HAVE A CARTOONISH DEMEANOR?????

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

oh Howard Kurtz…why hasn’t Jon Stewart snapped you up yet?  He’s just playing hardball Howard Kurtz, don’t worry.  Your star is rising.

Why does something like this come across as playful in text on ABC, but forced, awkward and generally grating live?

I want to remind everyone that I’m going to fail this class if I don’t maintain a twitter.

I love Doonesbury, but this isn’t much more than free advertising, which makes my skin crawl.  Still, if there’s one thing you can count on journalists reporting on, it’s something tangentially related to journalism.

But what’s interesting is that something that is fairly innocuous as a little sidenote on ABC’s site, really is so bad that it produces a physical reaction on CNN.

Part of the problem is that when you give Roland Hedley a real life voice, it counteracts the voice that a reader has already established in his own head, and that creates a kind of cognitive dissonance.  I suppose the same dissonance might apply to putting twitter on the TV; you’re asking us to accept a format change fundamentally against the format you’re trying to highlight.

Or maybe it’s just that TELEVISION seems so much more authoritative than the lowly internet that when you put tweets on it, it seems to undermine that gravitas.

Jake Tapper, reminding us how shitty the news was before it had a visual element.

It helps a lot that Jake Tapper kind of jokes along like he knows Hedley, and adds to the fantasy with lines about his “unusual non-work related battery operated device” (I laughed) while Howard Kurtz tries to like, call Roland Hedley out on his stance in advertising.  What weirds me out is that neither of them act like the book isn’t a straight up satire of the kind of twittering they both do.

You know what, forget formatting — Trudeau is mocking them TO THEIR FACES, and their reaction is to shrug and say “heh-heh, yeah twittering is pretty stupid?”   I know Trudeau’s satire is loving, but it’s kidding on the square and they’ve pretty much owned up to the criticism.  That’s weird to me.

You see what I’m saying?  They’re responding to jokes about narcissistic, self-indulgent tweets with narcissistic, self-indulgent tweets/on-air filler.  Bizarre.

It’s shit like this why people hate us, gang.

Hello Giant Andy Warhol Howard Kurtz, thanks for stopping by. Yes, I think I did write "Narcissistic" just now. That must be my mistake Giant Andy Warhol Howard Kurtz, I have no idea what gave me an idea so ludicrous.

[I do have a friend at Whitman College, but he is a finance major, not a newspaperman]

While I was reading between the papers, I realized quickly that literature is not the real issue here.  So I propose a deviation from form, compliments of a judicious use of my “Grab” tool, which is rising in the ranks of my favorite programs:

The Whitman Pioneer Vs The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin

Issue: The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin has one of the ugliest f***ing websites I’ve ever seen in my life.

Nutshell: I’m not even going to pretend like there’s a competition here.

The Whitman Pioneer:

I don’t know who hosts The Pioneer’s site, but it’s actually a pretty good example of the web design template I’m seeing a lot of college websites use.  That sort of Grab photo scroller and small preview boxes surrounding it layout has become justly popular.

This is a thing that makes me happy.

Note a few things:  The text is big and easy to read, the colors are stark and soft on the eyes, there are useful tools at the top of the page, and the art is inviting without being distracting.  Less is more, and I think this shows that really nicely.  And look how happy that Kappa Kappa Gamma looks.  I wanna party with that guy.

The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin:

It’s purely in the interest of entertainment and shock value that in the following paragraph I’m going to compare the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin’s website to a vomit-stain, but look at this and tell me that the analogy isn’t a little bit reasonable.

I'm artistically gifted and talented, and this is on my "things to cry about" list.

Yeah, the internet was already kind of a cesspool, but the U-B manages to stand out as a particularly bad vomit-stain.  Which is an accomplishment of sorts.  Basically, it’s way too busy.  You have so many thing competing for my attention that I don’t see anything, get scared and angry, and stop paying attention.  Furthermore, brown was the worst color possible to pick for a background.

And I don’t know why the AP ticker is there, I think it’s an unnecessary distraction.  From a business perspective you should highlight your strengths, which is local coverage as you can’t compete with the AP as a hub of global news.

Before we go anywhere with comparing these sites there is a blatant difference between them that is absolutely necessary to point out. And this makes it almost unfair to compare them.  The Pioneer has no ads, the U-B is inundated with them.  I think most readers prefer to not see ads, but if you don’t have ANY ads, you’re essentially throwing away free money.  And I like the ad layout on the UB page.  Look:

I considered using grayscale, but I just watched "For A Few Dollars More" and I was like "No, Clint would want sepia."

There are four ads when you open the page and they’re all pushed to the side and in a border.  The ads are noticeable — which is good for the advertisers — but they’re also separated from the news content — which is good for the site.  It’s a really winning layout where ads are concerned.  It’s just that once you throw in all the conflicting news layout, it just becomes jarbled.  But I want to make it clear: Their ad placement seems fine, and if you take something away from this don’t let it be “Ads ruin a webpage.”

I think that I demonstrated the difference well earlier — the simple, eye-catching design of the pioneer is a lot better than the cluttered, and non-dominant design of the UB, but there are two things I especially want to highlight and one is the grab photo:

Now, the point I want to make here is that news is going to be a news organization’s number one priority, and whne a person logs onto your site, what they’re looking for is the most current, most pertinent information you can offer them.  I’ll entertain the notion that this pageant isn’t the biggest news in Whitman, but I don’t know the college, maybe it’s more famous than you might think.

