Hi-Line Now Only Marginally Better Than Courier

Someone was nice enough to leave a copy of this week's Hi-Line laying around at a coffee shop the other day, so I read it.

Here are my two big problems with it:

1). There are three news stories in this week's issue. One is on an art show at the Hearst Center. Another is on a Renaissance Program that I'm guessing is to reward students for having a 3.0 or higher. (What is that, a B, B-?) The third one is on gay marriage being legalized and is written by Monica Reida, who wrote a great article that someone fucked up. But since gay marriage being legal is something that newspapers across the country were talking about, shouldn't that be on the front page? Why is some student rewards program that is like Book It, but less sensical be on the front page? On another note, the article on the Renaissance program sucks. First of all, it makes no sense. Second of all, this quote is terrible:

Senior Michael Rogers disagrees with the program’s discontinuation. “That’s really lame. If I’d worked so hard to get good grades, I’d be pretty mad if they got rid of the reward. If you’re doing that good, there’s no real point in taking the final anyway,” Rogers said. “I guess the gift certificates and stuff are cool, though.”

The gift certificates are cool. Great. Teenage apathy, magnified.

Maybe I'm looking at this wrong. Maybe because some of the writers (I think it's obvious which one's they are) are so much better than everyone else, it really makes the poor writing and reporting of everyone else really obvious. Especially if you're sharing a section with a certain theater critic.

Which brings me to my second point.

2). Do any of the editors look at that newspaper before it goes to print? Because there is a pretty obvious error that the writer did not make with the article.

This is how the end of the first and the beginning of the second column reads in the print edition:

After the ruling was announced, there was celebration among gays, lesbians, bisexuals and their allies throughout the state as well as the according to UNI Proud the turn out for the first rally was very large.

What? Does that sentence make no sense to anyone other than me?

Then the end of the second column and the beginning of the third column reads like this:

The mood at the rally was that of ebullience along with some surprise nation.

As awesome as it is that she used "ebullience" to describe something, I have no clue what a "surprise nation" is. Other than maybe a new country in Africa.

Judging from what is in the columns, I thought that maybe if you switched around the second and the third column, the article might make a bit of sense. If not, Monica Reida went nuts after seeing a terrible play.

So, this is how the first and second columns read after I switched them.

After the ruling was announced, there was celebration among gays, lesbians, bisexuals and their allies throughout the state as well as the nation.

And the second and third columns:

The turnout for the later rally was of a nice size, but according to UNI Proud the turn out for the first rally was very large.

Don't they make so much more sense?

This is how the article appears on the online version. It flows very nicely and because I've been reading what Monica Reida's been writing since August, I think it's safe to say that that is not her mistake, it's the editors.

Unless she's now an editor because judging from her blog and how the "Our View" reads, she wrote something the editorial staff is supposed to write. I don't think anyone else would end something with "We hope that as time goes on, the opponents of the ruling will see that allowing same-sex marriage to occur does not result in the end of the world."

But this isn't the first time the editors of the Hi-Line have made it very obvious that they don't proofread. For example, in Monica Reida's article on plays in Eastern Iowa, one section reads like this:

The company, which is still fairly new, has done The Flu Season by Will Eno, and Betrayal by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, among others. Stage Left Productions did this in a poorly heated room in Cedar Rapids but presently it is one of the finest productions I have ever seen in my 12 years of attending live theater.

What did Stage Left do that she thought was brilliant? We don't know. Maybe it's The Flu Season or maybe it's Betrayal or maybe it's something else they did.

And then there is "Ban-Rays", but I can't harp on that forever. Actually, I could. I just don't feel like it.

But what's happened with the article on the Supreme Court's ruling is ridiculous. Do they put together that newspaper by hand? Because then I could understand it. Other wise, that shouldn't be happening. Hell, I don't even think that the Courier has done that before.

I wonder if Monica Reida is angry over this. She should be. She has every right to be angry.