The length of an article doesn’t press hard on the minds of a newspaper’s reader base. For an editorial crew, though, it can be amongst the most urgent of questions. The Cavalier Daily covers myriad issues in various shapes, sections and sizes. Why not explore some newer and longer forms?
Picking up this week’s paper, I found several engaging editorials and guest columns that covered an abundance of subjects. An argument for the departmentalization of the Women, Gender and Sexuality program, a criticism of a former piece on environmental divestment, and a guest piece raising awareness of World Hijab Day were fantastic reads. Despite the diversity of their subjects and claims, though, I was left wondering what else could have come. Sure, these all belonged in the paper’s Opinion section, but what would happen if they didn’t stop there? Why not examine what the hijab means to U.Va. students, or how the Women, Gender and Sexuality program started at this school and elsewhere?
I’ll stop myself before I get too quixotic. One can only expect so much, after all, from student writers and editors. Firstly, let’s appreciate the availability of a democratic medium, the newspaper, with which one can raise such contemporary matters. Beyond that fact, though, there are only so many directions one can go into further their argument for a particular kind of change.
Additionally, Opinion — a popular section among writers and readers of The Cavalier Daily — has so much submitted content to sift through already. Choosing what fits and what cannot fit, within an ocean of issues to cover, is already difficult enough. But writers and guest columnists have a tall task, as well. Displaying your feelings and beliefs for an entire University comes with an enormous amount of pressure and a door wide open for criticism.
These challenges are necessary, ultimately, to promote topical discourse for the University community. But why not up the stakes a bit more, and develop pieces that are lengthier in word count, but delve deeper into wider-scale issues? In other words, why shouldn’t The Cavalier Daily take Opinion pieces a bit further, into formats like “longform” journalism or creative non-fiction?
Such ambitious styles of reporting would be beneficial to multiple parties. Writers interested in creating such content would have a means with which to analyze a plethora of problems both local to the University and within a plurality of other environments. The potential to find and refine stories otherwise unheard of would be immensely rewarding for their pens and word processors. Editors, too, would acquire a duty to fine-tune and polish these sorts of pieces to best engage The Cavalier Daily’s reader base. But most importantly, the community at large here would have a new, intriguing journalistic dish to chew and digest amongst the many meals of information.
But there are caveats to this modest proposal. Such forms of news, argues the chief editor of The Atlantic, contort the lines between traditional, precise reporting and novel, nebulous ones. Try to tell a great story, and you might lose some old standards in the process. That same sort of ambition, too, can be much to ask of writers and editors — at least, those who are interested and willing. The Cavalier Daily is composed of students, after all, and there’s only so much time in the average undergraduate’s life, and so much time to publish a daily newspaper.
Furthermore, the Focus section of The Cavalier Daily already focalizes on these kinds of journalism, topic-wise. Articles such as this week’s provide a perfect balance between local and national communities, engaging issues that span both types of environments. They also eschew the formats typically used in the journal’s other articles — about as close as one can get to “longform” journalism. So why propose such changes if such a section already exists?
For one thing, Focus articles appear few and far between. Few people may want to tackle the difficulty in writing and researching longer subject matters here and elsewhere. Moreover, such pieces can hardly be published daily either in paper or pixel form. They take long periods of development and publication in order to be suitable enough to engage the community.
So should The Cavalier Daily pay more attention to the Focus section? It’s tough to say. Perhaps there isn’t enough interest in such novel schemes of journalism. Maybe finding a place for such pieces is harder than imagined, especially when media has hybridized to end up between paper and screen.
But exploring the boundaries and limitations of such pieces — in Focus, Opinion or elsewhere — provides a necessary trial for publications like The Cavalier Daily to hone their craft. Perhaps a higher word count isn’t exactly necessary. Yet pushing beyond the conventional subjects and sections we’re so used to as a community might inspire us — readers, writers and all — to think about today’s topics in brand new ways. Why not combine opinions with focused pieces? Who knows where we might end up!
Sasan Mousavi is the Public Editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com or on Twitter at @CDPublicEditor.
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