The Heights student newspaper at Boston College wants you to know: It is not descending into that great unpublished yonder that is journalistic oblivion. In its own words, via an editorial published recently, “The Heights isn’t following the fate of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer just yet.” Take that Newspaper Death Watch! (Umm, at least for now…)
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In the editorial, the paper offers one of those funny this just in … no news here announcements. It reminds me of the press conferences that general managers in the sports world call to ensure the public that a coach’s job is safe (ironic of course because in the end a statement of confidence in something is typically only made when confidence in something is lacking).
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However, the editorial did win me over with two specific confidence motions:
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1) “The Heights survived the Great Depression – in fact, its advertising sales increased during the early ’30s – and it will survive the present crisis in the print news industry.”
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2) “The Heights‘ raison d’être is the service it provides to this campus, and we promise to do whatever necessary to preserve that. There is something irreplaceable about paging through a newspaper in the morning and something unmatchable about the quality that Stanford University Professor Theodore Glasser claims only the “sustained, systematic coverage that a good newsroom” can generate. A newspaper provides a standard of integrity and ethical journalism that the blogosphere has yet to attain. Furthermore, only a campus newspaper with allegiance only to itself can promise to unapologetically expose truth on the university level.”
