<r, The Carletonian is going through an extensive facelift. It began in the summer with an office renovation, moved forward this winter with a new layout and new content and will culminate in the arrival of six magical new computers over spring break.
We’re happy about these changes and grateful that Carleton has been so supportive of our new era. We thought about asking the Carleton community for some input on what they’d like to see in the paper, but never got around to it. Then, one afternoon, our Chief Archivist, Kelsey Ross ‘12, was digging around in our back office where we keep things like songs that Todd Anderson writes to us (Kinsey) and at least a million old newspapers.
Kelsey happened upon a stack of old surveys. This was her finest discovery since we used a 1993 paper to solve a perplexing mystery, but more on that later. These surveys were from the ‘90s and just such antiques. Aside from learning that Carleton students in 1994 had awful handwriting, we enjoyed discovering what problems plagued the paper in the 90s. Some of these have been fixed, but some complaints clearly fell on deaf ears.
Here are some choice comments from the 1994 survey:
“Page 12 is really scraping the barrel-cheap and tasteless.” Solution: page 12 was eliminated years ago. Now we leave all the cheap and tasteless items for the bi-weekly Carl.
“Be more subversive. Piss authority off.” We don’t believe that should be the goal of the paper. We try to publish stories and opinions that are compelling and well founded. But publishing things just to create controversy is not the purpose of a campus publication like The Carletonian.
“Oh, it’s fine, but having CUT and Syzygy write their own articles is very bad. They are too proud.” Well, some things never change; CUT and Syzygy are definitely still too proud.
“Grade: 82%” B-, sounds good. Adjusted for grade inflation, probably more like an 89%, so B+. Even better.
“It’s unreadable.” Clearly IN disagreement with the last comment.
“Be creative.” For years the paper had Sudoko, SUMO movie announcements and items that seemed to just take up space. Our solution has been new features like the alumni and abroad columns. Obviously, the new feature What’s Up With That?? is brimming with creativity. Problem solved.
Naturally, we welcome input, so feel free to email us at [email protected], with ideas and suggestions. We maintain the right to ignore any emails that we think are stupid, inappropriate or too proud. You know who you are, CUT.