Puzzle Pieces: Adventures in Student Journalism

(In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote for the paper I will be discussing today, covering men’s and women’s golf for the Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 semesters.)

The Independent Florida Alligator is a proud bastion of student-run newspaper journalism. Go to the paper’s Wikipedia page and you can read about its huge daily circulation (35,000), distinguished alumni (Carl Hiaasen and Philip Graham lead the list), and unusual status as a paper unaffiliated with the university it serves.

Its reporting and editorial content are derided as the stereotypical liberal claptrap you see in a college paper. The accuracy of that charge varies by the day.

But The Alligator is most often perused by students for its sports section. The alligatorSports crew, many of whom I have met, corresponded, and worked with, usually does an excellent job of covering the snarled sprawl that is the University of Florida’s cohort of varsity sports.

This is especially true in football, where the sports staff often is fighting not just local media, but also national reporters from ESPN, and, this year, The New York Times, which has profiled Jeff Demps and Tim Tebow in recent weeks, for scoops on beat reports and the best possible angles on profiles.

I usually read and enjoy the few pages devoted to sports every day.

Not today. Today, errors abound.

Editor Brian Steele’s article on blocked punts gives us this gawky gem

"It was UF’s fifth and sixth blocked punts of the season."

It’s the standalone third paragraph in the online version of the story, but it gets rolled into the second paragraph for print. The phrase could be fixed in a number of ways, such as making it a clause of the prior sentence, pluralizing it, or attributing both blocks to Carlos Dunlap there and not further into the body of the story. It wasn’t.

In Bobby Callovi’s article on UF’s women’s soccer team, he mentions Urban Meyer in the first paragraph and then slips this ponderous paragraph into the end of the story.

"Losing is never fun, but there were a few bright spots that came from the defeat."

The questions about whether the first phrase is empirically true frame a debate for another day. The crime here is the totally trite sentence, a clear use of journalistic filler in the place of statistics or actual insight.

Likewise, Christopher Yazbec’s piece on UF women’s basketball remarks on “the best part about losing,” but at least he had the good sense to not write, “Losing is never fun.”

Evan Drexler’s section-leading story on Tim Tebow’s Heisman campaign is just one more decibel in that echo chamber, and the comatose lede doesn’t help.

"The Gators had such a dominating night on offense that coach Urban Meyer decided to take quarterback Tim Tebow out of the game before the third quarter was complete."

There are about three hundred other ways to write that, and about two hundred of those might get readers to do something other than snore into their Starbucks latte du jour.

For example:

"The reigning Heisman Trophy winner stalked the sideline in Saturday’s second half."

"But what UF’s Tim Tebow did in the first half against Vanderbilt was more than enough to both put the game out of reach and reignite his Heisman hype machine."

That’s not the best lede ever, but it draws you in and segues to the rest of the article. It took me about three minutes to write, and it’s better than Drexler’s.