So I’ve noticed it’s been over a month since my last post. I’m sorry. I have decided that I don’t have much to say, just like I imagined when I started this venture a few months ago. I think it’s less to do with my lack of imagination and more to do with my severe laziness, but that’s life.

I decided to take this opportunity to list some of the grievances I’ve accumulated making my way through the Journalism program at Humboldt State University. Know that I’m not trying to make any friends and I am quite aware that I can be a real asshole. I dedicate this post to my mother who just recently read my previous entries and still thinks I’m pretty funny. Thanks, Mom.

• I am writing this post during my once-a-week “advanced” photojournalism class. If you are interested in making crappy color photography and copying techniques mastered by digital photo geeks who think using sheets of mylar to warp macro pictures of flowers is super cool, then take this class. If you’re interested in emulating Fred Larson or taking long exposures of the full moon like every other dope with a tripod, take this class. If you’re interested in fitting into a burnt out aesthetic of pretty trees and lake scenes and making a dime convincing stupid people at trade shows that they need to buy your picture because it would probably match the living room set they just purchased from Ikea, take this class. If you’re interested in commercial photography masked as “fine art,” take this class. If you’re interested in learning anything about photojournalism or improving your experience in the field of covering an event or setting up photo shoots for a newspaper or magazine, you’re out of luck.

• Half my editing class failed a grammar quiz that is similar to a test one might take in 5th grade. This scares me. A student in this same class, when asked what worried her about her future as a journalist and if she thought the education offered at HSU was preparing her for a professional career, said that she didn’t think we were learning enough about computers and the new technology required for news output, like online newspapers and using Adobe InDesign, etc. My brain exploded. We need to learn how to write! But perhaps the university isn’t at fault. Maybe it’s the fault of lower education in the state of California. I mean shouldn’t we know how to form a sentence once we get to college? I’ve learned that most people don’t. 

• Speaking of bad writing, the staff for HSU’s student newspaper The Lumberjack is, for the most part, in the same category of lacking basic writing skills. My professor Sid Dominitz, one of the coolest guys I’ve ever met, said that he received an email from the Lumberjack copy chief once that was nearly unintelligible. Yikes. We are trying to put out a decent publication, and for a student-run organization we do a decent job. But the mistakes that riddle the copy are appalling, consisting of commas run amok, the words its and it’s replacing each other interchangeably, run on sentences galore, incomplete sentences galore, music reviews made up of flowery dribble even a bad poet would frown upon, etc. We have a once a week critique run by staff advisor Marcy Burstiner, who I think is a great teacher and a snarky son of a gun, which I really like. Her online critique of the paper can be found here. But the class technique isn’t harsh enough. It can be a bad experience for some of the writers, but it still lacks the nit-picky criticism that a publication needs to succeed. We spend all of half an hour going through 20 pages or so when we really should be going through each story sentence by sentence and taking notes on what to improve. Let the critique last three hours if it has to! Dominitz agrees with me here. The classes should be weening out the bad journalists, we both think, but instead the bad journalists as well as the decent ones are going to come away with a degree, and I suppose we have to let professionals in the industry reject them when they come knocking for jobs which, by the way, will be very limited by the time we graduate. If you’re interested, visit the Lumberjack online here. You might be saying, well if you think everything sucks so much, Allyson, do something about it. I’m getting to that by posting this rambling and being a hard ass at critiques. I have on several occasions offered to help copy edit, but no luck. I have thought about vying for a copy editor position next semester, but will probably go for photo editor in the end because I love telling people that their photography sucks, and bad writers are a lost cause for the most part. I’m a defeatist, after all.

That’s all for now. It was nice getting that off my chest.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Grievances, Lists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.