Monday, February 22, 2010

Tragicomedy

The school paper tries really, really hard to drive home the importance of their stories through dedicated reporting and quality writing. While they don't often succeed through those methods, sometimes they accidentally prove their point through the inept and clumsy attempts at reporting that those of us who read the paper have grown to expect and even, sometimes, to love.

Case in point: There was an angry protest rally on campus on Friday. The Governor of Tennessee recently announced a six percent cut in higher education funding, and people are not happy about it. They had speeches, signs, and anger, which I saw when I was walking back from a lunch meeting:

stairs, protest, and hodges library

The school newspaper, known for their hard hitting headlines, gave the rally extensive coverage that included three photos, two of which had captions:

more then 100

"More then 100 students"? Like there were more students, and then 100 came after that? That seems wrong, but surely a newspaper staff that boasts a news editor, three copy editors, and two chief copy editors knows the difference between "then" and "than", right?

The second caption may shed some light on the answer to that question:

Fridays rally

I had no idea that all of the people at the rally were named Friday, but it was good of the Fridays to rally against the budget cuts. God knows that, based on the quality of the student newspaper at the state's flagship institution, higher education needs all the funding it can get. Or, in the case of the second caption, higher eduation.

We can start by spending that money on English teachers.

6 comments:

Todd said...

Did you see "eduation" in the second caption?

Joel said...

No! I was so distracted by the "Fridays".

Joel said...

I edited, and pretended I had seen the eduation all along. :)

Lauren said...

ughhhh. Good ole Rocky Top.

Don't make me show you the Green River Community College paper!

Elizabeth said...

Why do we live in East Tennessee? This is my kind of blog post!

Jeannie said...

This is the saddest thing I have ever seen. I may throw up.