No one attends first UPenn newswire meeting

College senior Lija Bentley, editor-in-chief of the newly formed UPenn Newswire Internet news service, sat alone at a conference table attempting a New York Times crossword puzzle at the group's first meeting last night. No one else attended the meeting at Houston Hall. Newswire was founded last year by five members of the Class of 1995 -- Engineering graduate Matthew Kratter, College graduate Jeremy Chiappetta, College graduate Rick Gresh, College graduate Daniel Rosner and College graduate John Leibovitz. After the five students graduated last May, Bentley took over the reins of leadership. Bentley said 15 students volunteered for the student-run group last year. But, she said, many of them told her in advance that they could not attend last night's meeting, although they still want to be a part of the group. She also attributed the lack of attendance to the fact that many of her postings on the Internet did not appear in the intended newsgroups. Newswire will begin as a newsgroup on the Internet called upenn.newswire. From there, Bentley said she hopes it will spread to the World Wide Web. In addition, there is a newsgroup called upenn.newswire.talk that accepts postings from all students who have comments about Newswire. Articles for Newswire will be written by a team of reporters and submitted to an editorial board. The editors will check each article before posting it to the newsgroup. Upenn.newswire is "moderated" -- which means that only editors are able to post to the group. There will also be a staff to help with technical aspects of putting the project on the Internet. The group was created with the intention of bringing to the University community "a new source of news about campus events," according to their mission statement. The five founders were all members of student government who objected to the quality of coverage provided by The Daily Pennsylvanian. "Many students feel there should be more than one source of news on campus," Bentley said. "I think that with an atmosphere of openness and truthfulness, the truth will come out." She also expressed her hope that a news service on the Internet will prove more efficient than a printed one. "I think Penn will become a more automated campus," she said. "And [it will] be computer-dependent instead of paper-dependent." The group's mission statement adds that "since the cost structure of an electronic-based news provider is magnitudes lower than that of a print-based news provider, UPenn Newswire hopes to provide a broad level of event coverage, eventually matching that of rival forms of media." Bentley said she is going to conduct the rest of the meetings via e-mail, because of the members' time constraints. She added that she hopes the first articles will appear within the next month.