TKS Editors Blog

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.

Writer Matt McKinney wrote a dynamite piece on the Chicago Bulls this week. That’ll be up tomorrow. For now, here’s an excerpt.

There’s a monster waking up in the Windy City (feel free to insert joke about the upcoming Chicago mayoral election.)

It’s not the Jekyll and Hyde-Bears team that fell a touchdown short of the Super Bowl to a division rival they could have knocked off in the regular season. And it’s certainly not the injury-prone, once-and-present Cubs reliever, Kerry Wood—the curse of the Billy Goat will make sure of that.

It’s the Chicago Bulls.

I’ll even take the clichéd monster metaphor a step further: the Bulls are going to be in contention for the NBA Finals once the playoffs roll around.

But you probably wouldn’t have guessed that listening to Jeff Van Gundy, Mark Jackson or most of the other NBA analysts on ESPN.

Despite a 36-16 record, and trailing the Boston Celtics by only 2.5 games for the first seed in the Eastern Conference, the Bulls are viewed as second-class citizens in the eyes of most NBA-insiders.

I also wrote a nationally focused column touching on the Pujols negotiations in St. Louis and the ongoing NFL labor saga. Here’s an excerpt.

When the dust settles from Albertageddon, two things that have always been true will remain true: 1. Albert Pujols is very, very good at baseball. 2. Any team interested in signing Pujols in his free agent years has to significantly overpay. Even the hometown Cardinals.

On the first issue, no one debates that Pujols is an incredible talent; a surefire hall-of-famer; perhaps the greatest right-handed hitter of his generation. He is the rarest of rare baseball players: the kind that transcends the fiery debate between the “numbers crowd” and the “scouting crowd.” All agree, Pujols is some kind of amazing.

Yet he’s thirty years old and he’s asking for a contract that will last ten years. Though some intelligent baseball minds—such as Dave Cameron of Fangraphs—insist that ten years isn’t much of a risk, these writers seem to forget that we are past the steroid era and the amphetamine era. It’s not just late-career rejuvenation that disappears along with a lack of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs), it’s season-long sustenance. And when Pujols gets a little older and a little slower, with some more tread on his tires—perhaps some more inevitable nagging injuries, plantar fasciitis for instance, the Cardinals may wish they hadn’t tied him down for ten years.

Happy Wednesday, everyone. Hopefully we’ll have articles to you in t-minus 15 hours.

…especially for a weekly. Tomorrow night, Lake Forest College comes to Galesburg to take on the Prairie Fire men’s and women’s basketball teams at 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. It will be senior night for both teams.

Also tomorrow night, The Knox Student goes to press. So we will plan on putting at least informational nuggets in the article: score, leading scorer, etc. But full coverage will not run until eight days later. A little distressing, no? When you consider that its also senior night, it becomes even more upsetting.

So we will try to make amends in the February 25th edition of TKS by running wall-to-wall coverage of the seniors and Saturday’s season finale against rivals Monmouth College. In the February 18th edition, expect slim pickens. We apologize.

We will try to atone, as best we can, with coverage online.

But I do encourage any and all readers to attend tomorrow night’s games. The lone senior on the women’s team, Jenny Haskell, has been a significant contributor for the Prairie Fire since transferring to Knox from Lewis and Clark two years ago. Haskell—a surefire all-conference selection—leads Knox in almost all statistical categories.

On the men’s side, four seniors will be honored: Matt Goedeke, Peter Cain, Roger Ortiz and Courtney Jude. This is a diverse and talented group, and the last class to have ever played for Knox legend Tim Heimann. And though they’ve had just five wins since their sophomore year, they haven’t quit.

We’ll have profiles of Haskell, Goedeke, Cain, Ortiz and Jude in the edition on the 25th.

This will be a quick update on last night’s basketball games—full coverage will run in this week’s The Knox Student.

The women’s team dropped the first game of the night, 61-54 to Grinnell. Grinnell dominated the paint, out-rebounding the Prairie Fire 32-22. Grinnell was also able to keep senior Jenny Haskell in check, limiting the lightning-fast guard to just 7 points, 4 assists and 5 rebounds.

Junior Steph Nunez had her best game of the season, logging 13 points on 5-10 shooting. Sophomore Sara Johnson had 11 points.

The men’s team dropped the nightcap, 90-76. Grinnell’s havoc-wreaking “system” hurt the Prairie Fire, forcing 27 turnovers. Though Knox held a 38-36 halftime lead, the Pioneers got hot to start the second half, and put the game out of reach. Sophomore Lukas Shaw had 21 points and 11 rebounds. Junior Ben Wetherbee had 15 points on 4-9 shooting from the field.

