I was browsing through the Daily Vidette today, which is the student newspaper for Illinois State University, and realized why I stopped reading it on a regular basis, at least as a source of legitimate information. In the past, I was a little thrown off by Associated Press articles that were simply cut off 3/4 of the way through. This seemingly happened so that room could be made for advertisements of drinking establishments. This type of thing makes the publication seem not so much a newspaper funded by ads, but an adpaper that fills empty space with news snippets.
And then every once in a while, an amusing typo would find itself onto the pages. A major headline on the front page a while back, for example, referred to "opinoins" of students. Today, I found three typoed headlines in the first six pages! (If you're curious, they referred to the university "libaray," an issue concerning "identy" theft, and something about President Bush's "cheif" of staff.) What kind of editorial staff lets these kinds of things just slip by? How can they expect anyone to take them seriously when they truncate articles in meaningless ways, misspell headlines, and of course hire columnists who seem to summon most of their insight from beer commercials and MTV?
Student papers tend to take a lot of abuse from critics, but the Vidette I imagine is playng in a whole different ballpark. In a way, the paper represents the university's student body, and if its staff is going to be sloppy and misguided in the ways that it presents news and opinion, then really, what good is it?
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