I’ve got a bunch of questions about the school newspaper, as someone who is interested in journalism. How is the quality of the Maroon? Does the student body generally read it often?
For those who have been writers for the Maroon, how was the experience? As someone who prefers writing about “hard” news, would I enjoy writing for the Maroon? Are editor positions competitive to get? What year are most editors usually in?
Any and all comments are appreciated, thanks!
College newspapers are pretty well documented on their websites. You can learn a lot about them by reading a few issues, and by comparing one college’s papers to another. You can go back a few years, and then use your favorite search engine to find whether the writers back then are getting bylines somewhere now.
It has been a few years since I read the Maroon regularly, so my views may be out of date – take them with a grain of salt. As of a few years ago, there was still a huge difference between the Maroon and the official student newspapers of the other colleges Chicago sees as its peers. The Maroon only published twice a week, and shut down for exams; the peer papers tended to publish five or six issues per week, and for more weeks. The Maroon’s staff was smaller, and its quality was . . . not as good most of the time. Five years after I graduated from college, one of my classmates who had been a Yale Daily News writer got a Pulitzer Prize for a series he wrote for the Washington Post. I don’t think any of the Maroon writers who were my kids’ classmates are in much danger of getting a Pulitzer Prize anywhere. There are definitely recent Chicago grads who are making a mark on journalism – Nate Silver leaps to mind – but they may not have written for the Maroon.
To be fair, the relative weakness of the Maroon reflects some of the special qualities of Chicago. A close friend of one of my children was the editor-in-chief of his Ivy League university’s student paper. For most of his last three years there, he did practically nothing but work on the paper. Everything else – especially his classes – came second. He got his post-college job – a great non-journalism job – through the network of newspaper alums. At Chicago, academics come first for pretty much everyone, including the editor-in-chief and department heads at the newspaper. So the newspaper is weaker, and some of the best future journalists don’t bother with it, but that doesn’t mean that anyone’s overall education and experience is weaker. And people who want to work on the paper don’t get turned away much.
One other thing: Most colleges don’t just have one student paper, and that’s true of Chicago, too. There will often be one or more alternative papers, usually weeklies or monthlies, and people can do good work there. The main alternative paper at the University of Chicago used to be a weekly supplement to the Chicago Reader. I don’t know if that still exists (the Reader has been bought and sold a lot in the last few years). One of my kids came to college wanting to be a journalist. She started out with the Maroon, but fairly quickly decided that she liked the people at the other paper better, and she moved over there. She ultimately decided not to pursue journalism, but some of her friends are doing fine at it.
thanks for the detailed response @JHS! your response echoes the sentiments I’ve heard from some current students that the Maroon isn’t that great. I’m actually interning as a reporter for a “legit” newspaper right now and I’ve been covering hard news, so I’m not sure if I should try to leverage that experience and write for a local newspaper in Chicago, rather than writing for a college newspaper.
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I mostly second JHS comments about the Maroon. I think it could be a lot better given the superb quality of UChicago students, but (as with athletics), it’s just not a priority at UChicago. I found the Maroon generally informative enough, but it is not really trying to be much more than a humble campus paper. As JHS said, academics come first.
I do have one pet peeve that this thread gives me the opportunity to express: why does the Maroon website not wrap/hyphenate words correctly? Most articles are littered with words that break after the first, second, or before the last or penultimate letter–and with no hyphen either. It’s inconceivable to me that they don’t correct this, looking worse than the simplest blog, year in and year out. Is this some sort of ideological thing or something? 