Reading the News so You Don't Have To: College Journalism Edition

—At The Spectator, there are a lot of late-night deadline conversations about who would cover the story if the entire staff died in some kind of horrible calamity (as a freelancer, the greatest compliment you can receive is being known as the one to whom this responsibility would fall). Well at NIU the staff of the campus paper lost one of their own in the recent shooting.

—There is a student paper in Colorado fighting to stop the administration from brokering a "partnership" with the Gannett-owned local paper. Two reasons this would be a bad decision:
-The powers that be insist that any deal will ensure that it remains a student-run paper. But the move comes after uproar last semester over a four-word editorial in the paper that read, simply, "Taser this ... fuck Bush." Think what you want about the editorial (no way would I personally have printed it if it were up to me), but the timing on the administration's part is suspect.
-Even though college and local papers are not direct competitors, the competition on the beats that overlap still helps. Truly, in my experience working at both papers at once the relationship was often mutually beneficial. It made finding sources easier in both jobs. There were times when I would get permission to reprint our work in both papers — probably an easier proposition than at most papers because all I had to do was pop my head into the editor's office (five feet from my desk) and ask permission (an upside of independent papers). But there were plenty of city and general interest-related issues when I knew I was going up against another paper and that made the writing better. Gannett as I understand it tends to streamline things and share content as much as it can — which is arguably helpful for small papers with few resources in large, spread-out geographical areas like northern Wisconsin, but not so good when it threatens to squelch the competition in a smaller market.

— "You probably don't REMEMBER me, Mr. Woodward ..."

(About the schism between the Washington Post and its online counterpart.)

While I'm in link-happy mode, I forgot to mention in my post on Century 21 that when I was in line for the cashier the man in front of me, buying only a small bag of socks, insisted that he didn't need a bag. The cashier was completely flabbergasted, calling him back after he walked away to make sure he didn't want one and even remarking to me when I stepped up how crazy it was that someone would turn that down. But recently I read an article on how people in Ireland have been taxed 15 cents a plastic bag since 2002, and the move has been so successful that using them has become socially unacceptable (the guy in question looked like he could have been european).
Speaking of plastic bags, check this out. The part about the bags = the story of my life. And read the rest of the site, a lot of it is dead-on.