Tag Archives: Editorial

Editorial

50 shades of black

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In reviewing a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly, I noticed that the pictures all look so very perfect. Not a single blemish or fat roll or misplaced hair. Every tooth is straight and white, every eye is shining brightly and all of the skin is glowing. Clearly, Photoshop is used heavily.

While that in itself may pose an ethical dilemma given what we know about the effects of body image on the world’s youth, I was struck by an even deeper concern when I came to an article titled “Shondaland,” which included a large picture of Shonda Rhimes surrounded by Ellen Pompeo, Viola Davis and Kerry Washington.

All four are beautiful women to begin with and this picture was no exception. The racial diversity displayed in the picture would, on the surface, appear to be a testament to how far our society has come with regard to racial integration, but I was struck by how the use of lighting in this picture seemed to lighten the black women, especially Shonda Rhimes, to the point that she almost appeared white. I wondered about that because I didn’t remember her being so light-skinned.

Did the photographer use lighting to make her appear less black? Did the editors Photoshop the picture to diminish the contrast between Pompeo and the rest of the group? Did they think their audience would be uncomfortable with an article about mostly black people?

Out of curiosity, I Googled Rhimes, Washington and Davis and the result of my search was actually quite interesting. The thumbnail images on the Google search page showed each woman depicted in drastically different lighting, making them look much darker or lighter, depending on the setting and the publication. The use of creative lighting and editing was obvious when the pictures are viewed side by side. I had to wonder if this is a deliberate whitewash. If so, by whom? The photographer? The editor? The managers?

This may be an example of a publication that would diminish the appearance of race if they feel that they are catering to an audience with less racial tolerance. In this way, the publication can claim to be embracing racial diversity while easily handling those members of its audience who are still uncomfortable with such things. It’s as if they’re saying, “Don’t worry, they’re only a little bit black.”

Editorial

Happy Holidays

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Every year at this time, social media starts to blow up with posts from people who are angry because they would rather say “Merry Christmas” than “Happy Holidays.” New this year, I’ve seen memes that called red Starbucks cups an attack on Christmas and “Holiday Trees” an attack on the American way. This strikes me as a strange thing to say here in the U.S., where capitalism is the rule of the land.

Starbucks may save a penny by omitting fancy text and graphics on their cups. They may save a minute of production time or a bit of ink. Maybe the person placing the order just didn’t want to bother. Saving time and cutting corners are the main priority in every other aspect of business, so why should this be any different?

Perhaps, you could argue, having the largest possible target audience to market your product to is the most important thing in a retail business. Which brings us around to “Holiday Trees.”  A few more people may buy a Spruce for the living room if the sellers can convince them that it’s not just for Christmas anymore. What does a tree have to do with the birth of Jesus anyway?

Instead, they can say, it’s more of an all-purpose tree that can be used to celebrate a variety of holidays. Nobody really knows what those other holidays are, yet, but over time, a decorative tree may be adopted by other cultures or religions in order to make this true. Maybe the Pastafarians will have trees hung with ornaments shaped like Flying Spaghetti Monsters and colanders.  Good news for tree growers everywhere.

For myself, I choose to say “Happy Holidays” because I was raised in Needham, which has a large Jewish population. My grandmother explained to me at a young age that saying “Merry Christmas” to a person who does not celebrate Christmas is just silly. Not because they may be offended, but because it’s simply a waste of breath to say something that, by definition, excludes the person you are saying it to.

I’m not worried about offending anyone. I just choose to include every person from every walk of life in my wishes for a wonderful holiday season.

Editorial

I want words to be my superpower

 

put an editorial column in this section of the newspaper. In theory, it sounds like an easy thing to do. Just pick an interesting topic, discuss it with the staff and write up a few columns expressing the newspaper’s views on the subject. Simple, in theory.

Reality, of course, is a different story. Much of the staff is getting bogged down with midterm exams, completing internships and the beginning of the holiday season — not to mention the fact that we all have other jobs, which makes getting together for meetings a challenge.

You may think that surely, as a writing major and the Editor-in-Chief of the school newspaper, I should be able to think of something to write about.

After all, we live in a world that suffers no shortage of commentary. I just don’t always know where to start.

I have been keeping up with current events so I would know what to talk about but I feel like I’m drowning in bad news.

The anger and fear that dominates the media is compelling but we can too easily get wrapped up in a cycle of negativity that leads us to behave poorly.

