If you Get What You Pay For, What if It's Free?
Written: Nov 09 '05 (Updated Nov 10 '05)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Quality of news coverage: |
 |
|
| Quality of editorial content: |
|
|
|
Pros: good coverage of Illinois sports
Cons: free - and worth it
The Bottom Line: A typical college newspaper - long on posturing and short on information.
|
|
|
| scmrak's Full Review: Daily Illini |
Five days a week during the school year, you can pick up a copy of the Daily Illini - the house organ of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - either from a box on campus or online (http://www.dailyillini.com/). Either way, you get it free - though that's not much of a bargain. Of the student-published newspapers at four universities with which I've been associated over the years (Arizona, Indiana, Texas, Illinois) the Daily Illini is clearly the most run of the mill. It's average both from a content point of view and from a "polish" point of view.
Content-wise, the Daily Illini is your typical college newspaper: the biggest national and international story garners a photo and a story above the fold on page one, and then the remainder of that page and pages two and three contain local news with a focus on the student population (hence lots of stories about bars). The staff rewrites AP stories for a one-page roundup of national and international news. For filler, the editors frequently insert stories culled from other university newspapers. On the opinion page, a rotating crew of poly-sci, business, and journalism majors rehashes national and local arguments. This can prove quite amusing, as the pundits often seem to emulate Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin in early SNL "point-counterpoint" skits: remember "Jane, you ignorant slut"? Yes, those skits.
The politics of the regular contributors is unsurprisingly predictable: columnist X will always choose the leftist position; columnist Y will write from the right wing. It's as if they're e-mailed daily scripts by a pair of offsetting left- and right-wing propaganda centers. As for input from the public, unless there's a hot debate raging about Chief Illiniwek (the university mascot recently deemed "hostile and abusive" by the NCAA) or the latest student to be killed by a campus bus, the letters section requires padding by more "editorials" from other college newspapers. A few weekly columns - on games, electronics, sports, etc. - occur on the back page, and the DI co-publishes a local "arts and entertainment" section that comes out on Thursday, with movie and music reviews and even an occasional restaurant review. Nothing on books, though...
Section B contains sports, entertainment, and classifieds, of which about 90% advertise housing. Sports coverage is concentrated on Illini teams - which is as it should be, I suppose - and the sports section rarely mentions professional teams based more than 300 miles from the campus. National cartoons printed by the DI include Doonesbury and Boondocks, the first exiled from the local paper and the second hidden in its classified section. A smattering of locally-drawn cartoons completes the comics section; they're hit-or-miss and, frankly, usually miss. The paper also carries local television listings.
Polish-wise, the DI frequently needs the Grammar Curmudgeon's help. Grammatical errors crop up everywhere, even in the largest typefaces on the page. Staff writers must sometimes consider themselves smarter than their spell-checkers and feel no need for dictionaries and thesauri. Logistically speaking, two hilarious major publishing snafus occurred in the last year (printed version): in late April 2005, the newspaper inadvertently reprinted the entire front page of their March 12th edition, trumpeting to the world that Madrid's commuter trains had been bombed - again? And, once during the past summer (when the DI is published three days per week) the newspaper printed the precise same story (with the same grammatical errors) on two different pages. Editing standards are, I opine, relatively low.
The bottom line is that the Daily Illini is your typical college newspaper, filled with shallow posturing from "opinionated" but uninformed people and serving mainly to let the college community know which liquor stores are having a sale and what DJ will be spinning at what nightclub. In that sense, it's decidedly average.
This 626-word review is a Lean-n-Mean IV entry.
Recommended:
No
Describe the newspaper's political views: No political views are evident
|
|
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.