TKS Editors Blog

I have spent the last two hours of my Saturday night analyzing the campus safety log.

Oh, TKS. The joys you bring me.

Kaldi’s, or the Beanhive as some heretics insist upon calling it, was the busiest I think I have ever seen it. When I arrived at about 2:00 p.m., I wound up getting the last available table. I came with a plan to do my reading for my paper, assisted in the task by a large cup of coffee and a ginger cookie. Turns out every other Knox student had the same idea. As did a group of Galesburg teens. And a guy in an orange jumpsuit. And someone with the loudest cellphone in the world.
Ultimately, I was glad for the distractions, though, the constant hum drowning out the soothing and innocuous Celtic harp music playing the coffee shop. I’m working on a paper about the history of European witch hunts between 1450 (ish) and 1700 (ish), and while the book is very well written, too much time reading about accusations of cannibalistic infanticide, communing with “the demon” and the judicial murder of about 100,000 people does leave one feeling a bit discomfited.
This afternoon, chilly, wet, grey, has simply encouraged me in my belief that when you have a paper you don’t want to write, when the atmosphere outside leaves something to be desired, and when you’re in need of tasteful caffeination, Kaldi’s (the Beanhive) is the place to be.  I think the only thing that will be keeping me from having nightmares about depraved coven members and crazed inquisitors tonight will be the fact that my latte was so wonderfully large I won’t be sleeping tonight.

(a letter I will not send, but still, something to think about)

Dear President Taylor,

I am writing concerning a quotation from you in an article that we published this week about several college newspapers across the country who have had their funding cut by their student governments.  Asked if this could happen at Knox, you said that it was “conceivable, but unlikely.”

The first half of this quotation raises a red flag.  That it is “conceivable” that all funding be taken away for TKS (the only independent media source for campus news at Knox) is astonishing to me.  Granted, I suppose I should probably take solace in the fact that you qualified “conceivable” with “unlikely,” but given sentiment towards TKS by certain members of the Knox administration, please forgive me if I do not find “unlikely” comforting.

The argument could be made that it is “conceivable” for any college newspaper to lose its funding, especially when that funding is controlled by a group of students through an organization such as Student Senate.  However, I believe that there is a pervasive misunderstanding as to the purpose of TKS on this campus.  This goes beyond the general student mentality that TKS is lacking in quality (something with which I vehemently disagree, given that we won 20 awards at the Illinois College Press Association’s annual conference this past weekend).  Many people seem to believe that TKS is a tool through which they can push their own agendas, be it by dictating story angles or telling us that we should not print a story until a certain time.  When we reveal unflattering information, there is a rush to accuse us of “misleading” our readers.

Here are the facts: like all newspapers, we do sometimes make mistakes.  Yet we never make them intentionally.  A newspaper is not a venue through which to promote any one viewpoint; it is a place where facts can be reported as they are.  Yes, sometimes they are not particularly flattering.  (If this is an issue, perhaps the person to which the facts pertain should consider the consequences of his or her actions more carefully.)  Yet it is our duty as a fair, objective media source to report them.  The most important part of the word “newspaper” is “news,” and that is what we print.  We do not sweep negative information under the rug.  We do not cater to any outside party’s desires as to the angles of our stories.  If we did those things, we would be a puppet, not a newspaper.

Of course, the fact that we work to maintain our status as the latter does not always win us friends.  It is not supposed to.  Unfortunately, the people we irritate are sometimes in positions of power over us.  We trust that they will treat us with the same objective nature with which we try to treat them and recognize the service we provide to this campus as a venue for disseminating information and conveying the student voice.

