Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Pathfinder Critique: Issue 21

Baseball in February? Only in Lewiston, aka the Banana Belt. Play ball, indeed.

THE GOOD

Appealing cover, offering several shots from the Warrior baseball team's season-opening weekend. One question: Who took those tasty snaps? Credit is crucial to one's credibility.

Opinion page anchored by editorial offerings from the editors as well as Kelly-Rae's timely and engaging breakdown of creeper-vs.-keeper.

Oodles of campus-related news on Page 3, including three stories generated by paying attention to student government activities. Nice job; keep your news swerve on.

Student Spotlight focuses on the Pathfinder's own, Sarah Hennessey. Might seem a little dubious to interview a staff member, but in this case, her appointment to a position in student government makes it defensible. It also means she now has a conflict of interest in covering anything involving said student government, so proceed cautiously.

Kaylee leads off the Arts and Entertainment section with a roundhouse 1-2 punch. This avid reader thoroughly enjoyed both her review of "Gnomeo and Juliet" and the inaugural Brewster Awards. Not to be outdone, Alex and Jeremiah deliver winning pop culture reviews of their own.

Sports efficiently encapsulated the previous weekend's athletic endeavors and was topped with another winning Sports Shorts column from Jed, the Pathfinder's resident sports fanatic/dancing machine.

Word on the Street introduces readers to six — count 'em, six — of their fellow students who tackle the burning question: Will Justin Bieber's outlive his acne?

THE NOT-SO-HOT

Headlines are written in present tense. Main head on the cover, concerning Gary Picone's coaching debut, fails this test.

Page 2 editorials really should have some kind of headlines on them. It's not enough to run an extra line of body copy and call it a headline. It should be larger, bolder and attract the reader's eye and thus his or her attention.

Story on Page 3 about cuts in Pell Grants cried out for some statistical data relevant to LCSC students. Wouldn't have been hard to make a quick phone call to the financial aid office to find out how many L-C students receive grants, how much they get and what kind of decreases they're looking at. That is still a staff-written story that could be written for future issues.

Once again, we failed to put necessary spaces between long dashs. Again: it's like this: word — word. Not like this word—word. That's a hyphen on steroids. Kaylee's movie review was riddled with this glaring error. Don't know where that's coming from, but I'd love to have a vigorous debate with whoever says that's how it's supposed to work. It's not.

Brewster Awards needed double quotations — not singles — around each movie title.

I believe it's officially called Rowdy's Texas Steakhouse," as per the Food for Thought column. Not that I've eaten there recently, but I hear their ads on the radio all the time. And I looked it up. We also left out the address of this fine, longtime, valley eating establishment. If I'm reading that and want to go there, now it's going to require a little extra effort on my part.

Another problem we can't seem to fix is leaving off the quote marks on the album titles in the Billboard Top Ten (sic) Alternative Albums. Please: Refrain from cutting and pasting information directly from the Internet. It's lazy, inconsistent and it damages your credibility.

Word on the Street responses were all missing necessary quote marks.

HARD WURDS (Or things to work on)

WRONG RIGHT
... that's okay too ... that's OK too.
Can you feel Spring?Can you feel spring?
man cake man-cake
ASLCSC senator Kevin Teats ASLCSC Sen. Kevin Teats
$1450 $1,450
... on page four ... on Page 4
ASLCSC president Jonelle McCoy ASLCSC President Jonelle McCoy
room 12 Room 12
eluding to alluding to (making reference to)
gun slingers gunslingers
2 A.M. 2 a.m.

DEPARTMENT OF FAIR WARNINGS

AP style quiz at the staff meeting on Wednesday.

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