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February 08, 2005
Editorial
Sometimes it feels like we exist in a concrete bubble.
The walls in our office are, after all, painted concrete bricks. But that isn’t quite it. More to the point, we do our weekly work within these walls. We plan stories, we report, we write, we design and we publish.
Of course, we’re always asking our interview subjects for their thoughts on specific issues, but we never ask them about our product. And we don’t always have the time to ask you, the reader, what you think about our work. And you don’t always readily voice your opinions to us.
This is a pretty typical relationship between newspapers and readers, one not easily rectified. The Star Tribune recently hired a full-time reader representative to field reader feedback, from specific complaints to general concerns, and even the occasional “Way to go!” e-mail.
We don’t exactly have the resources to do the same. Our money’s pretty tight. And, after all, we’re a weekly paper with less than a hundredth of the circulation that the Star Tribune has, so our representative wouldn’t be very busy, anyway.
But we have a solution better suited to everyone’s situation.
We have a Student Media Board (SMB). It’s new this year, and it just held its second meeting last Friday.
The SMB exists in part to maintain an institutional structure that keeps student government from controlling student media (a worrisome model by any measure).
It also exists to help the three media organizations on campus - us, the Fulcrum, and the Liner - stay in better communication and share resources.
But, mostly, it exists to give you the opportunity to speak your mind about the performance of Hamline media organizations. It will make our work more transparent, more easily identifiable. It gives you a chance to stop by our meetings and tell us how you think we’re doing.
We’ll be having meetings once a month, beginning in March. Keep an eye out for the dates. If you can’t make it and you have something to say, you still have a voice. We have six student representatives on the board who will speak for you. Their names are Naomi Doriott, David Brosnahan, Blake Lindevig, Graham Lampa, Lindsay Bacher, and Tim McDonald.
Think of the SMB as turning our concrete bubbles - we’ve seen the Liner/Fulcrum office; it isn’t much better than ours - into glass houses.
Posted by msveum at February 8, 2005 04:13 PM