Newspapers / Daily Tar Heel (Chapel … / Jan. 28, 1982, edition 1 / Page 6
Part of Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.) / About this page
This page has errors
The date, title, or page description is wrong
This page has harmful content
This page contains sensitive or offensive material
6The Daily Tar HeelfThursday, January 28. 1982 .EdlittdDFial race Jim Hi mmi i . Si 'SAN MAl'Nl Y. Lm.iy"; I'JiM GtOHRFY MtH'K. .Uw.;.- liJiuv BPTM BURRLLL. A.smu- iJiior Edwin a Ralston, CnUvrsity rJm. Rachel Per r y. :uy vjiM Charles Hernoon. si.n,-,iuiN.mhilLdiior Clifton Barnes, .svrf, vjiw Leah Talley. Am Um Keith King, vtmnt ndiw Scott Sharpe. rkwxr.irhy bum Ann Peters. sWh e.t Chuck James. ojw(, Free the Freshmen Within the next two weeks Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham will have the opportunity to change a housing policy that had merit when it was adopted in the early 1970s, but has since become outdated. Under a proposal announced this week by the Department of Univer sity Housing, freshmen who occupy nearly half of all dorm rooms on campus would no longer be required to live in University residence halls. The plan, which has the backing of Residence Hall Association President Robert Bianchi and Acting Director of Housing Donald Boulton, should be approved by Fordham, who has the final say in the matter. When the University began requiring freshmen to live on campus in 1972, officials felt the residency rule would help the incoming students adjust more easily to college life. Beyond the humanitarian considerations, however, was the fact that the University simply could not fill all the dorm rooms and was losing much-needed revenue. But times have changed, and as on-campus housing has become more appealing, the University has been forced to close out hundreds of students annually who would like to live on cam pus, be it for reasons of convenience or economics. At the same time there are some freshmen who would like to live off campus, but have to go through a complex appeal system to be exemp ted from spending their first year in a dormitory. By eliminating the residency requirement, the University could save itself time and money invested in processing appeals, and free up desperately-heeded space for upperclassmen or other freshman who are tripled every year. More importantly, the proposal stipulates that freshmen can live on campus if they choose and will be guaranteed a room, which still gives the first-year students priority on University housing. It is encouraging to see the University adapt to changing times and offer an alternative that is both workable and practical. For the benefit of students both freshmen and upperclassmen Fordham should adopt the housing department's proposal and take a step toward helping to solve some of the building woes that have plagued this campus over the past several years. Phony federalism Try this for logic. The greatest area of expansion in government over the past decade has been at the state and local levels. Spending and man power increases at those levels have far outdistanced those at the federal level. So how does President Ronald Reagan plan to decrease govern mental powers? He proposes to take away responsibilities from the federal level and give them to the states and local levels. Reagan calls this plan the New Federalism (although there is really nothing new about the idea), and the president unveiled the details Tuesday night in the annual State of the Union address. Key parts of the proposal include a turnback of funding for non-interstate highways, mass transit, sewage treatment, day care and general education programs. A $28 billion federalism trust fund from federal excise taxes and part of the windfall profits tax on oil will help the states take on these duties. Furthermore, the states will take over from the federal government responsibility for food stamps and the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. The federal government will, in turn, take over the Medicaid program. There is meaning in the selection of the programs Reagan wants to turn over to the lower levels of government. They are programs that affect mi norities and the disadvantaged the most. They are programs the states have never shown a real interest in funding and, in fact, have never done a very good job of running. ,Thus, Reagan's New Federalism is far from the "bold and spirited ini tiative" he called it in his message. It amounts to an outright shirking of the federal government's responsibilities. In the Reagan mythology these programs can be most efficiently run at the lower levels of government. In fact, several state politicians already are claiming that they don't have the resources to oversee effectively new responsibilities. Certainly the trust fund will defray only a small part of the additional costs to the states. Already several congressmen have expressed strong opposition to much of Reagan's proposal. It should act as a springboard for a counter proposal that could fulfill the president's hope of making the federal government a more efficient body. The solution to that problem, however, does not lie in a short-sighted ditching of federal responsibi lities. ' The Bottom Line : Paltry puns It's out. After weeks of pun-ishing anxiety, the list of 10 best-stressed puns has been released Oh, these clever con coctions of conversation tidbits will tickle the tastes of the most taciturn