February 2009 Archives

I'm lazy, so I woke up at ten on Sunday morning. I had received two text messages from the campus security alert system, about twenty minutes apart. One ordered all students to stay in their buildings, and the other said that campus was now safe. They had been sent at around eight AM, rather late in the game, as it turned out, and no one in my suite seemed to know what had happened. My mind instantly went to a shooting. Every few months, it seems, there's an announcement of a fatal shooting on a college or high school campus somewhere in America. Seton Hill, I figured, was next.

Facebook was full of confused status messages, but I finally got an instant message from a friend who claimed to know what had happened.

Do you really, or are you just being silly? I asked. She told me that her roommate's best friend had been a few houses away from the incident, and explained to me what we all now know. The police had been forced to shoot a young man after attempting to talk him down for hours. The information was later confirmed by my RA, Seton Hill's press release, and the Tribune review.

I looked at Joe Briggs' facebook page (which has since been closed to non-friends). By Sunday afternoon, it was brimming with heartfelt comments from an array of Seton Hill students, and even one of the coaches. Someone with that many people speaking up for him obviously isn't a deranged killer. I did have mixed feelings about the profile picture, which showed Briggs holding a what seemed to be a hunting rifle. Normally, I wouldn't have given the image a second thought. It just seemed sickeningly ironic.

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I'm not going to lie. I can't examine three award-winning journalistic projects and then look at the website for our student paper, the Setonian, and not say it pales in comparison--literally. The primary colors here are shades of grey with a touch of teal. It's boring. It looks like something designed for old people.

I think it would be really easy to brighten up the Setonian pages. Using the school colors, red and gold, would probably work well if done tastefully. The designer would have to be careful to not completely overwhelm the readers with color, because the primary concern should still be readability, but there's no reason why we have to be so dull. Or, we could take things in a totally different direction. For example, note how the New York Times makes a black and blue layout work. The key component, I think, is the blue hyperlinks. The bright color, as opposed to our drab teal, pops out on the screen.

Another thing I took issue with regarding the Setonian Online includes the text, which all seems to be a few centimeters over to the left. It's just odd, and it can probably be fixed by someone who knows CSS. In the same way, there are huge gaps between story headlines and the text itself. The grey boxes at the bottom of the page that any "related links" appear in are drab, too. The header is a splotchy, almost unrecognizable picture of the side of what I assume is one of our buildings that fades into a bar of solid grey. I see nothing here that suggests this website is a newspaper.

But do you know what the worst part of our layout is?

It doesn't look too much different from this.

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I understand perfectly what sorts of stories belong in newspapers and what sorts of stories belong on your personal livejournal. But I got to thinking about how that line sort of blurs when you deal with smaller, local papers. I know back home, we've got this tiny little paper that sure enough puts out stories on the same importance level as ladies who bake pies. I'm not saying it's a good paper, but it still manages to stay in business. So that must mean there are people out there who read all those little mundane stories as a matter of civic pride (they're probably not my target audience, though).

I've never met anyone who I think would want to write such boring things, so I'm going to assume that we all hope to do better if/when we become journalists. I'm a creative writing major, but I'm pretty certain that I have the skills to be a journalist if I needed to. Will it count against me if I don't have a degree in it?

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I have written for a newspaper in the past, but the things I wrote were pretty much opinion pieces. (I don't think they trusted me with real news). I've always thought of journalism as boring, to be perfectly honest, though I guess it depends on who you're writing for. Writing for The New Yorker is probably a lot more fun than covering the homecoming game in some rural town that no one's ever heard of, but I haven't done either of those things so I can only assume.

But to be perfectly honest, reading the English Essay vs. News Story guide doesn't make journalism look as bad as I thought it would be. Just because you're not allowed to talk about yourself doesn't mean it has to read like some dry instruction manual. Anything worth putting in a newspaper would probably be in there because it had some kind of emotional impact on someone, right? So I guess our job would be to make all those readers out there feel it, too.

If that's possible.

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