Acorn

Issue date: 2/29/08 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Merion Read

How to make a grilled cheese sandwich. "Righty tighty, left loosey." The difference between college-ruled and wide-ruled. There are just some things you expect every incoming freshmen to know, some basic skills that are required to function in a normal society.

Apparently, the mysterious world of journalism has fallen through those cracks.

The point of the 20-page beauty that is The Acorn has become lost on many people recently, who misconstrue our existence as a feel-good newsletter with balls the size of pennies.

Please, if you're an enrolled student at any university, let alone a liberal arts one, you should be fully aware of the rights and responsibilities of a real newspaper.

And yes, The Acorn is a real paper.

There are awards hanging from our window-less walls, many of our staff members have scored prestigious internships and our alumni range from reporters at large dailies to executive producers at CNN. Talk to me at 1 a.m. on a Thursday night and you'll see just how real we are.

So we are real, and we are a key element to the functioning of the University. I'm not going to quote Tommy Jefferson right now, because I'm sure you know just how elemental a free press is to a democratic state.

But, in the small sphere that is the Drew bubble, communication is boss. Covering big-name speakers, taking on issues being discussed over Sunday brunch, reporting on student protests-those are all things we do every week.  

It is what we do week after week, and the week after that. What we decide to lay out on our temperamental computers each week validates that issue to the community at large.

It may not be a conscious decision, but if we print it, people realize it must be important. If we don't cover something, it is forever doomed to remain in the piles of unread campus-wide emails.

This is a responsibility that we take very seriously.

We have to keep the administration accountable for how students are treated and engaged, we have to keep the thousands of readers updated and be on the pulse of Drew's heartbeat. That's what we do.

And yes, that includes reporting on arrests on campus-especially arrests.

Not only are these events reported on by long-standing, respectable news sources such as The Daily Record and The Star Ledger, but they're public record.

It is a simple and, I used to think, well-known fact that once you're arrested, your name is out there. Police hand it over to newspapers.

Continued...

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