Blogs are an interesting beast. While many of them provide good, biting commentary, some are so horribly off base that it is disturbing. As the editor in chief of the only campus newspaper, it is important to read things that others write that pertain to campus. But I felt it was extremely necessary to respond to a GWBlogspot.com post that is so horribly off base.
Now, I understand how they can make baseless assumptions. We try to be transparent but it’s extremely difficult to make people understand how we do everything we do. I certainly don’t understand how the New York Times does everything it does. I will concentrate on answering some questions from a recent post by “Sarah,” whose ideas and thoughts are so baseless, they require a response.
Sarah tells her readers that The Hatchet missed the story on a girl getting arrested at the Health and Wellness Center because we did not inquire, “whether this has happened before — is HellWell being overrun by people sneaking in? What happens if I leave my Gworld in the lockers downstairs, but go outside to take a phone call and then try to get back inside? Is there a new crackdown on security taking place? Have students complained of a lack of rule enforcement?”
These are certainly questions that could be asked but many people who have the answers are not permitted to answer questions. Essentially there is one person who can speak for the University so answers often take hours, days and more time than we have to turn a story around. We did a thorough job of reporting the story, which included a trip to the Second District police station to retrieve the police report. A trend story on security in HelWell may be well worth it. But we needed to report the news.
Sarah continues to surmise that this may have been a slow news week, which is the reason it is on page 3, which she chides for being ad-heavy. Sarah said the heavy concentration of ads is bad news judgment.
“The appalling lack of news judgment here makes me think the Hatchet cares more about making its advertisers happy than it does telling its readers what’s going on in their world.”
Oh Sarah…how I wish life were this easy. Here is how ads work. On Friday and Tuesday, the business office gives me a sheet that has the amount of pages of advertisements. So if there were no stories in last issue, the ads would have fit on seven pages. Because we care so much about the news and keeping the paper financially viable, we typically strive for a 50/50 ad to news ratio. So we printed 14 pages. We didn’t cave to our advertisers. Ads must be laid out a certain way based on our contracts with advertisers. I wish we could print 28-page issues every week. Unfortunately that’s not feasible. We have a budget, a staff of more than 30 people, travel expenses, rent, utilities and other expenses that require us to be financially responsible. Our first priority is putting out a great product, which I work very hard to do.
