The Fine Print

Surviving a newsroom apocalypse

2012-02-29T11:38:00.000-08:00

By Marcus Traxler
Collegian Sports Editor
11:15 p.m. Tuesday

You know when you envision what it would be like to be without electricity in the 1800s? It’s hard to imagine when you’re constantly connected to the Internet.

Except when you’re not. And you’re a newspaper. And all of your stuff — and I mean all of it — is on the server.

But that is what happened to your favorite college newspaper at 10:30 p.m. on the night of Feb. 28 when the servers in The Union went down. Tuesday is our main production night so the timing was less than ideal. Some of our guesses for why this happened range from a car crashing into a box containing fiber-optic wire to some sort of ice storm disaster to sabotage. I can safely assume that 50 percent of our paper was done or close to being done, but our well-oiled machine hit the skids without warning.

And it was terrible.

Some panicked. Some calmly came up with contingency plans. Some started a crossword puzzle. News Editor Nick Lowrey made plans to break into Yeager Hall's Print Lab to use the hand press they have over there. I bought a smoothie, just beating the Java City 11 p.m. closing.

Right now, Nick is reading through our favorite issues of our peer newspapers, delighting the newsroom like Santa on Christmas morning, except he works here.

Nobody knows what will happen. We’re planning in case we have to print late this week. But we’re hoping the Internet comes back. Soon.

NOTE (11:30 p.m.): We’re back in business. Just a little bump in the road.

Who started this? The "renewal" of the SDSU-USD rivalry

2012-02-10T09:39:00.000-08:00

By: Marcus Traxler
Collegian Sports Editor

In days leading up to the first meeting between SDSU and USD on the basketball court, I kept a close eye on what the local media was doing to cover the Jan. 12 meeting in Brookings.

I had thought of our coverage in the days prior and decided we wanted to do a cool front that honored the history spanning over 100 years. In coming up with the headline, I came up with “Rivalry Renewed.” In the immediate moments following, though, I knew the idea came too easily. We had to come up with something a little better than that.

Ultimately, we used “Bragging Rights.” I was happy about it and I was even happier in the days following mainly because a few of the local television stations were tripping over themselves in their coverage. (You can see those examples at the right. Full Disclosure: The KELO screenshot aired Jan. 10, the other two on Jan. 12, same 10 p.m. timeslot.)

The first game was undoubtedly unique but if USD wasn't going to be competitive, this series wouldn't be fun for a while. Our coverage was very small for the meeting Thursday, aside from a few mentions in the paper this week. Coverage from the other outlets was toned down as well and SDSU had asserted themselves as the odds-on favorite to win at the DakotaDome.

Thursday, USD pulled off the largely unthinkable, upsetting SDSU 72-68 and sending the Coyote faithful into a frenzy. Without a doubt, the 'Yotes outplayed the Jackrabbits and SDSU, in the words of coach Scott Nagy, did not deserve to win the game.

Almost right away, I had my lead for my game story already in hand. It was the phrase that I had avoided four weeks ago at all costs.

"Rivalry renewed."

That was perfect now. The rivalry wasn't going to be all the way back until the Jackrabbits and Coyotes would be playing tight games. In the second meeting, we got one and it was terrific drama in the end. If the people in Brookings didn't believe USD could beat the Jacks before, despite the 30-point pounding, they know it now. Someone needed to feel the agony of defeat to get the furor going again.

The players and coaches would decide when the rivalry would start and it is now fully underway. (I was wishing the new USD football coach Joe Glenn would come onto the court during a timeout and guarantee a win in Brookings in the first meeting next November but it didn't happen.)

Both groups of fans have shown it can be fun to have the two teams playing again. Thursday, the teams showed it too.

Mountain Duped

2012-02-06T15:58:00.000-08:00

By Hannah Baker
Managing Editor

Nick Lowrey, news editor for The Collegian, needed something to quench his thirst during production night on Monday, Feb. 6. He grabbed $1.50 and walked over to the pop machine. He chose his beverage of choice: Mountain Dew. Then, when he reached below to retrieve it, he thought he had been Mountain duped. The bottle was all wrong. It had square edges and resembled a bottle similar to a sports drink.

Nick Lowrey slyly enjoys a Mountain Dew.
(Photo By Kathy Kroeger)

“I didn’t want a Powerade,” he gawked. “What is this?”

After examination, he realized he did indeed have a Mountain Dew. He walked back into the newsroom and showed his find to his fellow Collegian staffers.

“Put it on the blog,” was the consensus.

So, to get to the point – Mountain Dew has a new shaped bottle.Or, at least we had never seen it until now.

Fun puns we couldn’t fit into this post:

Don’t be dewpid (Don’t be stupid)

Marcus, these photos are blurry. They won’t dew!

A Meeting of the Editors

2012-02-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

Here's a glimpse into one of our weekly editor meetings. The editors critique last week's issue while Tom, our number one ad guy, poses for a thoughtful photo-bomb.

Food in Fargo: More than a pizza

2012-01-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

By: Emma DeJong
Editor-in-Chief

It’s 1:15 p.m., and Marcus Traxler, Nick Lowrey and myself are sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Fargo.

We came here for the SDSU basketball games against NDSU — one last night and one tonight. Our minds are not on the games, though. We are still in awe of the pizza we just ate.

It’s called Rhombus Guys. I’ll just start by saying, if you’re ever in Fargo or driving through Fargo or thinking about Fargo, find a way to eat this pizza.

We ordered one pizza to share among the three of us — half “The Rockefeller” and half “Pacific Northwest.” Below are the ingredients on each:

The Rockefeller: roasted garlic white sauce, bacon, shrimp, spinach, onion, cream cheese, tomato and mozzarella

Pacific Northwest: garlic-infused olive oil, tomato, smoked salmon, feta, green olives, black olives and capers

When Nick was halfway through his second piece, he literally had to pause. He was too overwhelmed to speak, and when he did, he said he was close to tears.

