The South End
- This article is about the student newspaper. For the Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood, see South End.
| File:TheSouthEndFrontPageNov4.png Front page of The South End, November 4, 2004. | |
| Type | Daily |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner(s) | WSU Student Council |
| Publisher | WSU Publication Board |
| Editor | Kyle Stefan |
| Founded | 1967 |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | 5425 Woodward Detroit, MI 48202  United States |
| Circulation | 8,000 |
| Website | [1] |
The South End is the official student newspaper of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, published in print and online. It was founded in 1967, and its publication is funded partly from university funds and partly from advertising revenues, and is distributed free of charge.
The paper is published five days a week during the fall and winter terms, and twice weekly during the summer. Since the September 13, 2004 issue, the front and back pages of the paper are in color and inside pages are infrequently color as well. The daily printed circulation is 8,000 and the online readership community is over 30,000.
Because WSU is still largely a commuter school, most readers of the paper see it semi-regularly during their years on campus, and only sporadically (if at all) before matriculation or after graduation.
Sections of the paper
The South End, like the Detroit dailies, has sections, each getting about a page each, namely: news (national, international and campus, with a preference for national news) on the front page, sports usually on the fifth page, A & E (sometimes called "Vibe") usually on the third page, opinion (sometimes called "Voice") usually on the fifth page, features (sometimes called "Campus Life"), sci & tech (sometimes called "Fusion"). Overflow from other sections is sometimes given the section title "Etc."
Syndicated features run by The South End include the Tribune Media Services crossword and a horoscope by Linda C. Black of Tribune Media Services. A McClatchy Newspapers wire service provides these features as well as national and international news articles.
The paper has more advertising in the fall and winter semesters than in the summer semester. Advertisers have included local restaurants, Hollywood studios, the MPAA, the United States Army, the United States Air Force, the 2005 political campaign of Freman Hendrix, etc., and of course, various agencies of WSU. There are also classified ads, but no personal ads.
Comics
Cartoons run by the paper have included Perry Bible Fellowship and Melby Comics, the latter by a local Detroit artist, and occasionally cartoons by staffers and students. The South End has always had cartoons on a sporadic basis, but these have never had a full page of their own.
Craig Davis was a frequent, almost daily contributor until his graduation in 2004, with his C'toons concerning themselves mainly with national headlines. By contrast, Pedram Farnia's Campus Life Comics focused more on the foibles of the campus experience; these were approximately weekly and continued until the cartoonist's graduation in 2005. Aside from Brandon van Meter's Not That Funny in 2006 and Tomek Jankowski's cartoons in 2007, all the cartoons published in The South End since then have been from the McClatchy wire service.
Many of Jankowkski's cartoons are of the Fearman series, about an unlikely superhero; his other cartoons concern themselves with current events, such as the smoking ban in France or an address by President Bush. In the summer of 2007, Jankowski was officially recognized in the paper's staff box on page 2 as the cartoonist of the paper.
History of the paper
All old issues of the paper are archived in the Walter Reuther Library on campus.
The 1960s
Before The South End, the paper was called The Daily Collegian, having been The Wayne Collegian and The Detroit Collegian earlier on. The last year of The Daily Collegian was Volume 57, while the first year of The South End was Volume 58, in 1967. William Rea Keast, the University president at the time, objected to the name. The logo of the paper then consisted of the name in lowercase over a drawing of a city skyline. In its first few years, The South End published a lot of poetry.
On September 26, 1968, when John Watson took over as Editor-in-Chief, the paper changed radically, both in design and in editorial policy. What had been a more or less ordinary student newspaper became a radical broadside, with a more casual approach to layout, spelling, and some would maintain, accuracy. A drawing of a small black panther facing to the right was added on both sides of the logo, which remained the same. From October 15 to the end of the year, the black panther on the right was flipped to face left, for symmetry. This symbolized the paper's ties with the Black Panthers and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The LRBW was an organization founded by Watson with other black radicals including Ken Cockrel that aimed to link the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and other Revolutionary Union Movements in other auto plants, associated with the Panthers and active in Southeast Michigan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this era, the newspaper also ran a standing quotation under its masthead to the effect that, "One class-conscious worker is worth 100 students."
The 1980s
Twice during the late 1980s, left-leaning editors refused to run advertising from branches of the U.S. military. This resulted in at least one case in which the editor, Patricia Maceroni, was removed by the SNPB. She later resumed her editorship following a court challenge to the firing.
The 1990s
In 1998, The South End changed from a tabloid to a broadsheet format. In 1995, the newspaper won a gold medal from the College Newspaper Critique of Columbia University.
Controversies in the 1990s included satirical attacks on the university administration, the student council, and staff at the radio station, WDET (which shared a floor with the paper at the time).
