New Sentinel, same problems

The newest issue of The Sentinel came out on Monday. Indeed, the staff gets better as a whole each issue (while it would be obviously hard to get worse from such humble beginnings…), I actually am quite impressed with the advancement of many individuals. While I thought I was truly the only one who could feasibly obsess the way I do, a few have come through the woodwork to seemingly care half as much as I do – and anyone who can obsess half as much as I can is undoubtedly making a statement to their dedication.

Nevertheless, I am impressed with some.

Meanwhile, we have won two major awards this year (the pacemaker we picked up was for LAST YEAR’S paper, and thus I attribute none of the acclaim to the current staff in place, including myself). While winning “Best-of-Show” in Kansas City was my goal from the beginning of this school year (the second “Best-of-Show” award for our special election section was but an exclamation point to what I already expected), we handily won on a seriously sub-par issue. And I hate to sound cocky in that I expect to create the best paper in the country, it is only because there lacks any real competition.

Just glancing though our larger-than-most paper may pique the jealousy from other two-year institutions – even some universities – but a deeper, thorough perusing will unveil a serious problem: We have not begun to showcase the serious potential we are blessed with. We are still a paper struggling with the same problems seen in those publications we beat in competition.

The Sentinel is like a beautiful woman with a pushup bra and low-cut shirt, but not enough makeup to cover her acne.

You see, we overwhelm people with full-page, color layouts devoid of ads and lots of big photos, that nobody notices the numerous misspellings in stories or the typos in captions. The glorious cutout of the soccer player on this issue’s cover is amazing, to say the least, but how is it that we told the reader to look at page “B11” for the continued story … WHEN THERE ISN’T EVEN A “B-SECTION” in this issue!?

It’s my fault.

I have spent so much time worrying about minor issues to please myself (whether columns line up along the bottom of a story, whether there’s a border around a photo or if we have a good photo to cutout for the cover), that I have put the overall quality of our paper on the back burner. I have been more worried about the small elements of design than the overall image; and while my lead role for this paper is “Managing Editor,” I have spent more time managing than I have editing. If I can work more at doing my job than making sure everybody else is doing theirs, we won’t just be the best two-year school newspaper in the country but the best newspaper, period.

Like Alison Atwell said: “Jake Donahue is an ass and freely admits it.” As cocky as I was in Kansas City (when asked who I was by members of the Daily Nebraskan, instead of just saying my name was Jake, I went one step further: “You wanna know who I am? I’ll tell you what, why don’t you just show up for the awards ceremony on Sunday, and when they start handing out “Best-of-Show” awards, I’ll be the guy on stage most of the event collecting plaques!!”), I should probably start working on that.

Maybe next time I’ll introduce myself as “The guy who MIGHT be collecting all the plaques on Sunday.” You see, that doesn’t necessarily mean I am guaranteeing victory, but merely insinuating it.

Baby steps, people. Baby steps.