Granted, were our funding to be cut, TKS would not disappear.  We would continue to publish articles online.  Yet the cutting of funding for a student newspaper is a powerful signal.  It either says that a school is going under or that a free press has no place on a college campus.  Knox is poor, but it is far from declaring bankruptcy.  Thus, you understand why the use of “conceivably” has me leaning towards the latter explanation.  I ask that the administration respectfully consider the indispensable role that TKS plays on this campus as a newspaper, not a place for agenda-pushing.  I ask that this campus realize the importance–and the luxury–of having an unbiased news source to go to for information.  I ask that the removal of a student paper from Knox, or any college campus, be viewed as inconceivable.

Cordially,

Anna Meier, Co-News Editor, The Knox Student

As you may have heard, University of Texas-El Paso head coach Tim Floyd is in some hot water. Floyd was ejected after he was issued two technical fouls in a game against East Carolina this week. But Floyd made matters worse by lingering, ultimately being escorted off the floor by a policeman.

But was he really at fault? Take a look at the video. Did the cop really need to come out on the floor and escort Floyd? Was Floyd about to strike the referee? It seems the cop overreacted, spawning a bunch of stories about how police were “forced” to intervene by Floyd’s behavior. Seems a bit unfair, no?

Happy Tuesday, world.

Three of Knox’s teams ended their seasons this weekend: swimming, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. Only the men’s basketball team ended the season strong, eking out a win over rival Monmouth 61-58. We’ll have full coverage of everything in Thursday’s paper.

On a national level, I’ve got a pair of columns. After the Illini were destroyed in Columbus Tuesday night, I felt compelled to write about the worst NCAA men’s basketball season in recent memory. Excerpt below:

What’s good for the Illini?

Ultimately, I’m not even sure it’s good for Illinois to make it to the NCAA tournament. I’ve defended head coach Bruce Weber during every disappointing campaign since the magical run in 2004-2005, but I’m running out of excuses.

The blame could very easily fall on the weak class of Illini seniors: Tisdale, Mike Davis, Demetri McCamey and Bill Cole. But at the same time, these are Weber’s guys, and the former three have been significant contributors for the last three seasons. That they haven’t developed the requisite leadership skills by now should be on the coaching staff as much as it is on them.

And after ‘Melo finally made it to New York, I thought it necessary to jot down some notes about the trade and my general ambivalence about the Chicago Bulls.

It’s been an exciting season in the NBA, and this trade only adds to the drama. There has been a drastic shift in power, and the East is now stacked with superstars. As Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan continue to age, the West may look like as weak as the East in the pre-LeBron days.

From a different perspective, this trade has re-affirmed some things I’ve long known: I love the NBA, but I’m not a fan of any single team—and I’m definitely not a fan of the Bulls.

Bulls fans, in particular, seem disturbed by this trade. Though the majority I’ve heard still insist that Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah and Carlos Boozer forms a better core than the Knicks’ Anthony, Billups and Amare Stoudemire, they claim this with an ever-present quiver in their voices. In other words, they’re scared. They don’t want to be unseated by the Knicks, given the rivalry, and given that the Bulls had the chance to acquire Anthony—hell, numerous chances to acquire Anthony—since last summer.

Look for all this and more in Thursday’s edition of TKS.

The Illinois College Press Association had its yearly awards ceremony and conference in Chicago. As per usual the weekend was fun and the list of awards was fruitful.

This year our staff was able to bring home 20 awards (if I’m not mistaken) and this was fortified by 7 awards in the photography department.

The biggest win in my eyes came from the first place win by Tara Jarvie in Feature Photo. Her photo from last year’s Lincoln Fest was epic. It was truly a great moment she captured.

In second place of pure great work by our staff was Liz Thomas’s photo essay that also pulled out a first place spot this weekend. Her quality work from her trip to Nepal must have made it easy for the judges to pick her work.

Besides those two first place finishes the rest of the awards were given to myself (not to sound like I’m tooting my own horn). It was a great honor to receive that many awards. I am ready to graduate because I got a lot of practice grabbing the award with one hand and shaking with the other (sometimes not so gracefully). I finished with three 2nd place awards and two honorable mentions and one honorable mention in layout that I didn’t include in our department’s tally.

