Web Exclusives | Feb 20, 2006 Web Wire Editor's Note |
|
|
| Written by Josh Nathan-Kazis | |||||
|
Navel Gazing: The Web Wire in Crisis? It’s a hard week to be a Jewish student journalist. On the one hand, there are currently a huge number of weighty international issues that fall within our purview – the Israeli elections, the Palestinian elections, the New York Times report that Israel and the US are conspiring to force Hamas out of power, the unrest in the Muslim world sparked by the Danish cartoons, the decision by the New York Sun to reprint those cartoons, the Iranian newspaper’s Holocaust cartoon contest, and the jailing of Ariel Sharon’s son, among others. On the other hand, the pros pretty much have these stories covered. An original angle is hard to find when every single newspaper in the world has run three articles and an editorial on the cartoon controversy. So, what to do? Should we be repetitive and unoriginal, in the name of full coverage, or stick to local campus issues and risk irrelevance? As I’ve pondered this question over the past few weeks, I’ve hit upon another that I suppose must be answered first. Namely, what exactly is it that we’re doing here at New Voices? In my two semesters editing the Web Wire, the hard news stories we’ve printed have generally fallen into two basic categories: reports on a special program on a particular campus, and pieces about what students think about national and international issues. While I’ve been very proud of the work that my writers have done, there’s definitely a flaw in the format. In the end, we find that half of the articles are too local, while the other half are too global. The pieces about the individual campuses are only interesting to the students on that particular campus, while the pieces about global issues don’t provide enough insights to be worthwhile to the reader. Not all hard news Web Wire pieces fall into this trap. Megan Brown’s (Northwestern, ’08) “End of an Eruv” is one outstanding exception. However, it has been the prevailing trend. The writers sense this, and almost always prefer to write opinion pieces or personal reflections. This is a problem. Personal essays are all well and good, but they can never have effect that a well-researched, well-written piece of original reporting will have. We need to stop overreaching ourselves, and return to our base. Let’s leave the national issues to the mainstream news sources. A few editorials here and there are fine, but we obviously don’t have the resources to do original reporting on the Middle East, and any attempt to make it look like we do will turn out badly. Back home, the key is to focus on issues, instead of events. Shira Miller’s article about gender issues at a Wesleyan Friday night service is a good example. Such pieces are specific and well-grounded, but hold the interest of people who aren’t friends with the author. So while I don’t regret not assigning any pieces about student opinion on the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, I do want to broaden the scope of the Web Wire and integrate original reporting and universal themes. Next time Jewish/African-American relations at Carnegie Mellon take a turn for the worse, or a UCLA alum starts paying students to report on what left-wing professors have to say about Israel, we’re all over it.
Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.12 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.
|
|||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|