tale-teller. The list was compiled by John Crosbie, chairman of the Inter national Save-the-Pun Foundation in Toronto, Canada. And, if there was ever any doubt that original, witty puns needed to be saved from extinction, this list should put those fears to rest. Permanently. For example, there is the one about the French chef who tried a new dish for breakfast. He fried frogs dipped in a batter and served them dripping with syrup to unsus pecting guests. French toads. Or the one about Sam the frog and Tony the turtle who decided to go in to business by opening a reptile dis co. Unfortunately, Tony died before the opening night and Sam had to finish the preparations himself. In Heaven, Tony pleaded with God to let him return to earth for the St? liatlu (Bar mnl 89th year of editorial freedom opening night. Ciod allowed Tony to go as long as he would wear a halo, take his harp and be back by curfew 2 a.m. Heaven time. Well, Tony had a great time, with his old friends on earth and barely slipped back through the pearly gates on time. God praised Tony for mak ing the curfew and keeping the halo but had to inquire about Tony's harp. Tony replied while breaking into song, "I left my heart in Sam Frog's disco." Well, we at The Daily Tar Heel are particularly proud of-our Own pun making. Our Weather Ear each day has pun-ctually promoted such headings as Moist Assuredly, Rain of Terror and Gray Expectations. Per haps one day we'll make a list. In the meantime, did you hear the story about the man who brought a miner to the zoo to help with experi ments on the long-life expectancy of porpoises? He brought the miner in despite the presence of some lions who were asleep in front of the door. Well, the man was arrested for transporting a miner across staid lions for immortal porpoises. And that's the bottom line. Drescher, JOHN DRESCHER Q. What do you see as the weaknesses of The Daily Tar Heel? D. 1 don't feel like in the past year we've done the kind of probing and in vestigation that we should have. I think it is a newspaper's obligation to investigate as well as report the news. Q. Has the University news been co vered as accurately or completely as1 it should? D. Accuracy and completeness are two different questions. I think the University news desk has done a good job in the past year. The only area 1 would like to see more of is graduate students and their or ganizations, because they make up about 6,000 people on this campus and it's fun ny, because you hardly read about them. Also, a lot of campus groups get our money and we don't even know what their initials stand for. I would like to see a lot more in-depth kind of stories on campus organizations. Q. There are more than 100 of these or ganizations. We barely publish that many newspapers a year. Can you cover one group and not another? D. You can't worry about whose pic ture you are putting in this week, or whose organization you're going to cover. It's a news judgement decision. I think some obvious choices would be or ganizations that get the most student funds and then organizations that involve the most people on campus. John Drescher Q. An area you expounded on in your brochure was for more news from outside Chapel Hill. D. Right. A girl at a hall meeting the other night said that I was the first edito rial candidate that she heard of that was campaigning for more news coverage out side of Chapel Hill. For most students on campus, the DTH is the only paper they read. The great majority of people told me they want to have more news from outside Chapel Hill. 1 propose two structural changes in the newspaper: one is the expansion of "News In Brief and its movement to page one, so we'll have five "News In Brief" on the front page every day, in the easily read position in the paper. This is effective for people in a hurry, it's a good way to find out what's going on outside of Chapel Hill real quick. Contrary to what some people have said, if there's a major news story that day the example I heard is "what if President Reagan was shot" it will not be two paragraphs in "News In Brief." If the major (national) news story of the day is the lead story of the day, it will run on the front page, but I will still have those five "News In Brief." If we have two longer stories, I would cut down to three or four "News In Brief," depending on what news we have at the University, too. Q. , How will University news be af fected? D. What I think is that we'll see longer stories on University affairs. Some people have asked, 'Where are you going to find space for that?" One effective way to do that is run it in a three or four part series. . Another thing we have to do is' go ahead and use the back page for some longer investigative-type stories. I would suggest we start using the back page for some of our longer in-depth stories or University news, even if they are not necessarily opinion. Q. What is the "Week In Review" that you mention in your brochure? D. "Week In Review" is another move 1 am making to expand coverage from outside Chapel Hill. Every Friday on the editorial page, I'll have a summary and analysis of the week's top stories. If there':, a big story from Chapel Hill, we'll . include that too. As far as length, I'd say about a third of the editorial page. is S s V N N "v X X r k X Stv 4 v s I Ml ' f X o : X f': - v X . I V, U ' I f . i i Rich discuss proposals for 'DTH' editorship Q. What is your proposal about