Talk:Daily Free Press

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The Daily Free Press should have its own article. I propose keeping the article separate because newspapers have thier own Wiki articles, and the paper is not officially recognized by Boston University. The article can be edited to acheive a longer length and quality. Assawyer 18:55, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with Boston Uni

I vote that this article be merged with the main article on Boston University. It is clear from the article that the Daily Free Press has no life, certainly no meaning, without the University. Let me quote from the article: 'All writers, photographers and business staffers are BU students.' Enough said. --die Baumfabrik 02:10, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

If your logic held, that would mean any state agency article would have to belong to the main state page. Clearly this article is more than a stub and has value. For the above mentioned reasons I object to its move.Assawyer 14:38, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

How do people feel about removing the merge suggestion? I think the article is filling out now and will no longer fit nicely into the BU main page.SwissFirecracker 05:22, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to remove it. Being bold and all that. Jeff Greco 22:07, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of Criticisms Section?

Why was the criticisms section removed? The concerns presented were legitimate and objective.

I am adding the section back until anyone can provide a valid reason for its removal. SwissFirecracker 03:48, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Those criticisims could be true of any newspaper, not just BU's student paper. I do not think that it should remain, as the claims are not supported by verifiable fact and generic.Assawyer 05:36, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

My only concern is that the article without any criticism is extremely one-sided, glorifying a seemingly flwaless newspaper. The criticism section could be substantiated with fact such as the admission of plagerized articles in January 2006/December 2005. Also the mis-attributed quotes claim is also backed by fact, however exposing the nature of the misquote would compromise the anonymity of the contributor. SwissFirecracker 06:11, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I have just updated the main article with substantiated claims of criticism and plagiarism in the paper. I have removed, for now, claims about the relationship of the paper with the university as they were less objective.SwissFirecracker 06:36, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I like what you have done with the sections. I think the article will look more balanced if more information is added about the paper. Assawyer 23:16, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

First let me state that I am a Freep staffer and past member of the editorial board. I agree that this article shouldn't be glorifying the paper and ignoring anything negative; the plagiarism section is a valid addition about a significant event in the paper's history. However, I don't think it's fair to say that "The newspaper has been criticized by students for grammatical and spelling errors," as this claim is not substantiated by any evidence other than one person's opinion. Moreover, I find the claim that "Such errors suggest a lack of proofreading" rather biased -- not to mention incorrect. I know that there is proofreading because I've done it myself and am very meticulous about editing my copy. Of course the paper makes mistakes -- some of which are quite embarrassing -- but it is unfair to paint the editors with such broad strokes. Anyone can tell you that the mistake about the "International Revenue Service" is not at all significant, and doesn't deserve such attention in a relatively short article. As someone pointed out above, proofreading mistakes occur in every newspaper, from the worst college rag to the New York Times. This article is supposed to be specific to the Free Press, and so a discussion of this error or similar ones is not relevant. While I think the entire "Criticism of the Daily Free Press" section should not be included here (the fact that it's poorly written is not the least of its faults), I don't feel that it's my place to do anything about it. What I'd really like is for someone to address these points and explain why the section deserves to stay.

As a former editor of the Freep, I'll be the first to admit that embarrassing mistakes were made under my watch, an inevitble reality for even professional editors. But to call out the FreeP for grammatical mistakes, as the previous commenter pointed out, is petty nonsense. Because the FreeP is a haven for amateur, untested writers, editors are often charged with cleaning up copy that is, at first, unreadable. The plagiarism debacle occurred under my watch, and I don't dispute that its implications have an important place in the chronicling of Daily Free Press history. It was my lowest moment as the editor, and I literally spent days without sleep poring over the offending reporters articles to discover every instance of plagiarism I could find (there were many). While it was regrettable, what resulted was both a change in the editorial board and a new system of checks that I am confident prevented instances of plagiarism from occurring again (we caught several before they went to print). I think what the plagiarism incident shows is not a point of criticism -- plagiarism has occurred at the FreeP for years, as I discovered -- but a willingness to preemptively admit egregious mistakes publicly and set the record straight, when sweeping it under the rug would have been easier. I used the correction tool far more frequently than my predecessors, not because we had a greater number of errors, but because my editorial staff and I were more concerned about setting the record straight than about avoiding the embarrassment of admitting mistakes.

A criticism page cannot be fair or balanced because no accurate barometer of the readers can actually be taken. I was on hand for some of the harshest criticism and greatest praise the FreeP has known and I still couldn't say what the prevailing feelings are. Any criticism of the paper should be directed to the editor of the FreeP in the form of a letter to the editor. Criticizing a newspaper's content by sidestepping the paper itself is not only unfair, but irrepsonsible. While the editor's note on plagiarism ran online (I made that choice because of the magnitude of the error), many other less serious corrections ran in the print edition to correct mistakes such as the "International Revenue Service." All that matters is that the editors are made aware of the error, and, as I did and am sure my successors will do, it will be corrected.