Journalism, Student Society, and Dr. Kenneth Tan

More thoughts on how to proceed, after talking to Mark, Dr. Kenneth Tan and Kiat Han.

I think what is sorely lacking in NUS is basic public intellectual space. By “public intellectual space”, I mean to denote the aggregate amount of meaningful facts which accurately depict student civil society. It is in my opinion that the current major publications in NUS are not providing this good and therefore its hard to conceptualize the state of academia or student society in NUS.

In particular, major publications in NUS are The Ridge, Hooked, and campusobserver.org. While campusobserver isn’t an official publication, but I would call it at least potentially major because of the infrastructure is professional. The Ridge and Hooked are established with NUSSU, which means that they receive funding and at least have big pool of resources to draw from.

Smaller publications would include: the Literary Society magazine, “Issues”, which is now renamed “Argot” at Kiat Han’s word; the Arts Club magazine “Insomniac”; the Political Science Society’s magazine, “Politeia”; the USC publications; and numerous others produced by their respective societies. Personally, I define Insomniac a smaller publication now because on rumour it would have been pushed to an online existence.

In my opinion, the biggest sin that goes unobserved is that the stories that get published in the major publications in NUS do not accurately depict campus life as a whole, or at least do not directly depict it. To depict campus life, there must be hard facts and “hard reporting” on all the campus events that occur, whether its a small discussion organised by the DSC, or a large carnival held at the Forum.

As a result, we cannot judge what is happening as a whole. There is no evidence for justifying trends in student society. There is no foundation of common knowledge which we can draw on. With student society, we merely have anecdotal evidence, we are merely claiming assumptions.

This leads on to a secondary result. Because students are unaware of general occurrences in campus and trends in student society, they don’t develop a sense of belonging because they’re so atomised in their own personal sphere of influence and network. If there was a pool of common knowledge which connected individuals to a larger community of students, then we could actually foster some sort of proudness and unity among students.

The Ridge and Hooked aren’t publishing and commissioning the necessary kinds of stories in sufficient quantities to provide the critical amount of hard facts every month. There are a lot of lifestyle stories, there are a lot of book reviews, gadget reviews, movie reviews, poems, stories that you would expect to see in a magazine. Most of the articles passing off as “hard news” are actually opinion pieces or feature pieces, rather than hard news delivering the facts about student life.

Lets take the current October 2006 issue of the Ridge. While Kelvin Teo and Kelvin Lim’s two articles on the IMF and the Government, and several interviews with faculty members on Singaporean politics are actually somewhat substantial, but they shouldn’t pass off as news, and really, they don’t. The Ridge probably won’t claim to be a source of news, just a magazine.

Hooked, even though more capable than the Ridge for hard journalism, does not make the cut either. It doesn’t give the student-related in both sufficient quantity AND quality. I don’t know how to quantify and prove this, but I will just make the claim that the writing quality there makes it difficult for me to respect the institution it is.

Finally, while campusobserver.org can be credited to publishing stories of student concern with excellent writing style and tone, however, it doesn’t deliver in quantity on hard news and student activities. Take for instance, the front page piece accessed today (27th October 2006), Distasteful Posters Turn Students Off, focuses more on the posters themselves and opinions surrounding it, rather than the student activity in itself. Nevertheless, campusobserver must be credited as their weekly updating gives them the advantage of responsiveness compared to Hooked and the Ridge which publishes monthly.

At the moment, there are little groups of students who act independent of a student organization or society. So, reporting has to focus on student society activities now. I would to know who is organizing a certain bazaar at the forum. I would like to know where the jazz band is playing. I would like to know how many bands are there in OMS. I would like to know what they do in guitar club. I wouldn’t mind including sports. Hard news aims to provide these kinds of facts.

By hard news, I expect to see the same kind of news I see on the front page of The Straits Times, BBC, CNN, any respectable newspaper in the world. I want to see the five W’s and one H being answered. I want to see as many objective facts as possible: how many people, what did they do, did they make an impact, how often are they doing this, who made it possible, how was it conceived, how does it change or aim to change student life.

It is extremely important that hard news be written well and be published in bulk (number of stories per issue, not number of issues). If the tone is too frivilous, or there is an overuse of hyperbole, or there are not enough facts in the story, the story is essentially dead. The story cannot be taken seriously. If there isn’t enough hard news per issue, then there won’t exist enough facts to tell the collective story of student life in general.

Students, while they may not take an active interest in reading news on student activity, will eventually benefit from it. Even though hard, objective facts are dry and boring, by making information about the activities of their peers public which will eventually disseminate through word of mouth, students will eventually have a better grasp of the politics and greater connection to student life in general.

There has to be hard news out there, not only just written well, but also in bulk. That is the whole concept of journalism: to provide hard facts about society such that a comprehensive description of it is captured. It is keeping the public journals, that’s not what’s being done, and we’re worse off without it.

To be continued in PART 2.

I should really be thinking on what to write for my GEK1052 CUDG essay.

And there is nothing going on in my life, romantically-speaking, it HAS been dead for the past few weeks so no thoughts on modeling relationships. I’d wish I’d fall in love, but, you know, there isn’t anybody right at the moment. Meh, this is supposed to be private isn’t it? So everybody knows

October 22, 2006.