COLUMN: Once, there was a magazine?

From Dina Bass', "No Loss for Words," Fall '99 From Dina Bass', "No Loss for Words," Fall '99Where have you gone, Red and Blue? I never thought I would reach the day when I missed reading The Red and Blue. For my first three years at Penn, the magazine consistently offended me with both its opinions and its ever-present dose of what I consider to be bad journalism. In truth, the issue really isn't that I miss The Red and Blue but that Penn is suffering from a dearth of interesting, provocative reading material. As a fourth-year Daily Pennsylvanian staffer, I firmly believe that the DP needs competition from a good solid news magazine. The existence of such a magazine would only benefit the campus and the DP by using fair and accurate journalism to stimulate debate and giving a voice to a variety of opinions. The Red and Blue never was such a magazine. What bothered me about the magazine was not the extremity of its opinions, but the constant violation of journalistic ethics in its pages. For example, the magazine's nasty habit of publishing articles with no sources that instead seemed to represent the writer's own opinions as fact -- in the rest of the journalism community we call articles like these opinion columns, not news articles. The magazine often ran stories representing nothing but the writer's opinion, such as Ed Yang's "B-GLAD! Why Not Just Be Quiet?" in its articles section rather than placing them in the opinion section. I was also appalled by articles that attacked individual students and faculty based on anonymous accusations -- for example a piece alleging that Community Service Living and Learning Program graduate advisor Margaret Quern had allowed drugs and alcohol into the Castle. But, pathetic as it is, The Red and the Blue was all Penn had. Most students loathed it for its snotty tone and poor reporting. But students read it and commented to each other and once and a while the magazine did hit on a vital or otherwise-ignored issue. Two years ago, the magazine ran a first-hand account of hazing in minority sororities. The issue had long been the subject of rumors, but until The Red and the Blue convinced Olivia Troye to write about her experiences freshman year, there were nothing more than rumors. There is no other magazine of news and opinions distributed widely more than once a semester. The DP's own 34th Street magazine is intended mostly as a culture and arts magazine, with an occasional news feature; the often-excellent Vision is rarely seen by anyone outside DuBois college house. And the DP itself cannot and should not take the place of a magazine. A magazine allows a writer to exercise greater freedom in adopting a certain angle or a distinctive style, while allowing room for longer stories and more in-depth coverage. On a campus with so many students and so many different opinions the paucity of news and opinion publications is shocking. Does no one have an opinion or an issue that they feel like pursuing? We ought to have several regular magazines covering different interests or political views. Instead we can't even put together one. You can get your news from the DP or from the assortment of mind-numbing University press releases masquerading as newspapers, but where is there a forum for magazine-style coverage of news or for opinions that don't belong to the 12 regular DP columnists. Penn needs to establish at least one good magazine. It matters little to me whether that magazine is conservative-libertarian, as The Red and Blue was, or as liberal as the Women's Center's seldom-published Generation XX, although it would be best if the magazine could house a variety of opinions and perspectives. All that matters is that such a magazine provide a different look at news than the DP, that it give space to Penn writers and columnists who don't currently have a place to publish their work and, most of all, that it stimulate thought and discussion. Students and observers alike tend to write off Penn as an apathetic school and in certain ways the student body over the last few decades has not shown concern about a lot of the issues bothering our peers at other universities from the Vietnam War to the use of sweatshop labor in the production of Penn-licensed paraphernalia. But Penn students do have opinions and concerns. They do read and, contrary to popular belief, there is intellectual debate to be found on our campus. It's time to create more forums for that debate and a new magazine with intelligent, interesting content is a good place to start.