Responsible journalism has to be about more than perpetuating the negativity. I really love words and I think they are way more important than people give them credit for. They need to be used with respect and care. When misused, they can be a weapon powerful enough to destroy lives. Or, they can be the inspiration that saves them.  I vow that as a journalist, I will never use my words for evil purposes.

That said, I don’t want to just rant about current events. I want my words to mean more than that. Anyone can rant. I just don’t really know where to start.

I could tell you that I saw Spotlight recently with some of the Observer staff. The movie was fantastic but to be fair, even this amazing movie was based on bad news of evil deeds.

I trust that Jowi will be able to do it far more justice than I ever could, so you can turn to his review on the last page to hear about that.

I could join the ranks of people who are writing about three people being killed in the shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. Plenty of people are voicing their opinions about that incident. Some even hail the shooter as a hero for saving the lives of babies that would have otherwise have been aborted, although, according to an article by The Associated Press, that particular clinic did not actually perform abortions.

Nobody seems really shocked that this happened. We are kind of becoming used to the random shootings, I guess. This is the shooting of the week. Add it to the list.

I could write about the article that appeared in the Boston Globe on Sunday, Nov. 29, that uncovered such a backlog of cases at the Massachusetts Medical Examiner’s office where children are abused to death often fall through the cracks, sometimes going unsolved for years for lack of a determined cause of death.

Here in Massachusetts, the Department of Children and Families is often under fire for failing to protect the children in its care. Now we know that the investigations too often go cold, allowing their killers to go free. The injustices against our state’s children just keep piling up, with no end in sight.

Perhaps I should write about terrorist attacks in France or sanctions against Turkey or Syrian refugees, or the beheadings in Libya. Or, the suicide bombings in Nigeria and Cameroon. But really, by the time you read this it will all be old news and some new drama will be unfolding. The truth is, in the hour that I’ve been writing this column, another 6,400 people have died. (An average of 56 million people die worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization. That’s about 153,424 people each day.)

Reading the news each day leaves me wrung out and exhausted. I feel compelled to do whatever little I can do to help make the world a better place, I just don’t know where to start. I’m not angry. I don’t want to point my finger at Obama or yell at Charlie Baker or disband the NRA or blame Islam or defund Planned Parenthood. I don’t want to carry a gun or a picket sign or pass judgement on others. I just want us all to learn how to share this planet. The world is becoming a small place. We are going to have to learn to work together, since none of us are going away willingly. Hopefully, someday, I will be able to use my passion for journalism to help us all become better educated about the people that share the world with us so we can learn to see each other as fellow humans.

I want to make words be my superpower and I want to use them to save the world. I just don’t know where to start.

Editorial

Two-Party System Undermines Democracy

 

Jill_Stein
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Foundation
This year we have the largest, most diverse group of presidential candidates I’ve ever seen. They vary from uber-conservative to bleeding-heart liberal and fill the entire spectrum in between. It seems as if there are far too many to fit them all comfortably into the two-party system that we demand. I’m not sure why we limit ourselves to two parties, anyway. It seems like a flaw in our so-called democratic system that allows this limitation. How democratic can our election process be if it forces everyone to choose between one side and the other, when every issue has more than two sides and so many people feel that the truth and the solutions lie somewhere closer to the middle.

Bernie Sanders, who is an Independent senator, knew that he couldn’t go any further as an Independent. If he had any chance at being taken seriously, he needed to run for president on the democratic ticket. Jill Stein, on the other hand, has very similar ideas as Sanders, is the nominee for the Green Party. If you have never heard of Jill Stein or the Green Party, it’s because they receive absolutely no media coverage. Since Stein did not defer to the Democratic Party, she may as well not exist for all of the attention she has received in the news. I mean no offense to Sanders but he doesn’t fit very neatly into the Democratic box that we are used to. He even refers to himself as a democratic socialist, a risk nearly, but not quite, as big as if he had run as an independent in the first place.

It seems to me that regardless of what a candidate wants to call themselves, or what party they choose to run for, they should be given the chance to speak to the American people. In order to facilitate a true democracy, it falls upon the media to offer equal consideration to all candidates, ensuring that voters are truly educated about their options. For this reason, I have decided to dedicate a few lines of this issue introducing the NECC community to Jill Stein, and the Green Party.

Editorial

Why it’s Important to Write Well

 

It’s not always important for your writing to be clear. The thing that’s important, for a journalist, is to know why, sometimes, it should be clear, and why sometimes it doesn’t need to be — because it really, really needs to be in a newspaper. The vast majority of people in the vast majority of cases can get by with writing that’s just okay. This writing might contain errors, or confusing paraphrases, or sentences that, technically, mean something very different than the thing they intended to say.

