A Signpost to nowhere?

Okay, I am going to do a couple of posts because I have to make up for them. First because I was sick all last week, so things didn’t turn out exactly as planned. Second, because I have been really busy as well.

Anyway, this week I am going to have a little bit of a rant. I have to say that I am fed up with the Weber State Signpost. They can be reached here. http://www.wsusignpost.com/ I have been continually disappointed in the Signpost. It’s for several different reasons. One reason is that almost every issue has some sort of error in it. In my opinion they have never really been all that good. However, things really got to a low point with the issue of Mark Bruckham. Let me explain. In the Homecoming issue of the Signpost, they had a student that was accused of attempted kidnapping. They did put it on the front page, which I had no problem with, even fact, I think that is what they should have done. But there were a couple things wrong. One, the caption had a different spelling of the name then was found in the article. Second, in the article, they said that Bruckham was not a student at Weber State. Third, was that in the special section of Signpost, they had a picture of Bruckham and said that he was a student, and I believe a psychology major (sorry if my info is wrong). The major problem being that the picture was taken less than 24 hours previous.
This is not the only event. I think that this was the low point, but I admit that the content has gotten better since that time. Another time the Signpost printed a picture of a defaced sign that said “Screw you Weber, I need to go to class!” The image itself was not bad, but it lacked a time frame. It was all because there had been a construction consortium that day on campus, and they had taken over half of the A9 lot for parking. At this point, there was not much of a problem. The problem came when a couple days later the Signpost printed as their official “viewpoint” that this was nothing more than just a case of selfishness, half bad mouthing the practice and then going on and comparing that act, to things much more severe. I kind of took issue with this, because I didn’t think that it was the right viewpoint to take, but I’m not really mad about that. I was madder about the fact that they took that viewpoint without mentioning the crucial fact of time. Time was important on if this viewpoint was correct or not, yet it was never printed. The reason for this was that the A lot permits are sold at a premium. That’s because the lots are sold with little excess so that a parking spot is always available. But that no longer becomes an issue after 5 p.m. or perhaps a little earlier because many people have gone home. So if the meeting was at 9 a.m. and the person trying to go to class suddenly finds his space gone, I can understand the frustration and the Signpost viewpoint would be wrong. However, if the event was around 5 p.m. or so, then the student really didn’t have a reason to act out and the Signpost would be right. But that distinction was never given to the reader.
Other things that they don’t do that make me mad lack of preview stories, crap campus calendar, lamenting lack of student involvement, and the fact that they don’t have a correction section. They never ran anything about the Mark Bruckham case as far as I know, and they just continued with other stories about him. I don’t see like a dedicated section for corrections and if they do, it mixes in with the ads so that you can’t tell where it is at. And I have to say that the letters to the editor, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT count as the correction section. That is someone else pointing out your mistake or is against something that you wrote. But it is not the Signpost taking credit for it.
Now, I do understand that they are a student paper and that they are learning and trying to improve. I understand that being on the newspaper is very time consuming and they are doing the best they can. I applaud them in that and I have seen many different improvements. However, it seems to me that they are missing key features that should be included in basic newspaper reporting. I hope that they will learn from their mistakes and be able to be a paper that the University can be proud of, and not one that is like a junior high school paper like it was at the beginning of the semester.