putting sports in the Spotlight! D. I am going to expand our coverage of sports, and there is absolutely no room for that in the daily paper; it's just too crowded for it. The room for it is in the Spotlight. So I am going to have three to five features on athletes and teams play ing that weekend. This will really enable us to expand our coverage of non-revenue sports and do a little bit more on club sports. Another-reason for the change is be cause we have had difficulty attracting advertisers to the Spotlight. We lost, last year, $8,000 on Spotlight. This year, Interviews with the two candidates competing for editor of The Daily Tar Heel, John Drescher and Jonathan Rich, were con ducted by Bill Peschel. Peschel, a staff writer for the DTH, talked with the candidates this week about their past experience at the DTH, what they plan to do if elected and what changes they would make as editor. we've been breaking even, and I think it's because we've gone back to that weekend emphasis, which I like. I feel, this town, as sports-crazy as it is, you start putting in three, four or five profiles and features on athletes and teams and readership is going to increase drastically. When that happens, we will be able to attract a lot more advertisers to the Spotlight. When that happens, we'll be able to expand it in size. In the beginning, the size will be the same, so the question is, what's going to go? The first thing that's going to go is some of the longer stories in the middle. For example, the story that we ran on cancer about a year ago in Spotlight. I don't see us running those kinds of stories in the Spotlight anymore. This past week, we did the one on air guitar. That is the kind of story I want to see in the Spotlight. Now, that's a very small Spotlight; I think that it might be unfair to ask where I might get the space from that one, but yes, we are going to have to cut back on arts and features a lit tle bit in the beginning. Q. Describe your journalistic experi ence. D.I started the summer of my sopho more year, two years ago. I started in fea tures, writing one feature a week, often two. The second week of August was when I switched over to sports, and there I wrote a weekly column called "Intra murals and Clubs" as well as doing other sports assignments for the paper. When there was an opening on the back page in mid-October for an editorial assistant, I was asked if 1 wanted that position. So, that October of 1980, and from that time until I quit in November of 1981, 1 worked continuously for the DTH, including a summer on the editorial page of the sum mer Tar Heel. So that gives me more than 12 months of editorial page experience. When I quit in November, I had far more editorial page experience in terms of months, than anybody else. Q. How long were you with the sports department and how long with features? D. Features was three months in the summer of 1980; sports was approxi mately mid-August to mid-October 1981. Q. You also had an internship with The Raleigh News and Observer. D. I think it's important for the editor to have seen how a large news operation is run. This is a large news operation here. I was a reporter in Raleigh for the News and Observer last summer, working for the city and state desks. I did have a story almost every day I worked; it was more than 45 for the summer and I did have 1 1 front-page stories. r;'4 r'v- I ' A . v v . J r I I' ' t' f' - 1 I '".'',. S y"" ft i' ... FIi : ' "-,. V ' ' - ttfctiiiK'-''"',M'-',''m -n ' 1 '" ',,,'"''"lf'J"-v-fJI'':'"-'-,s''n"'r-'-iTrriiiiiiiTiiiiiiii ni-- ' i mm m nr r Jonathan Rich (left) and John Drescher .editorial candidates answer question at a forum JONATHAN RICH t Q. What do you think are the weak nesses of The Daily Tar Heel? R. The DTH has been, for years, one Df the best student newspapers in the country. This tradition could also be a hindrance in that it is very easy to do things as they have been done before, to assume that we are doing a good job, that we are a good paper and that there is not a lot more that we could do. It is impor tant for an editor to go in there and chal lenge the old ideas, the old ways of doing things. That would be my first priority. Q. University news; how well do you think that has been covered? R. I think there has been a real problem with our local and University news in that it has been too traditional. For example, reporting about Student Government and the Campus Governing Council. We need to do more than tell you what they are doing. We need to tell you if they have been doing a good job or a bad job. Another thing is, we're missing a lot of important stories around campus. For ex ample, we never mention rape. There was this whole controversy on South Campus about assaults on black women. We didn't know what was going on during these two weeks. Meanwhile, the campus was suffering because of these very nasty letters to the editor. Another example was town politics. We didn't know enough about the candidates for Town Council to even endorse them, which is really a bad sign because these elections affect a lot of Chapel Hill students. A problem is that most of our good writers are working on regular beats, so you're going to need some good, innova tive, talented writers who are going to be able to go out and spend the time finding out what's going on around campus. One of my main ideas is to put at least one in vestigative writer on every news desk. Q. To