When you’re writing for a small audience — one person or a handful of people — and you know that audience, or at least know pretty much what kind of people they are, and you know they’ve got a lot in common with you, you can often trust that they’ll fill in the blanks correctly. You can trust that they’ll recognize your voice and insert what they already know about your opinions. You can trust that they’ll bring their own expertise on the topic to unpick ambiguities. And, vitally, you can trust that they’ll ask you to clarify when they can’t work it out, or when they’re not sure they’ve worked it out correctly.

That’s why it’s never really a problem that most people are just okay — or even quite bad — at writing. When your audience will ask “What did you mean?” and you can reliably respond, you don’t need to craft exceptionally refined prose to move ideas from your mind to theirs.

It’s important for journalists to understand that exactly zero of those charities are available to them when writing for print. You cannot trust that a newspaper’s readers recognize your voice in your writing. You cannot trust that they share your basic values or knowledge or intuition. You cannot trust that they know the same idioms as you, and you absolutely cannot trust that you will ever get a chance to clarify.

Even if you publish a correction, the majority of your readers are never going to see it. They’re only ever going to get the wrong version of the story, and they’re never going to know to ask.

When you write for print, you’re always writing not just for people who share your general context, but for people who disagree with you, and will interpret you either to confirm their own view, or uncharitably to discredit yours; people who’ve never learned the first thing about concepts you’ve been getting comfortable with for your whole life; people whose first language isn’t English, and who don’t have nearly the same amount of practice as you in solving the puzzles of other people’s writing mistakes; people who come from another part of the country or the English-speaking world and use some parts of the language totally differently than you do.

(Did you know, for example, that the word ‘quite’ is usually meant to emphasize in American English — ‘quite good’ means ‘very good’ — but to diminish in UK English — ‘quite good’ means ‘kind of good, but not very?’ I used the word quite in the fourth paragraph of this piece. That makes the meaning of that paragraph kind of slippery, doesn’t it?)

Understanding this relationship between writer and reader — and understanding the way it can shift — is a valuable life skill in general, especially online. It helps to keep in mind that you can expect a different level of charity and understanding from your Facebook friends than a stranger on a forum, or in an email to a coworker, versus a client, versus your mom. Keeping it in mind will make you a more effective communicator — and, if you’re a journalist, keeping it in mind is a pretty good summary of your job description.

Editorial

Editorial: The NECC Observer is free-press and student run

 

One figure, hand on chin, asks another figure, holding a notebook and with an angry look on their face, "I want you to cover my event. But I want all your coverage to be completely favorable, and I want you to let me read the coverage in advance, so I can make sure everything you’re saying is acceptable. And I don’t want you to use the words “complex,” “fissure” or “egg.” and I want you to call me a genius, but, like, in a way that you really mean it, okay? And I want you to insert this pre-written paragraph right here. And I absolutely don’t w ant to pay for ad space. ..." The text continues to outside the speech bubble.

Newspapers have more than one function. They serve to inform, create engagement, provide a voice for a community, sometimes entertain, and function as watchdogs against corruptions and abuses in a community. Free publicity is not among these functions.

Journalists report on the good and the bad to accurately communicate the state of affairs. As a basic mechanism of the value of news, readers need to be able to trust that the things the paper tells them are true, and that reporters aren’t deliberately leaving out information that they could reasonably predict a reader would want to know about the topic.

The NECC Observer is a free-press, student run newspaper, funded by the college to provide real world experience for students. 

Only students write the paper. The faculty and administration do not have say or influence in what the students write. This includes the faculty adviser for the NECC Observer, who has only limited editorial discretion to avert obvious and potentially catastrophic errors. Apart from that, she is here to provide guidance and supervise production.

News has been in a bad state for the past 13 years or so, so we can understand where students, faculty, staff and administration might have come to misunderstand or incorrectly infer our functions and goals.

We realize that this is no longer common, but as students, in our education and preparing for the best possible version of our future, we at the NECC Observer are committed to ethical, transparent reporting.

Free press means that stories are written for the sake of news and information value. The NECC Observer does not write for the school, and it does not write for its advertisers. We write for the community and for the students and employees who are a part of it.

For folks at NECC who would like the Observer to cover their business or event in exactly the way you would like, with maximum oversight and verification, we sell ads in several sizes. Details at observer@necc.mass.edu.