One of the many highlights for myself was my 2nd place finish in the Shoot Chicago Contest. Every year we are given a new one word topic and given 3 hours to go out in Chicago and photograph a journalistic photo that most represents the word. This year the word was ‘work’ and Liz and I returned with some quality work (pun intended). Fortunately for me I made the cut and almost topped the pile of 19 or so photos that were submitted. Liz came up just short, due to some tight competition, though her shot was still great. As they eliminated the non-winners I kept looking over at Liz thinking I might win it all, but I came up just short. The judges were fond of my use of panning in the shot and the clean background, but the shot that edged me out was more iconic, the judges thought.

I am still super excited, since last year we didn’t get any awards from the shootout and the year before that Liz was able to pull out a third place finish on the topic of ‘economy.’ (I think we will be publishing my photo online or maybe even in the paper, so I will edit this post in the next few days with the photo linked to it so you may enjoy it.)

Next year I hope to maintain numerous awards for our staff and I hope a majority of them go to our staff photogs and next year’s photo editors.

In addition the whole staff walked away with a 2nd place in general excellence, which is a great honor to remain near the top of the pile of newspapers in our division. Elmhurst College’s The Leader edged us out this year, which is greatly commendable since they had their funding pulled out from their student senate this year, and they have been struggling to keep their newspaper afloat.

P.S. I hope to start getting the photography section of this blog to be more active with more photographs of the staff’s top work from each week.

61-58. Joe Kozak led Knox with 15 points on 7-7 shooting off the bench.

Look for full(er) coverage soon.

Aside from splashing through puddles and making awkward penguin noises while walking home from pub nights, Katy Sutcliffe and I sometimes have deep* conversations about the meaning of journalism.  Tonight, we celebrated Katy writing her first blog post (admittedly using my account, but whatever) and finally getting to express her opinions in a public venue.

As journalists, we work to remove any sort of bias from what we write.  Our job is to present news as it happened, objectively, without slanting the story by including how we feel.  We generally have opinions on what we write, but it’s rare that we get to share them in writing.  Having this dandy blog is a nice way to get around that snag.

So, in the spirit of disclosure, opinions on this week’s stories:

1. composting.  While investigating potential composting systems for Knox, Student Senate discovered that Dining Services preferred the most expensive option presented not because of its shiny newness, but rather because it was the only system with the capability of breaking down food as greasy as what is served in the Gizmo.  Um, yikes.

2. Fusion, Knox’s new student-run theology journal.  Unlike many new student organizations, Fusion has hit the ground running and is preparing to publish its first issue online.  It fills a much-needed hole in publication on this campus; we have TKS, and we have a bazillion literary journals/magazines, but we don’t really have outlets for scholarly work.  Bravo, Kyle Cruz and Yumna Rathore, for starting to rectify this.

3. the Campus Safety Log, which this week deems the finding of a chair outside of GDH worthy of note.  Newsworthy?  Apparently.*

*Debatable.

First of all, thank you to my amazing co-news editor Anna Meier for allowing me to hijack her blog identity and post under her name rather than my own. I’m not sure how journalistically ethical it is to do so, but I’m doing it anyway since my log-in is broken and I have never once in in my life possessed either the technical prowess nor the patience to fix something like that.

(edit: it’s now the next day and thanks to the genius of Peter Walker, this IS written by me!)

Secondly, I just got a lovely e-mail from Chris Bugajski, communications officer of Senate, requesting, cajoling, nay, BEGGING that people vote on how to spend $100,000 dollars of Student Senate money.

To those folk who have been hiding under a rock for the last few weeks and weren’t aware Senate had that much money: yes, that is the correct number of zeros.

Again to those folk who have been hiding under a rock for the last few weeks and haven’t yet voted on how that money should be spent, it is my turn to request, cajole, nay, BEG you to vote. However, I have an agenda: I think you should vote to purchase new TKS computers, at a mere cost of less than 10% of that $100,00 dollars!