The 21st Century
Circulation of The South End hit a high when guest columnist Joe Fisher wrote a controversial column entitled "Islam Sucks" in the February 26, 2002 issue. The column was mentioned by noted journalist Jack Lessenberry in his Metro Times column, saying that it should have been titled "Fundamentalist Islam sucks." The South End received so much mail about Fisher's column that they were printing letters for days, including letters from anti-defamation leagues.
The paper is not consistently antagonistic to Muslims, however. When a student group consisting mostly of Arab-American women got together on campus to protest the 2003 occupation of Iraq on April 13, 2004, the paper reported on the protest the next day with a headline reading "Students Rally for Justice." On January 19, 2006 the paper also provided an objective report on one of the Five Pillars of Islam with a headline reading "Performing The Hajj." And when the controversy over the Muhammad cartoons erupted later on, The South End consciously decided not to reprint the cartoons even though other student newspapers around the country did.
In 2003 - 2004, the circulation was highly unreliable and spotty when the task was entrusted to WSU's interoffice mail, which is notorious for losing documents. Although there are stands for the paper at many points throughout campus, they were sometimes either full of old issues or completely empty. It was that school year that a gray line drawing of a tower of Old Main (a campus building) was added to the paper's name atop the front page.
In April 2004, the Conservative Union, a student group at Wayne State University started a biweekly (now monthly) newspaper, The Wayne Review, without university funding, to counter with a conservative viewpoint what was seen as the South End's radical left-wing bias. Wonetha Jackson, then editor in chief of the South End, wrote a column extending good wishes to the new paper. The Wayne Review often includes on its last page a section called "The Back End," an obvious parody of The South End. Wayne Review editors often write letters to The South End. In 2004 the Knight Ridder wire horoscope was occasionally replaced by the Warrior Spirit Horoscope, with predictions spefically meant for WSU students made using aspects invented by Johannes Kepler.
Another start-up newspaper, the Warrior, has been publishing on and off since spring 2004. Its staff includes former South End staffers who've graduated.
For the April 1, 2005 issue, the paper ran a satire issue called The Rear End, printed the date as "March 32, 2005" and ran fake news stories, such as "WSU partiers conquer, reign" "Raisin mistaken for roach, student still catches buzz" and "Warriors Basketball awarded National Championship." The issue was code-named "Onion", after the satirical newspaper The Onion. For that issue, the paper had a color logo of humorously anthropomorphic Old Main tower with rear end exposed.
After that issue, the old gray line drawing was replaced by a color photo of the facade of Old Main with a blue sky, though the blue sky was removed after three issues. Although The South End often has misspellings in its articles, it occasionally has misspellings in its headlines. The headline of the June 8, 2005 lead story read "CULMA to be disolved [sic]" and its secondary headline was "Vote closes 18-year-old urban studies school and moves it's [sic] programs throughout WSU". The South End very rarely runs corrections.
In summer 2005, the Fusion (science and technology) and Campus Life section were cancelled to make more room for prepared full pages from the KRT wire service.
Currently, the most popular article on The South End website is an article about community users who watch pornography on the school's library computers.
The paper did not recover from the usual summer advertising slump. As a consequence, the vast majority of issues of the Fall 2005 semester were 6 pages, with 8-page issues being the exception rather than the norm (compared to the Fall 2004 semester, when most issues were 8 to 10 pages, sometimes even 12).
A major redesign of the surface details of the paper took place with the first issue of the Winter 2006 semester. Justified paragraphs, a constant source of layout problems in the past, have been discarded completely in favor of ragged right margins like the News uses in many of its sections. The picture of Old Main on the front page has been removed, and the listing of the staff has been moved to a less prominent position on the second page using a smaller font.
The June 15, 2006 issue marked a 3-year record low number of pages, with just four.
The May 7, 2007 issue showed another redesign of surface details, including the use of lowercase in the masthead.
Administration
The editor-in-chief is a student, usually a senior classman, who is selected annually and traditionally enjoys enormous autonomy in staffing and editorial decision-making. There is a general tendency for new editors to be selected from amongst the existing staff of the newspaper.
The South End is governed by the University's Student Newspaper Publication Board. This board consists of six student members appointed by the Student Council and three members appointed by the university president. According to the SNPB charter, the administration's appointees include one working journalist, preferably an alumnus/a of the WSU journalism program, a faculty member from the Department of Communication, and a financial professional from the university's operations division. The advisor to the paper and the editor-in-chief serve in (non-voting) ex-officio capacity. The board is responsible for oversight of the paper (particularly its budget and major expenditures and contracts, and for selecting its editor each year. A board chair (and vice chair) are elected by the members from the student members. The university administration hired a full-time professional general manager for the paper in 2004.
External links
- The South End Online Official website
- Text of Joe Fisher's article, and official email to the Wayne State University community that followed
- The South End at Typepad.com Temporary website because "persistent technical problems have kept our main website ... down."