Finals are around the corner and we’ve all got other things to worry about, so it looks like the blogs will be shutting down after Thanksgiving. I may stick around here a little while longer, but soon I will return to my old home at http://genelewis.wordpress.com/ (now with a brand new design!).
As The Hub’s first bloggers, I hope we’ve launched something that will grow and improve in years to come. I think we’ve featured quite a few interesting, sometimes fantastic posts all semester.
However, one flaw that I’ve felt from very early on is that our voices have been limited. A while ago Meredith passed on an e-mail from the campus Republicans criticizing the balance of the Daily’s coverage. Now, I don’t expect that a political advocacy group will ever be completely happy with the local mainstream media; it’s their job to push from the margins and shift the debate, in ways that are often unfair to those trying to fairly and accurately report the news.
In other words, despite their rhetoric, most advocates do not actually want fair media; they just want the bias to be more on their side.
But even so, I could not help but agree with some of the Republicans’ criticisms. And if they read me, Meredith, Tiara, and Tres, I’m sure we’ve only provided them more ammo. It’s fairly easy to recognize us as the nest of liberal conspiracists that we are (Dane, as a sports guy, is at least immune from this critique, though on this campus talking football is probably even more dangerous than talking politics.)
Now, I don’t think we should temper our opinions to appease some imagined ideal of balance. That would be dishonest, and, perhaps even worse, result in less interesting writing. Nor do I think we must have a house Republican to insert right-wing talking points on every issue we discuss. Political balance may not even be the right way to look at it, since there are so many other voices out there that don’t fit into the cages of left-right, liberal-conservative, Democrat-Republican.
Heck, we could improve diversity just by looking outside the journalism school. I’m sure there are many fascinating voices working in the fine arts or hard sciences that would provide a genuinely different take on campus life than those of us who live or have at some point lived inside the Daily newsroom.
Ideally, new voices would not just provide the opposite perspective on the same old topics, but point out other issues that we may not even have considered worth looking at.
But that will be a project for editors of later years. In any case, after an admittedly shaky start, The Hub Web site has improved greatly and is getting better all the time.
Besides, as a student newspaper, we’re all learning. Hopefully the lessons of The Hub have helped form some of the great new media minds in the next generation of journalists.
Anyway, it’s been fun. Thanks so much for reading.
Photo by Flickr user Krista76 used under a Creative Commons license.
Pictured here are some Colorado potato beetle larvae, currently in the process of eating my potatoes. I’ve always wondered where these things come from. They only ever show up on potato plants, but they are almost always on those plants, and in force. But how does a critter with such a limited diet manage to be so widespread? I live in an urban area, no hub for potato agriculture, and the plants only got there from the throwing old vegetables at the brick wall on the side of my house game.
D.C. pictures can be seen 
Bear with me; I will be filling my nerd quotient for the week with this post.