Marquette Wire doing ok with real news stories
- Andrew Goldstein
- Jan 25, 2017
- 2 min read
On January 23, Marquette’s board of trustees announced in a press release that tuition would be increasing $1,330 for the 2017-18 academic year.
Before you chuckle and wait for a punch line, you might first want to consider the source: an organization known as the Marquette Wire. According to its website, the Wire is “the official student news source of Marquette University.” They have quickly gained a reputation for reporting and disseminating information based in reality – a practice that some are calling “real news.”
“We have a growing number of reporters right now,” managing editor Aimee Mastel-Ellison said. “It turns out that a lot of people actually want to know what’s going on in their community, so anybody interested in writing for us should send in application. If you know the first amendment by heart and don’t mind shoving a tape recorder in the face of strangers, you’re hired.”
The Wire publishes a newspaper, the Marquette Tribune, once per week. Students say they enjoy reading the paper once their phone has run out of battery or while waiting for a meeting with a professor.
“It makes me look like a cultured, educated man of the world,” junior Sam Beswick said. “Passersby are definitely impressed by my commitment to knowing what’s going on our campus, while they sulk away as an uninformed simpleton.”
When asked if he actually read the articles, Beswick chuckled and said, “heh, no.”
The hallmark of this so-called “real news” organization is running stories relevant to people on campus. For instance, just last night, the Wire sent multiple reporters to the Golden Eagles’ upset over No. 1 Villanova. These reporters made no jokes, instead opting to report the score of the game, how many points players had and other things that really happened. Noticeably absent from this coverage was the lack of snark, a choice that sports editor Joseph Godfrey said is intentional.
“I was reading the Golden Seagull one day and it occurred to me that people might want news unfiltered by some smart-ass comedy writer,” Godfrey said.
(This smart-ass comedy writer does not appreciate the dig.)
Time will tell whether or not this non-satirical news organization can survive in a campus culture where jokes about church bells playing Smash Mouth get over 8,000 views.
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