While The Hatchet is usually a manageable size – 12 to 16 pages – sometimes you have to dig a little to find the news you want your student paper to cover. This was the case with the charity ball that GW’s Class Council, a student group that represents each class to promote unity on campus, that was placed on page 7 of last Monday’s edition. And the same is often true for philanthropy events campus groups put on.
Students often gripe that their events get “bad play” in the paper. They deserve recognition for hard work, and students should know what’s going on in their community. But they must realize that stories that touch on important issues sometimes take precedent. In the case of the ball, other students had brought a national conference about drug use to campus, Ralph Nader spoke to students about the drug war, GW received a $3 million contract and students addressed the war movement in Afghanistan.
By putting the charity ball story on page 7, The Hatchet is not making a statement about the event’s success or importance to students but deciding that there are four other issues on campus that had higher priority.
Our news editors decide how “newsworthy” stories we run are and lay out the paper accordingly. “Newsworthy” is a tricky term because it involves many elements – timeliness, importance and possible ramifications of events, student interest in the subject, quality of reporting and a host of other considerations.
At The Hatchet, often you will find that issues take prominence over events, because students are more likely to take away something when they read about issues. Philanthropy events often get pushed farther back into the paper, and even bumped out of it when space is tight.
Fraternities and sororities at every campus in the country complain about negative coverage in student papers. They wonder why stories about chapters hazing students make the front page and why there rarely is a story about community service.
For our part, we have worked hard to balance Greek coverage. We refuse to ignore serious issues such as hazing and violence that certain GW fraternities traditionally choose to involve themselves in, but we also present the other side of the story. Just this year, you have read front-page stories about Greek Week, how Sigma Alpha Epsilon attempted to improve its campus image and how houses help strengthen brotherhood. This excludes the many stories you will find on inside pages. And when Greek organizations play major roles in events, such as the “Night to Give Back,” we tell you.
Our editorial board, which includes members of fraternities and sororities as well as other student groups, is constantly trying to expand its reach to report on all aspects of campus. While the number of advertisements we get on a certain day generally limits how many stories we can print, we try to give you the most important ones in an order that makes sense.
If it’s happening on campus and it’s important, most likely you’ll read about it in The Hatchet. But sometimes you have to dig.
