Each week, Newspeak allows the fraternities and sororities to submit columns which we print in our Greek Corner. We see the purpose of these corners as a means for fraternity members to communicate with other members as well as with the community. Through the Greek Corner, anyone who reads Newspeak gets a glimpse of what fraternities are doing, what issues are being discussed, what fraternity life is like, and the attitudes of fraternity members.
Recently, there has been some discussion about the content of Greek Corners. Even more recently, there has been some heated debated concerning particular corners. The purpose of this editorial is not to point fingers; it is to make people aware of the problems we are encountering with this section of our paper.
Submissions to the Greek Corner have changed over time. To put it bluntly, Greek Corners used to be quite eloquent and clear. For example, the following is the type of thing you might have read in a Greek Corner twenty years ago: "The soccer team has been involved in some exciting games. The first game against an independent team was a 9-8 victory, whereas we lost our second game, 5-4. Better luck next time! Officer elections were held last Saturday. The new officers include..." The Greek Corners of today sound somewhat like this, but there is a definite difference.
There's something else about the Greek Corners that we'd like to talk about: content. First, the reason why we give organizations this space is so they can let others know what is going on. Often, the corners are composed of a host of inside jokes and observations which are meaningless to those outside the fraternity. We don't have too much of a problem with this; after all, if this is how organizations want to use their space, that's fine by us, despite what we'd like to see. More importantly, we feel that the content of some of the corners (which is one of the principal ways that people outside your organizations get to know you) is not, we feel, how organizations want to pitch themselves. For a Greek Corner to mention how many pledges got trashed or how many girls Jimbo went home with after the party seems to go against the idea of differentiating between Animal House and WPI fraternities. Of course, not all Greek Corners sound like this, but quite a few of them do.
Discussions among the editors late last year and earlier this year sometimes revolved around the incoherent nature of some (not all!) of the Greek Corners. Of course, not being in all of these organizations probably contributes to our inability to understand many of the corners. Honestly, though, these things are hell to edit. In fact, unless we see a blatant or accidental mistake (the occasional "waht" instead of "what", or "friday" instead of "Friday"), we don't touch the corners. We don't try to fix grammar. We can't possibly fix spelling or capitalization of words we don't recognize. Often, we can't tell if the author meant to make a mistake if we see somthing that looks wrong. To be honest, we really don't care. For one thing, the corners are a submission by the respective Greek organization; they are not articles written by a member of the Newspeak staff. Besides, we really don't understand a lot of the Greek corners; it's hard to fix or change something that you don't understand anyway (or something that is so pitifully beyond English that it's not worth our time).
I just stated that Greek corners are submissions of the fraternities, not Newspeak material. Because of this, it is our belief that the Greek corners reflect on the organization which submitted it, not on Newspeak. We allow the fraternities to discuss what they wish. This is why we ran a particularly sensitive corner three weeks ago.
There also seems to be some question about our submission policy. Club and Greek corners are due to Newspeak by 5:00pm on Friday! When emailing your submission, do it before 4:59pm on Friday, because the system might be running slow and we might not get your email right away. There is a reason why we have this deadline! The 5:00 deadline gives us an opportunity to compile your submission, print it, proofread it, and place it in the paper. We feel that the 5:00 deadline is quite reasonable for both your organization and our operations. For this reason, we have no qualms about not accepting anything that comes in after 5:00pm on Friday, and we don't see much reason to extend it or to give grace periods after this time.
We also have space limits. We reserve a full page for the Club and Greek corners. We expect organizations to take advantage of this space. When all of the space is not taken, we fill the extra space with advertisements. Because we expect organizations to use the space they are alotted, we must limit the size of submissions. There is no minimum submission size, but our maximum limit is 275 words. We set this limit for two reasons. First, we believe that it allows organizations to say what they have to say. Second, it gives room to other organizations so that all submissions fit.
A few of you might be wondering where your Club or Greek corner is this week. "Hey, I submitted a corner. Why isn't it in the paper?" It has to do with size limits. In the past, no one really violated the size limits on submissions. Although our limit is 275, we didn't mind if a submission was 300 words or so; it wasn't very noticeable. However, last week we received a submission that was over 700 words (the submission made note of the fact that their organization's submission wasn't printed the week before, which the person responsible for the submission attributed to the shortness of the first one that wasn't printed. The author thought that a long submission would make up for this. More likely, the submission got to us late.). There was no way that we were going to run this submission because of its length. Unfortunately, if we were going to remove this one because of its length, we had to do the same to others. This week, we had to be especially hard on long corners, because of accusations that we didn't print a corner last week because of its contents. The author thought that we didn't print his submission because it was offensive. In reality, it wasn't that offensive, it was just too long (after all, we printed that debate-sparking corner, which was much more offensive, three weeks ago). If we find something very offensive or libelous in a corner, we will not print either the offending line or the entire submission (in the opinion of some editors, that debate-sparking corner's aim was not to offend, but to address a current issue).
The deadline, size limits, and policy against libelous submissions are mentioned in the Staff Box on the Opinion/Editorial page. Also, we ask that all submissions be emailed, which hasn't been a problem. We are discussing the possibility of changing our policy for Club and Greek corners. Maybe we'll allow longer submissions, but we make no promises right now.
We frequently submit Newspeak to competitions and critiquing associations. The most common critique we get is that the Club and Greek Corners (especially the Greek Corners) are meaningless babble that shouldn't be printed in our newspaper. However, we keep them in the paper because our paper is for the community, and if that's what the community wants to see, that's what we'll print.
By the way: in general, the Club Corners make a lot more sense than the Greek Corners. Just a hint.
And we don't print smileys.