He summed the whole experience up with a single word: “Awesome.” Actually, he said it about 17 times.

I’m not kidding. This was seriously good pizza. Marcus wrote a letter of admiration using crayon on the paper tablecloth.

Marcus and I determined that the “The Rockefeller” was our favorite, but Nick just couldn’t declare one to be lower than the other. In all their glory, each pizza was completely unique.

Nick’s insert: The shrimp, bacon, mozzarella combination was a recipe for happiness, and the smoked salmon added a sublime smoky finish to the briny capers and olives. When those flavors combined captain pizza materialized vanquishing for good and all the blandness that is chain pizza restaurants.

A word on the price: very reasonable. We ordered a medium, which came to a little more than $7 for each of us. We only had one piece left over, but not without thoughtful deliberation. Nick said that to eat it on a full stomach would only be disrespectful to the pizza.

He was exactly right. A pizza that good deserves only the best.

Our tree

2011-11-28T15:30:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures of The Collegian's Christmas tree for The Union's Festival of Trees:

A little Zombie. A little Hobo. A little Collegian.

2011-11-09T23:55:00.000-08:00

"The Night of the Living Hobos," was the theme for this year's homecoming day at SDSU, also known as Hobo Day. The Collegian editing staff decided to participate in the parade this year, float, zombie and Collegian shirt included.

Check out these pictures from the parade on Hobo Day, "The Biggest One Day Event in the Dakotas!" The Collegian staff had a great time riding in the graveyard-themed float, waving to the audience and honking the horn of the truck.

Marketing Editor
-Megan Pavlow

Learning a Little From Hockey

2011-11-04T10:39:00.000-07:00

By: Marcus Traxler
Collegian Sports Editor

I had heard things.

I had heard about how club hockey was popular at SDSU and that they have fans regularly showing up to their games. Honestly, I didn’t really believe it. I figured there was no way that people cared more about men’s hockey in South Dakota than volleyball or any of the other varsity sports at SDSU.

I was wrong.

During the Jacks 8-3 win over USD on Wednesday, 611 fans showed up to watch hockey — unpolished and mostly ugly, but hockey nonetheless. Eighty-five to 90 percent of those in attendance were students. The key demographic that every student club, organization and group on campus is trying to capture is at a hockey game, where the concern is less about the puck on the ice and more about the dead animal pelt hanging over the visitors’ bench.

By comparison, SDSU’s volleyball team had 327 people show up to watch them drop a three-set match to a pretty good North Dakota squad on Halloween night.

Why is there a difference and what is club hockey doing to get fans to watch them?

The immediate answer is the focus directed to the students. It doesn’t get more grassroots than writing the time of the game in every classroom in the Rotunda and creating an event on Facebook. They created a theme for the game against the Coyotes and had fans show up wearing camouflage or blaze orange. That plays right into the stereotype about South Dakotans, but it gets fans involved and has them actively participating in the game. Selling it as an event that you can’t afford to miss makes the four dollar admission tolerable and more fun for everyone involved, with exception of the officials. The players buy in too, making it very clear that they have no interest in playing nice with USD, and the impressionable crowd loved that as well.

Part of the hockey experience is the quirks. The scorekeeper at center ice is dressed up in blaze orange and regularly engages with the referees. After almost every SDSU goal, the scorer would jump up into the glass to celebrate with the students. (Personally, it was funnier when USD scored and did the same thing in front of the SDSU students.) Every song that was played over the sound system was one students were familiar with. The only one that wasn’t from their era was Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline,’ which every person with any ties to American culture will have heard at least five times before.

For the SDSU athletics department, the students can’t and likely won’t be the focus, because they don’t fund the sports like season-ticket holders, alumni and donors will and currently do. Outside of liking both SDSU and ‘Sweet Caroline,’ students and big-money don’t have much in common when it comes to sporting events. A look into the future doesn’t bode well for athletics, though. By alienating students now, you can risk losing donors and supporters later.

It’s time to embrace the students. Embrace everything that they enjoy about SDSU. Kids love to do the Bernie dance. Clean up the lyrics a tad and you have something that fans look forward to doing, much like the Interlude Dance at UNI or Jump Around at Wisconsin. Encourage them to dress up in blaze orange or like hobos and tell them to yell for a couple of hours like they do with the BS chant at the refs but direct it in favor of the Jacks. Kids will dress up in blaze orange; they won't dress up for the Corduroy Classic. (Hey, maybe that's an idea.) The residence halls are probably good for a couple rounds of dorm-storming before basketball games. Based on the increased power of SDSU in the Summit League, I would see if I could get cowbells back while I’m at league meetings.

Is the coyote pelt too much? Absolutely. Will you see Nate Wolters jump into the student section after a made three-pointer? No. The athletics department should make nice with USD and grow the rivalry in a different manner but they can take the attendance for games against the Bison and Coyotes for granted. If students were aware about IPFW coach Chris Paul’s propensity to call SDSU just “South,” people would probably begin to dislike the Mastodons.

It’s no longer enough to be just seen and heard and expect students to show up. Throwing a message at people doesn’t mean it’s effective. Throw it to the people and let them run with it.

The Collegian staff = Random

2011-10-25T16:35:00.000-07:00

By: Megan Pavlow
Marketing Editor

One word that comes to mind when I think of the Collegian staff is "random." I never knew what went on in room 069 of The Union until I started working for the Collegian this year.
This series of pictures gives you a peek into what happens in the Collegian office on production night, which is usually every Tuesday. I took these pictures my first week in the office with the editing staff and have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy the randomness of the Collegian staff this semester.