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A Daily Conflict of Interest

Update 6/14/06: Added point about hiring of editors, and clarified a few minor things.

I guess I didn’t mention it here earlier, but I’m a staff photographer for The Spartan Daily at SJSU this semester. I wanted to see explore my recent obsession with photography, but I think this semester has all but confirmed that my true calling likely lies in economics (see my LiveJournal for more on that). I’ve always doubted photojournalism was the way I was meant to change the world. After all, only a small slice of it is visible to cameras (try illustrating comparative advantage or opportunity cost with a photograph). Because of that, photos in newspapers are often used merely to fill space or as eye candy to draw readers (it’s telling that the best paper in the country by far, The Wall Street Journal, hardly runs any photos and indeed used to run none altogether). It’s a useful function, but it’s not the primary one of journalism, which is to inform and educate.

I still think my true calling will involve writing. Of course, I don’t intend to write for the Daily, because to tell the truth, it’s just not a quality publication. To be sure, it’s a bit unfair to compare it to the WSJ (required reading for my Public Policy course) or even The Daily Californian (which I probably didn’t judge as critically when I was there), but almost every time I attempt to read The Spartan Daily, I find it a poor use of my time. Erika agrees, saying that most of the stories read little more like press releases. Heck, at the Don Edwards Lecture featuring Terence Smith on Wednesday night, political science professor Terry Christensen couldn’t resist making a crack at how far the Daily has fallen.

Given that I haven’t worked on the writing side, my various theories as to what’s going wrong and how to address them are probably not worth much to anybody (which is why I blog). But there’s one thing that really sticks out as an obvious flaw. I may regret saying this, but I’ve generally been underwhelmed by most of the opinion columns (which tend to make up an unusually central role in this paper, for some reason). And I think there’s one really obvious reason behind this. You see, the paper is currently in the process of selecting the editors for next semester. Once that’s done, the editors then get to select the opinion columnists — inevitably themselves.