Both the men’s and women’s teams will be in action tomorrow night against Lake Forest. The women’s game will begin at 5:30 p.m., and the men’s game at 7:30. It will be senior night for both teams.

According to a press release on the Knox website, the men’s and women’s basketball teams will be participating in a fundraiser for cancer research at this Monday’s games against Grinnell College. Proceeds will go to the Mayo Clinic, in honor of Knox professor Larry Welch, who was recently diagnosed with the disease.

Each team will wear pink shirts during pre-game warmups and on the bench.

The women’s game will begin at 5 p.m., and the men’s game at 7 p.m.

This weekend I am spending time in Saint Louis to learn more about how to run a newspaper in the digital age. The first day just ended and I have an almost endless list of things we at TKS can do better in the coming 1.5 years to catch us up to the professional papers as well as move ahead of them.

As long as I am able to convince my coworkers prepare for a great growth in social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook, our website and much more).

I am so lucky to be here at this event. I am here as a part of a grant with Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. They were kind enough to pay for travel and food and in repayment I’m photographing all of the talks.

I will discuss more in the future when I am not typing on my phone and I figure out what we want to implement on our paper to better serve you, the reader.

During the Obama presidency, FOX News has made it clear that their primary interest as a network has been the proliferation of panic and hysteria about the American left. And, in the process, they have given a platform to any washed-up Republican who will cow about the loss of American exceptionalism.

But in doing so, FOX News has created a second market: organizations like Media Matters and Talking Points Memo have generated millions of web-hits by plucking at the low-hanging fruit provided by Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich on a nightly basis. By covering Beck’s, Gingrich’s, and network star Sarah Palin’s bouts of anti-intellectualism, these organizations have made FOX News’ continued paucity of facts or thought redundant.

There are times, however, when someone on the network goes so far that it shocks even FOX’s most tired observers. And the crisis in Egypt has brought out the best—or worst—in Beck. As protesters have rallied in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in recent weeks, Beck has warned his tinfoiled viewership about the possibility of a caliphate—yes, caliphate—in the Middle East.

In a segment on his February 3^rd television program, Beck used the word caliphate fifteen times. Employing his tactic of “Don’t shoot the messenger! I’m just telling you what these crazy Muslims are saying!” Beck scared some section of his drooling, barefoot audience into believing that the Muslim Brotherhood, should they wrest power away from the Mubarak thugs in Egypt, would re-establish the caliphate in the interest of a “New Islamic Order,” or something or other.

Nevermind the diversity inherent to Islam. Nevermind that the Saudi government hates Iran, and visa versa. All of this doesn’t matter to Beck—all that matters is that all these countries want to destroy Israel and re-establish the caliphate.

Now what does this have to do with the Intellectual Diversity Foundation (IDF)? I’m getting there.

In 2009, the IDF thought it would be a smashing idea to bring the grand imperial wizard of the anti-Islam conservatives, David Horowitz, to Knox College.

Kresge Auditorium was filled with Galesburg conservatives who had come out to hear a man who knew nothing about Knox College, Knox County, Galesburg, etc. lecture them about what’s ailing our fine institution. And, unsurprisingly, Horowitz’s railing against the “campus left” at what he called “Knox University” hit home with the most virulently anti-Knox members of the Galesburg community.

They received him warmly, giving him a standing ovation at the end of his diatribe, which included anecdotes about his need for a bodyguard and how Israel is the only legitimate nation in the Middle East. He also demanded that there be no questions asked of him at the end of his lecture.

In other words, the IDF handed David Horowitz thousands of dollars to come shit on a school he knew nothing about, without being held accountable. To Horowitz, the speech at Knox could have been made at Grinnell, Macalester, Kenyon, or any other liberal arts school that didn’t employ any members of the John Birch Society.

Last week, Horowitz praised Beck’s insight into the Egyptian Revolution, claiming that the protesters in Egypt were both a) radical Muslims and b) in cahoots with “secular leftist” organizations in America, such as Code Pink.

That Horowitz would corroborate Beck’s insanity is hardly surprising, and only serves to remind how crazy each man is, and how useless an organization the IDF has proved to be. Kory Atkinson ’02, in his quest to prove how intellectually lacking Knox is—in terms of pluralism—has brought a continual stream of offensively unintelligent and racist cretins to the college.

Kudos, Kory, and to all eleven or so people worldwide who support such a willfully ignorant organization. You’ve done well.