It’s no secret that I love print media. I would rather read a physical book than an eBook, and the idea of flipping through a magazine on the beach is still as exciting to me now as it was when I was 11 years old reading Tiger Beat and Bop (who remembers those?)
Posts published in “The Stute Editorial”
The Stute Editorial is an Opinion column written by the current Editor in Chief of The Stute to address and explain editorial decision making, discuss news and media issues, and develop a sense of trust and transparency between readers and members of The Stute.
Welcome to The Stupe — the one day out of the year where Off The Press puts some sense into us and teaches us about real journalism!
Last year, around the beginning of the pandemic, I started reading for pleasure. I began with some classic novels, like Frankenstein, The Bell Jar, and the 900-page Anna Karenina which all made me hooked on the world of fiction.
If you haven’t already noticed, I like talking about ethics — in writing, but also during Stute meetings. Mostly because in my time as a member of The Stute, we haven’t talked much about ethics at all, and I feel like 80% of the times we mess up are because of ethical situations we weren’t prepared for.
In most of these Editorials, I talk about something related to journalism — last semester I talked about the increase of news on social media (specifically Instagram), which I argued has ultimately shifted the role of editor onto consumers.
In media and journalism, ethics are important but tricky to understand. It can be a bit of a game that starts with a desire to understand a particular practice, finding one organization that says to do x, thinking that’s what you should always do, then seeing something that says to do x but think about y, and realizing you may have been wrong in your original thinking.
For the past several months I’ve been trying to understand the difference between activism and journalism, or rather, if there even is a difference that exists.
To quote and mirror a January 2014 post in The Stute, “On behalf of The Stute, welcome back to Stevens Institute of Technology!”
I sat down to write this Editorial this week and honestly didn’t know what to write about. But realizing that made me remember days in the Stute office where former editors would express something similar — they didn’t know what to write about or comment on.