quote from your brochure, "As editor, my first priority would be a paper that draws on student input to address the diverse concerns of the University." How? R. Two things. First of all, as I said, I think there is a real problem with the paper in that we are not open to what stu dents want to see in our paper. I ran an informal survey of 200 people last fall, and a lot of that information are things that I built my brochure on. As editor, I would run another formal survey, not only to see what students would want in their paper, and what qualitative changes they would like, but also one thing that has come up is. distri bution. It's a real problem with a lot of students, and I want to make a formal study of distribution and see where there are too many papers going to a certain area and not enough to others. Another thing I have been stressing is the input of students to improve the paper. What we can do to improve the paper is to draw upon other journalism students and graduate students. There is an unhealthy split between the students who work within the paper and students in the journalism school. We especially need to attract students around campus .who have diverse interests and concerns, and a lot of diverse, talent. There are two posts that would indi rectly help this: one is a contributions editor. This is someone whose main job would be to attract the talent from around the University, everything from professors to graduate students. Another idea is a special projects editor, who DIHS:m Simi$- would stay above the day-to-day opera tion. There is a real problem in that most of the desk editors have barely enough time to worry about their own stories; they have to fill the paper the next day. A special projects editor would look around campus, find those areas that we're not covering well enough, and coordinate the longer-term studies which would address local and state concerns. Q. The changes you suggest seem to be more of an internal nature of opening avenues of opportunity to those students willing to come out. Do you have any plans for the DTH reaching out to the students? R. The investigative writers I men tioned earlier would not be expected to spend much time around the paper. They would be out talking to people, finding the stories. The same with the special pro jects editor; I expect him or her to have a lot of outside contacts. Q. Another of your promises is to maintain a large editorial staff. How would that compare to the editorial staff now? R. It would be approximately the same. What I would like the editor in charge of contributions to do is develop almost an informal staff of columnists and writers; people who are regularly contributing. They don't have to feel obligated to write something every, day. I would want at least five editorial writers and these would not all come from within the paper. What would be important is writing ability, but what is also important is that you have a diverse perspective on issues. That's why It 5 Jonathan Rich it is important to have on the editorial staff at least one black and at least one woman, and this is something we did have this year. Another reason why I want at least five is that I feel there has been a real problem in that we are not taking the time in our editorials to find out the facts, to do the research, to make the necessary contacts. One of the things that came up in my sur vey was editorials. They don't take a firm stand, they don't know what they are talking about. . Q. Another idea is the weekly specialty sections; describe that and how you will find the space for that. R. This will . be a two-page section, once a week, where you would have the space to devote to those subjects and topics that don't get enough coverage within the paper. One of these pages would be the back page. Now about the other page, at least half of that would come from within the, paper. I do have some financial ideas which I think would increase our revenues, the ability to have , that space in the paper. But I don't think we need to have that added revenue to have the section; I am confident of the space being there. Q. Describe your journalistic experi ence. R. I've been working on the DTH staff since the fall of my freshman year, which is about three years now. For my first year and a half I was a staff writer and columnist for the state and national desk. I wrote about 45 stories for the front and inside pages and I also wrote about 10 columns during that time. This past year I have, been the associate editor, which is the number three position on the DTH. My job was to run the back page, which has a staff of about eight people. I have also been writing three to four editorials and columns a week. But what I like to stress is my overall experience at the paper. I have had experience running the paper in the editor's absence. ' Q. You mentioned working this sum mer at a marketing and research firm. What were your duties there? R. The company was enlarging their sales personnel around the country con siderably, and my job was to determine where 80 of these people would be lo cated. This involved a lot of intricate re search about market conditions, financial conditions and that's where I got a lot of good business experience, working within t'.iat context. " i X l - tie c - f
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
Jan. 28, 1982, edition 1
6
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75