Splicetoday

Politics & Media
May 06, 2008, 05:20AM

Conservative Campus Publications Serve An Important Role; Also Kinda Lame

The Northwestern Chronicle strives to provide a reasoned conservative counterweight to the dominant liberal discourse on one of the Midwests's most prestigious campuses. But like many other college papers that are right of center, it seems to work better in theory than in practice.

"The tactics used by the Chronicle do have a feeling of desperation; look no further than the front page of the April issue, which featured a sketch of the torso of a busty woman. "We didn't have any other compelling stories to put on the front page... and we did it to make people pick up the paper because breasts sell," says Zebrowski. Somehow, the lack of compelling stories does not come as a surprise, but the lack of marketing creativity is astonishing.

Even the Chronicle has trouble taking itself seriously. Zebrowski says, "We want to give the paper a collegiate feeling that is not overly serious." In the eyes of the Chronicle, it would appear that campus is overrun with student journalists engaged in the deplorable activity of accurate reporting. Perhaps it is true that NU press is apt to regard dogmatic conservative arguments with far more seriousness than they deserve. If the Chronicle wants to bestir debate between the conservative minority and liberal majority, it should do so in a way that can curry respect on the basis of, if nothing else, good reporting. To date, the abysmal quality of Chronicle copy accomplishes nothing more than to make it the laughing-stock of an entire campus.

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