Let me lay out my case by explaining to you how a newspaper is made. On Wednesday, as soon as our classes are over, my amazing co-news editor and I RUN over to the Publications Office. We check to see how many articles that our writers were supposed to turn in actually got turned in. We write some of our own to replace those that have, yet again, mysteriously failed to appear. We cross our fingers that the copy editors fix the mistakes quickly so that we can put them on the page as soon as possible. We put them on the page, using a newspaper layout program known as Indesign, a.k.a. that god damn piece of crap computer program that takes five minutes to bold a word and crashes every time you do something brilliant. We go to dinner and debate whether or not we’ll be finished by midnight that night. We print the pages, the copy editors read them again, we fix the pages, we put them online.

This process sounds simple. I, too, once lived in a world where I thought it would be simple. Since I had that happy thought, I have only had ten or eleven nights where I stayed in this office until 4 a.m. The average is around 1 a.m. – much better.

If you wanted to hear this saga continue, I could explain to you about that time period AFTER 4 a.m. where we try to finish our homework and slap (academic) papers together and study for organic chemistry tests that for some reason my professor always liked to schedule for Thursday mornings when I got to drag myself out of bed on four hours of sleep. But you’re creative Knox students. I trust your imagination. (If you want to make it REALLY good, throw in some dinosaurs.)

So, after you’ve closed your eyes and imagined this, please open them and hear my plea: IF WE HAD COMPUTERS THAT DIDN’T TAKE A BAZILLION HOURS TO DO ANYTHING, WE COULD BE DONE BY 6 P.M.

True, this affects, or seems to affect, very few people. After all, we have a staff of maybe 10 editors. But I appeal to you: a college newspaper is one of the only consistent forums for the student voice on a campus. With faster computers, yes, we’d be done earlier, but we as editors would also have a lot more energy to pour into other things – covering more events and issues that you as fellow students care about. Making our paper more visually appealing because the computers don’t crash whenever we make something exciting. Having time to find more writers and solicit a greater diversity of student opinions. (This school is full of opinions. Trust me. I have to listen to them.)

Newspapers are moving into a digital age. The Knox Student is falling behind that curve because we don’t have the technology or the funds to keep up. Last year, we won the award for the best newspaper in the state. We are one of the few colleges to build their newspaper website completely from scratch. We have an incredibly devoted staff who regularly skips senior meeting thanks to the temper of our awful Macs (I’m slightly afraid they’ll know I typed that and delete this post before I have a chance to put it online, just to spite me). We would like to maintain these statements as true statements.

So…vote for us?

Katy Sutcliffe, the co-news editor who is NOT Anna Meier

(Plus, if you vote for new computers, we would have more time to study, so our GPA’s would go up, so Knox’s overall GPA would go up, so more people would apply here, so we’d become a more prestigious school, so we’d have a larger endowment, so your tuition would go down! Think of us as an investment!)

After a strange journey, Galesburg’s Corner Cafe—formerly the Rite Track Cafe—closed its doors today, according to a blog post from Register-Mail Assistant Editor Jay Redfern. Jay has all the info on why they closed, how they got to Grand Avenue, etc.

It’s always sad when a lack of money forces a business to close, and more so when it’s a personal favorite. And Rite Track was, for a time, my favorite restaurant in Galesburg. Nowhere else could I receive a vegetable omelet (made with between four and five dozen eggs—I’m just guesstimating), hash browns, toast, and orange juice for ~$5.90. Truly a special place.

When the Corner Cafe was on Main St., in the former Four Stars Restaurant building, my visits became more infrequent. The occasional omelet here and there. But that location lacked the ambience of the original Rite Track, with its trainyards and comfortable seating.

I’m sorry to say I never made it to the Grand Avenue location. Farewell, tasty breakfast people.