For the record, this image also scrolls to advertise similar features

What’s definitely not pertinent is this family forum.  Also in the grab box are a slideshow of Walla Walla images and a video of some kind of wine tasting/feast.  Those are probably good features, and maybe even popular, but as part of a responsibility to inform, they’re sorely lacking.  The worst part is that they overshadow the leading news piece, which is reporting the results of a local election.  In my mind, that’s of vastly more import and interest.  This breaks aesthetics into the sense of ethics.  When your paper prefers a family forum to a state matter thta impacts lives, you’re treading into territory where news becomes entertainment, and that’s a dangerous place to be.

The other thing I want to point out is the search bar.  Because that’s integral to the functionality of the site.  If I come looking for something, and I don’t find it on the homepage, then I’m probably going to use the in-site bar rather than google for starters, just sot narrow the search parameters.  Look at the Pioneer again.  It’s right in the top corner for all to see.

Now look at the UB.  Can you find it?  It’s blink and you miss it on the left hand side maybe half-way down the page.  That’s just unreasonably hard to find.

I won’t bog down the post with further analysis, but simplicity is always going to be the best choice aesthetically.

Final Thoughts

The thing I want to ask is: “why does this matter at all?”  The Union-Bulletin happens to have some pretty good writing in it.  And their actual coverage is wide enough for a local.  And you know what; it probably shouldn’t matter.  People should ideally take the news at its worth without any sparkles or clever industrial psychology to trick them into reading the right stuff.  But life isn’t structured that way and if you’re honestly trying to do people a service then you need to take into account how people actually process information.

A weird part of news has always been trying to guess what articles are going to interest people, and what stories are going to push citizens towards action, and this falls in the same vein as those guessing games.  And this is such a fundamental acknowledgement of how people read and subconsciously react to stimuli in such a basic way that it hardly even counts as manipulation.

We owe it to our audiences to make information easy to understand and access, lest we fall into a weird elitist trap.  If you can reach that point without falling into the trap of pandering, then it’s going to pay off significantly.  Let’s be honest: we need every advantage we can get right now.

Monohan’s on Fox 61 today.  I’ve been on TV twice more since my last post.  We’re riding this bloody wave all the way to the end.  Anyway: Boosh:

The Daily Illini vs The New York Times

Issue:  Resignation of Richard Herman, Chancellor at University of Illinois

Nutshell:  Herman quits his job in response to allegations that he had been given special treatment to applicants with “connections”

Daily Illini:

I used 'Grab' to get an image of this banner, which can't normally be copied. QUIVER BEFORE ME 'TECHNOLOGY' YOU HAVE MET YOUR MATCH IN THE GUISE OF A GINGER MADMAN.

Who, What, Where, When, Why: these are the questions a lede should answer.  I do not see a why in the lede, nor in the nut graph.  ”"Given what happened at the senate at the beginning of the semester, I knew this was coming at some point,” says a man named Overbye, but they never say what happened at the senate.  That’s like saying “knock knock” to someone, and when they respond “who’s there” you reply “Jeff” and walk away.  That someone expects a joke, and I expect an explanation.

He is so sad that they say he cheated. So sad.

It’s fair, on a college campus to assume that news like the alleged scandal might get around fast, and be on the forefront of student consciousness but as I have just demonstrated, not everyone reading your paper is going to be on a college campus.  I got here by reading the New York Times and looking for new information about the resignation.  I have to look for another Daily Illini article for what I wanted, and the least they could do is mention what article they outline the scandal if not to write the dozen words it would take to say “may be connected to his part in an admissions scandal from earlier this year.”

On the plus side, they have lots and lots of sources.  They put a lot of effort into getting quotes, and the man’s history and future plans are well researched and chronicled.

The New York Times:

I required no trickery to obtain this; NYT got our backs, guys.

This is a great story.  I mean, for a national paper, you can’t ask for too many inches about the story, but that’s the strength:  It has awesome economy of story-telling.  I tend to prefer a newspaper because you can spend longer on a topic than in TV, but that doesn’t mean it’s always effective to.  We’ve got concise happenings, context and relevant quotes that add something useful.  Not sure what else to say.

Deliberation:

Well, let’s compare strengths:  the Illini has a very strong sense of Herman’s impact on the staff and university.  And the New York Times has a much better sense of “what happened.”  This is what I’m thinking when I say:

Verdict:

New York Times

Let’s say something fair: The Grey Lady is the best newspaper out there.  This was not the most equitable fight.  But you subconciously compare evverything you consume to the best thing you know of, so maybe it is fair.

All the quotes in the world, all the backstory in the world, are all secondary to our point: What exactly happened.  the Illini answers that — the chancellor resigned — but it’s not a full answer.  Without a why, or an admission that you don’t know why, you’ve only told half of a story.  This piece is a punchline — I feel like the setup is hidden from me.

And this raises the question of how to effectively use quotes.  I tell my kids; make sure the quotes don’t drive the story; the story should drive the story.  Here, I get the sense that they had a bunch of quotes about how nice Herman was, and then copied them unquestioningly.

Final thoughts:

Now, I skipped over the fact that this story is just one of many features about Herman’s resignation: I chose it because it seemed most directly related to the news.  Looking for pictures, I found this story, which is actually the piece I wanted to read.  Bizarrely, this is a feature about Herman leaving, that has context and quotes that support the story.

Well…I’d already written the blog post.  Thing is; if I hadn’t been looking for picture I would never have konwn there was a much better news story on the same site, which a less hard news headline.  I think the best thing we can take away from this is that it’s important to keep a sense of economy.  Two stories on the same subject don’t always have to be two stories because you can’t trust that the audience is going to read the entire paper.  People read these things incredibly selectively, especially online.  It’s an important thing to remember your audience when making your budget.

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