An important team, at that. It was a real newspaper, getting the real news out to the hundreds (dozens?) of students who picked up a copy. It was pretty cool being a part of that.
Still, when I think back, the things I laugh about most are when the cracks in the facade showed a little bit. We were a REAL newspaper, but still, it was a college newspaper, and mistakes were made. Some bigger than others.
Two of my favorite fuck-ups were right there on the front page. The first one, I no longer have a copy of, to my great regret. The front cover story was about (don't quote me on this) a symposium that La Salle held about being respectful and civil in the media? Something like that. It had to have been the type of discussion forum where they were going through what NOT to say in certain situations, because the large, front-page-featured picture was that of the speaker at a podium, and behind her, in bold letters, the word CUNT.
No one caught this before it went to print. Not the News Editor who pasted the picture. Not the five copy editors, including the Editor-in-Chief, who had to sign off on a page before it was submitted (and I can include myself in this, because all editors were expected to occasional play copy editor and sign off on a few pages). Not the printers. Who knows, maybe not many of the readers picked up on it either. But to those of us in the Collegian office, the boner was clear as day. The front page had the word CUNT on it. Amazing.
There had been another blunder on the front the previous school year, and this one was probably better, in my opinion, because it was less blatant. It was only the suggestion of an insensitive screw-up. The story in the left side column on the front page was a solemn story about a guy getting stabbed to death by his girlfriend at an off-campus house. Gruesome shit, but definitely a story that is worthy of the front page.
In the lower left corner of every issue, the editor would usually put a picture related to a story further on in the issue, perhaps to entice the reader to continue on past the cover page. So the picture had nothing to do with anything on the cover page, but rather the caption would direct you to open to the page in the issue to "read on" about the story that the picture actually related to.
Only in this particular issue of Collegian, in the Entertainment section, there was a review of a recent local Philadelphia production of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's bloodiest play (no, not the band). And whoever put together the front page decided that this would be the article previewed on the front page with a picture.
And that picture featured someone holding a bloody knife. And that picture was placed directly below a morbid story about someone getting stabbed to death at La Salle.
To someone with a twisted sense of humor (like me), this is fucking hilarious. And lucky for you, dear sadistic reader, I actually have a copy of this one.
So yeah, we were college kids, we weren't always perfect. But now let me tell you about a time when Collegian's front page WAS perfect. Sincerely perfect in every way. It was fucking legendary.
The story starts, as all good stories do, with some strippers. There was a kooky business professor, employed by La Salle, who decided that a good way to illustrate a point about supply and demand(?) would be to hire strippers to come to class and give lap dances to the students in his class. His name was Professor Rappaport. The class itself took place at La Salle's Bucks County Campus, but still. I mean, not to belabor the point, but Professor Rappaport did something that was, um, very against La Salle's Code of Conduct. And it was fucking hilarious.
Our Editor-in-Chief got a tip early on that this absolutely bonkers event had taken place, and so he wrote up a front-page feature about it. He was going to fucking break this absurd story before the fucking Inquirer!
Except, it's La Salle, and you should know by now (if only from my constant insane ramblings on the subject) how strict La Salle is, how draconian the establishment is, how dumb and rigorous the rules are, even if (or especially if) it fucks over a student somehow.
And La Salle pays the bills for the Collegian, and the paper and the staff are owned by the Deans, and so the Dean of Students put the kibosh on the whole thing. No front page feature. No breaking report of this incredibly wild story. Their excuse: "La Salle wants you to hold off on your story until its official investigation is complete." Fucking bullshit, but EIC's hands were tied.
Collegian is a weekly paper, so we had to wait a whole 'nother week to publish the damn story, and by that time City Paper broke it instead. Collegian was ready to print the next week, but by then, every Philly publication had gotten their hands on the story, and Collegian was left to pick up the crumbs.
And! Even after all this, the next week rolls around, and the La Salle Higher Ups are STILL being dicks about it. First they said "No" to the story again. After EIC ostensibly got on his hands and knees to beg, a compromise was reached.
The compromise was that the Collegian staff was allowed to put the news article on the front page, but it had to be "below the fold," i.e. where you couldn't see it if the newspaper was in its folded stack in the distributor bins around campus. It was Family Weekend, you see, and La Salle didn't want mommy and daddy to be greeted with stacks of newspapers telling them about how their sons and daughters were receiving lap dances from strippers on campus.
Below the fold. Okay.
Sure enough, that week's issue featured a Breaking News story about how there were strippers on La Salle's campus. It was below the fold, as demanded.
Except, the entire portion of the front page above the fold was blank, save for four small words in the center that read: "See below the fold."
I'm cracking up even now, years later, just writing about it. What fucking brass balls EIC had in this stunt. I fucking love it. He had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stick it to the man and take a shit all over the La Salle's administration, and he fucking took it.
This shit was so legendary that the Inquirer followed up on their stripper coverage with a story about Collegian's coverage of the story. Please read the article, because I'm hesitant to put any of my friends' names on this public blog, but EIC's name needs to be known. In fact, now he's actually writing for the Inquirer himself, covering Philly's suburbs (including the same PA county where those infamous strippers gave lap dances in a La Salle seminar hall).
I did a lot of fucking around in my section of the newspaper, and wrote a lot of shit that I imagined was calling La Salle out for their bullshit (I'll spare you any more of it, you've already read enough). But I couldn't touch that legendary Collegian front page.
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