Politics@theEAGLE, its namesake newspaper’s new political forum, arose from a quandary of sorts.
About two weeks after the Democratic National Convention’s press application deadline passed, The Eagle found itself in a financial and logistical jam: How could a student newspaper, with limited financial resources and an overstretched editorial staff, adequately cover the two all-important nominating conventions? We lacked the money to fly two correspondents – or, one reporter (me) twice – to Denver and St. Paul, and we couldn’t forgo one convention for the sake of covering the other.
But the alternative — simple speech recaps and analyses from the comfort of our offices — seemed equally unfulfilling. No matter how much fun we have writing scathing opinion pieces, political commentary is not our primary purpose. We are a campus newspaper that seeks to cover issues with a much deserved student angle, and we could not abandon our stated aim and succumb to election hysteria.
That said, The Eagle prints twice weekly, and our first issue hits presses during the height of the convention drama. We quickly realized that we could not shower the spectacles with ample attention in our print edition without appearing pathetically outdated and slow. So, assuming the odds were stacked against us, we laid convention coverage to rest and resigned ourselves to the frenzy of final papers and exams. We figured we’d worry about it in the fall.
In retrospect, we experienced difficulty because we were acting wholly narcissistically. One of the foremost rules of journalism is to inform your readers fairly and objectively, and we – as many newspapers still do – assumed our staff reporters and editors were the only writers capable of that task. Not so. If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that communities – individual locales, publics interested in specific topics and, of course, motivated students – are just as ready and able to deliver dynamic content as we are.
And with that realization, this blog was born. Politics@theEAGLE sheds the hierarchy upon which dead-tree journalism was once soundly built, seeking instead to tap the unlimited talents of students who wish to engage their own communities in their own unique ways. The writers featured on this Web site are some of AU’s finest, most politically active students, and their opinions are as diverse as they are insightful. Our role is to moderate: We provide the forum, create the atmosphere and contextualize the result. Meanwhile, our blog correspondents offer the firsthand, on-the-ground depictions of an election far too overshadowed by mostly undemocratic ways of reporting. The result, hopefully, will be as experimental as it is exciting.
Tony Romm
Special Projects Coordinator, The Eagle
Blog Editor
