Yellow Journalism

Yesterday I wrote up a little diatribe about how ridiculous the Rice Standard has become, then deleted it soon after; it's way past the scope of needing me to poke holes in its crisp magazine pages, I thought. Who needs me when there's a painfully blatant libertarian bias-- the publisher's note says something like the "Standard will not kowtow to any party line," followed by an advertisement for a Rice Libertarians luncheon and a neocon wankfest of a book on the pages following-- mixed with infighting and a general lack of direction.

Maybe they actually DO publish the Standard with the full understanding that...

• ...only seven people on campus agree with maybe half of what's contained in any given issue, and three of those are just because they're friends with the authors.
  
• ...four people in metro Housto actually have the vocabulary to make it three sentences into an article written by Arturo Munoz.
• ...quoting Dave Eggers makes you indietrash from 2002.
• ...blogs belong online, not in print.
• ...Ron Paul will get not a single electoral vote.
  

But even if they did understand all that stuff and made strides towards fixing those few glaring problems, my main quibble with the Standard would still stand, which is:

THE RICE STANDARD IS UNNECESSARY.

It's like having an alternative press rag in a town of 5,000 people, except that said publication only writes about issues on the national level, and does so in prose style. Oh, and they only write about topics spanning about a square inch of the acre-wide political spectrum.

But okay. So why did I decide to come back today and write another diatribe? I got this e-mail not twenty minutes ago...

Dear Rice Standard Readers and Contributors,

As some of you may have noticed, Alice was omitted from the masthead of our latest issue. After almost a year of dedicated service as Editor-in-Chief of the Rice Standard, Alice is no longer a member of the Rice Standard family and organization. Alice asked to be removed from the editorial staff on Friday night after copy-editing. Her departure was not amicable, and while an invitation remains open for her return to the magazine, she has made no attempt at reconciliation. However, despite Friday’s events, our staff remained committed to printing and distributing our fifth full-length issue. It hit the colleges’ newsstands yesterday.

This message is to reassure all of you that the staff of the Rice Standard remains committed to producing a high quality magazine; a magazine that displays the creative and intellectual talent of all of you, and every other member of the Rice community. We, as an organization, have responded to the void created by Alice’s withdrawal, and are ready push forward and try to improve our already exceptional publication.

Therefore, I am pleased to announce that Matt Schumann, one of our Executive Editors and a noted contributor, will be filling the position of Editor-in-Chief. Matt has been a strong supporter of the magazine since its inception and I have his full assurance that he will carry on our standard of editorial excellence.

On a more personal note, the loss of Alice came as a surprise to all of us. Without her our magazine would not be where it is today. Nevertheless, the strength of our organization does not reside in one person alone. It is the support of all of you that makes this magazine possible.

The future is always unexpected and is always full of unlimited possibilities. I know that together we can produce the best campus magazine that Rice University has ever seen.

Sincerely,

John Stallcup
Publisher, The Rice Standard

But I guess if I'm going to publish that letter, you should probably have Alice side of things, too. So here's the LiveJournal snippet where she discusses her departure. From said link...

there's many larger problems than what happened last night including but not limited to a lot of accusations and criticisms of my personality and style, and of course some male chauvinism. there were considerable efforts made over the last month to characterize me as the socially inept, psychotic despot. and they've succeeded, and i'm gone.

Despite the fact that Alice would like to see me flattened under a steamroller a la Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit...



... it's utterly ridiculous that she should be removed from the masthead of the pages she founded and paid for. It's not an act of fixing the magazine. It's an act of social revenge for some petty thing I'll probably never know about, like Alice serving the wrong kind of brown sauce with the foie gras at dinner last Saturday or whatever her friends get mad about. That's why these people aren't really journalists.

Unprofessional behavior.

Taking her out of the picture probably isn't going to fix much, either. Everyone's going to continue to write articles like they're being graded by Ralph Waldo Emerson. That gold-mongering, Ron Paul-loving libertarian lean isn't going away, either. They'll still be cracking the same whip over the same group of young, idealistic and morally devoid writers.

It's all so silly that, you know, I could only expect it to come from one publication. Thank God I have the Internet to absorb my pseudo-journalistic bitch rants.