"You will never find the more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious."
- Obi-Wan Kenobi, "Star Wars"
We here at The Spectrum (Motto: "Sleep Is for the Weak") tend to annoy people. Perhaps "annoy" is too mild a term. At times, large swaths of students, faculty, staff and their pets loathe us the fire of 1,000 exploding suns.
According to my informal survey, approximately 2,359 individuals or groups on campus view The Spectrum as "the moral equivalent of Nazis or worse."
I could delve into specifics of the who and what, but that would only open wounds hopefully healed. I think much of the anger stems from misunderstandings, misinterpretations and just plain ignorance about a newspaper's structure. This lack of knowledge is nothing malicious. How many fully comprehend the inner workings of a 1998 Dodge Neon, or Microsoft's Windows XP? Or silly putty?
The creative license afforded myself as resident Spectrum mental patient allows me to address and hopefully correct this systemic lack of knowledge. Our journey will proceed page by page through this wondrous world of ink and processed tree pulp.
First, a quick overview of our five desks: arts and entertainment, campus news, editorial, feature and sports. Campus news reports on the big news and big words of UB. "Bioinformatics?" That's them: the bread of our sandwich.
Feature, arts and entertainment and sports are the meat, pickle and good, stiff drink of our feast, respectively. They provide the stories that highlight the people, events, trends and cool happenings that make UB the place it is.
Finally, editorial, my home for the past two years. What gets a drunk in a bar in the most trouble? His mouth and his fists. That's editorial.
Okay, page one. The front page of any newspaper is the most important part. To use the analogy most inappropriate, think of prostitutes.
Prostitutes in Amsterdam, where the practice is legal, display their "wares" from behind the glass fa?\0xA4ade of an establishment to pedestrians. If a man (or woman) likes what he (or she) sees, they inquire further within.
Our front page is quite similar. Instead of the "come hither" finger-crooking of scantily clad Dutch women, we offer the similarly enticing prospect of headlines like "Greiner's Gun-Toting Rampage Comes to Bloody End" or "Bulls Capture National Title." In theory, anyway. Hopefully, the front page encourages the reader to look within our pages.
Page two is solely reserved for jump space for articles that run long on the front page, with one exception you're all undoubtedly familiar with: the Safety Report. "Lockwood masturbator." There's really not more to be said, is there?
Page three contains additional stories, or jumps from page one. Digression alert: if you are a member of the UB community with a subject you think we should write about, inform us. This does not mean, however, you can write about your sorority's "Bras and Bullets" war bond fundraiser. That's called conflict of interest, children.
Pages four and five: my territory. Here is where we encounter the most confusion. The following terms will be used to describe very specific items. As a wise man said, "Words mean things."
Looking to the farthest left on page four, you will see editorials. Editorials reflect the general consensus of the paper. My column is not an editorial. Letters to the editor are not editorials. If you are not an editor, you will not write an editorial. Follow this simple rule: if it has a name on it, it is not an editorial.
Type "editorial" enough, and you'll go cross-eyed. Uggh.
Page five is our opinion page. What you see here is the responsibility of the author. If you disagree, you do so with the author, not The Spectrum. Don't think Elizabeth Fox-Solomon proudly displays her "W in 2004" bumper sticker just because I do.
The opinion page has a number of informal mottos: "We sell propane and propane accessories," "The world is our punching bag" and "We are right. You are not." I'm partial to the final one. Too arrogant and judgmental? Good.
Beyond pages four and five the reader treads into uncharted territory. "Uncharted" because the content of those pages is dictated by the number of stories we have, size of the paper, and if jump space is necessary for other stories.
Again, digression. When, for one reason or another, stories fall through, we're left with white space. We hate white space. White space is the white devil. To fill that space, we run "wire."
"Wire" comes from a service we subscribe to that provides stories from The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. We do not "steal" these stories or pass them off as our own. The bylines clearly indicate the story's point of origin. The "A" section of the Buffalo News is mostly wire.
The inner jungle of the paper is pierced on Wednesdays by Arts and Entertainment, successor to the Prodigal Sun. Wondering when and where you can watch a man burn leaves on stage with a recorded baby's cry in the background, call it art, and qualify for a federal grant? This here's the place.
The second-to-last page is classifieds. Please support your local neighborhood capitalists and purchase their goods and/or services.
Sports, the yin to the front page's yang, rests on the final page. They've certainly had their work cut out for them these past few years. How easy could it be to cover a football team ranked dead last in the nation with the Sports Illustrated comment, "At least comatose WWI veterans would struggle to overcome this MAC powerhouse." But, thankfully for their sanity, our teams are on the up swing.
We've come to the end of our tour. Hopefully, next time you ask yourself, "Just what the heck is that?" you'll know.
Of course, if you're a surgeon, that question has much larger ramifications.
But at least you now know just what is an editorial.
