In mentioning to others my new role as Co-Editor in chief of The Weather Vane, the question I repeatedly encounter – even from EMU students and staff – is, “Wait, you guys do The Weather Vane every week?”
The simple answer to this question is yes. Staff meets Wednesday evenings for assignments and production and Friday mornings for feedback from our advisor. 5 p.m. on Mondays marks the deadline for submissions, etc., etc. Production of the student newspaper is a regimented, simple, weekly routine.
And perhaps it shouldn’t be.
This is a school with a dwindling population and a dearth of students in the writing program. In desperately trying to recruit more staff for this semester, I came to the realization that there are virtually no people on campus interested in journalism and even fewer willing to sacrifice their free time to work on a student newspaper. Where the majority of The Weather Vane’s staff not compelled to work on the paper for pay or credit, I highly doubt the paper would exist at all due to lack of interest.
This lack of interest in journalism is nothing new. For years, my English teachers and professors have lamented the death of magazines and the replacement of newspapers by Reddit headlines. It is exactly because of journalism’s waning popularity that we should continue to publish The Weather Vane so that we can continue to offer staff the opportunity to learn about the editing and publishing process and provide students the chance to indulge in something created by their peers. However, it would be foolish not to adapt in some manner to the demand (or rather lack thereof) of readers.
In recent years, journalism has had to work extra hard to garner an audience due to the public’s disinterest. Publications must be even more interesting, more full of verve, more expansive than ever in order to win a second look. This is difficult to do even on large scales and especially difficult to do here at EMU.
As I’ve mentioned, EMU has a small and steadily declining population. While a small student body is wonderful in that it allows for smaller class sizes and a stronger sense of community, most EMU students can also list for you its downsides, and nearly all members of The Weather Vane’s staff can tell you that it results in very little fodder for journalistic coverage. Other than our first issue of the year, each subsequent one has been difficult to fill due to a few events and new faces on campus. This has led us to publish articles that many of us agree no one will read because we know it’s not particularly interesting, but we have to put something in.
And if the goal is to keep journalism exciting (it is), filler articles are not exactly conducive to doing so.
The other big problem we have, of few staff members, sometimes leads to less thorough coverage of events than we hope. This is absolutely no fault of the staff, but of people prioritizing their classes (as they should), having to complete an assignment in a small amount of time, and being given a heavier Weather Vane workload because of few staff members. I myself scramble to write pieces (as I am doing currently) in between classes or late at night after I have already spent hours doing homework.
And so how do we solve this problem? Maybe multiply the student population by three or four, drum up a ton of enthusiasm in the student body for journalism so that we have a large and varied staff. Or maybe, since neither of these changes seems very feasible, we could just publish The Weather Vane less frequently. Ironically, in order to preserve the excitement of journalism, I think we should participate in it less and publish our student newspaper every other week. Doing so could prompt more of the student body to become involved in production because it would be less of a time commitment, would result in better articles as more time could be devoted to them, and would lead to fewer filler articles as there would be more events to cover in the span of two weeks rather than one. This ultimately would lead to a higher quality, more interesting version of The Weather Vane which hopefully would amass more readers.
Of course, a publication is nothing without its readers and so I’d like to know: Would you be sorely disappointed if The Weather Vane were to be published less frequently? Do you think doing so would help improve the quality of the paper and consequently result in a higher level of interest in the paper and journalism as a whole? Write me at wvane@emu.edu and let me know.
