ODE Watch: Shilling for Clothes Edition
In case you haven’t heard of American Apparel, today’s Emerald was intended for you. “News” Reporter Eva Sylwester breaks down just why American Apparel - which recently moved into the famed retail space previously occupied by Buster’s - is the bestest company EVER in a fawning front-page piece. The news editors back the de facto advertisement by devoting more inches to it than any other article, including stories about a drug dealer, a graduate student caught possessing child pornography, and the serious leakage problems a number of campus buildings have been experiencing. Newly-promoted News Editor Steve Neuman neglects to mention in a Newsmeeting blog post why the story was given so much space, but maybe this would be a good time to try out the ODE’s barren Ask the Editors feature.
January 9th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
Buster’s: Failed
Philly Steak Place: Failed
Buffalo Wings Place: Failed
Pizza Thingamaggier: Failed
Everything In That Space Since Face The Music Moved: Failed.
I’m noticing a pattern.
January 10th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
Gee, what a surprise. Winter term begins; the Emerald manages to put out an issue with original content and the Commentator continues to put off producing actual issues to nit-pick at stuff they really don’t understand. What a damn surprise.
Let’s analyze story placement for Monday’s issue, shall we? Now keep in mind I don’t have a copy in front of me, but thanks to collegefrontpage.com I’m viewing a PDF of the front page. I’m not sure how many pages this issue was or how much wire there was, but judging from the front page I’m guessing there were four Emerald stories ready for publication that day. The art for those stories wasn’t exactly the most exciting stuff in the world – two mugs shots, a photo of the outside of a new business and a photo of the water damaged floors in the EMU.
Sooooo, Ian, where would you place those stories? The two arrests and the water damage are probably your biggest stories, with water damage outdoing the arrests. The new business is definitely not as important as the arrests, so Joe Critic would assume those Ol’ Dirty editors screwed up and made a bigger deal out of the new business because it got more inches on the front page than anything else. But there’s no way you can switch the placement of the business story with any of the other three. Water damage has alright art and is important, thus deserves the partial banner spot. The arrests are important but only have mug shots, so the lead column is home for them. You can’t exactly run one of the arrest stories where the business story is because you’d have to make a mug shot HUGE, and it’s not right to make one mug shot bigger than the other. They should be the same size.
So basically the only way to get around printing so many inches of the business story on the front is to run the photo bigger, and that would detract from the photo of the damaged floors being the lead art.
Hope this answers your questions, Ian. Sometimes designing a newspaper is trickier than it seems! Btw, editors decide what should go where, but designers really have control over how much of the story is where and how big the pictures are, though editors have veto power. Talk to Tyler about this stuff, he’s been in the J-school long enough – he should be able to recite this shit in his sleep.
Also, when the hell is your next issue coming out?!
As you may be able to tell, I have more down time at this job than at the last.
January 10th, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Meghann-
Yay a response!
Please excuse the continued Armchair Designing/Monday Morning Editing, but why isn’t it right to make one mug shot bigger than the other? The alleged possession of child pornography is a bigger, more disturbing story than the alleged dealing of pot. Few people will care what the alleged dealer looks like but many people should care who the alleged possessor of child pornography is. I must be missing out on some important journalistic credo here, so please fill me in.
As far as the American Apparel piece is concerned, I’m unsurprised that you neglected to defend its content. The piece isn’t written poorly and Sylwester contacts a number of sources, but there just doesn’t appear to be any purpose to it other than to pick out a particular business and promote its products ($15 t-shirts,) business practices (”progressive benefits - low cost health care, free English classes, massages and paid days off,”) and complementary stores (West Moon.) Can you recall a similar story for another non-University retail store? Compare this piece to a May. 2nd story by Sylwester that actually talked about the 13th street business environment as a whole. Hell, the two Jan. 9th In Brief pieces by her were far more newsworthy and relevant to campus as a whole. And with the webcam piece you can play up the angle that it will actually have a harmful effect on enrollment.
Also, you make good points about the difficulty in laying pieces out. Isn’t that the sort of thing that would be perfect for the Emerald blog? The six paragraphs you wrote here contain more content than the sum of the past three months of Emerald blogging - pictures excluded. Isn’t the point of the blog to placate the lowly plebe that is “Joe Critic”?
I’m still a bit pissed that you didn’t accept my offer to be in charge of OC distribution and advertising (we would have given you a fancy title and everything! living on the street isn’t that bad!) but I hope that your current job at least pays the bills.
Re: next issue. Soon. Any further elaboration would require far too many exclamation points.
January 10th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
Emerald staffers are such a defensive race.
January 11th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Though it wouldn’t have been relevant to the story (since we are focusing on just a store opening and not the founder of the company) do a search on “Dov Charney”+harrassment and it’s a pretty interesting read. The dude loves the ladies.
January 11th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
Wow…get a load of the mug on that guy. I’m pretty sure I saw him pleasuring his scraggly self in the metro tunnels last weekend.
January 11th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
why y’all gotta hate? shiiit.
megs, i miss your feistiness. and while i can appreciate ian’s argument for differing mug relevance, printing a large mug shot just seems odd. seeing that gentleman in a 1 x 1.5″ size was enough. his head is reminiscent of a pumpkin, and who wants to see that in higher resolution?
January 11th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
I was going to post something about the founder of the company today. Alas, Sho beat me to it.