And it's killing me. Cause this is not the article that I turned in. It's been edited to the point of nearly NOT being my story at all. And that hurts. I sat with the Edge editor yesterday, and we reviewed the story together. Tweaked it a little, corrected some of my very common grammatical errors (WHY are quotes so hard?) Took out the part about Jesus from one of the contestants....
I have a byline. Marred - in my humble opinion - by the fact that it says the article was completed as part of a class assignment. Because that's not why I did it. I did it because THIS is what I want to do. I want to tell stories. I want to tell the news. I want to have people like you, reading at home, know the people that I met on Monday night. People I go to school with, and still never see. I didn't want to let the people I met Monday night down. I *wanted* to tell their story. And I wanted you to care.
So, here I am. With my first ever, out there for the world to see and criticize, marred by that stupid sentence about it being a class assignment, edited till it barely resembles anything I wrote at all, published story. My first byline. And I'm crying in my darkened bedroom. Damn it.
Here is the link to the article in the Kansas State University Collegian newspaper. Happy reading.
EDIT 12:00 pm 2/1/12- So, I got to work. I grabbed a copy of the Collegian on the way to my desk. I cried to a coworker that they hacked my story. I set the story aside and went to work.
I went back to the paper, and pulled up my original article on my computer. I highlighted the areas in the original that didn't make the paper. And realized that there are really only 7 sentences that didn't make the paper.
There are several other minor changes, and the story doesn't *sound* like me anymore. The people that I was highlighting, are not the focus of the article, and I still take great umbrage at the sentence declaring the fact that my article is part of a class assignment. Even DH agrees that it kinda throws me under the bus, implying 'if you think this article sucks, it's because she's a student.'
My point is that I might have judged the article a little harshly at 5:30 this morning. I might have overreacted or maybe I'm PMSing. But out of the entire article, only 7 sentences didn't make it. And for the first one, that's not so bad. Is it?
EDIT 12:00 pm 2/1/12- So, I got to work. I grabbed a copy of the Collegian on the way to my desk. I cried to a coworker that they hacked my story. I set the story aside and went to work.
I went back to the paper, and pulled up my original article on my computer. I highlighted the areas in the original that didn't make the paper. And realized that there are really only 7 sentences that didn't make the paper.
There are several other minor changes, and the story doesn't *sound* like me anymore. The people that I was highlighting, are not the focus of the article, and I still take great umbrage at the sentence declaring the fact that my article is part of a class assignment. Even DH agrees that it kinda throws me under the bus, implying 'if you think this article sucks, it's because she's a student.'
My point is that I might have judged the article a little harshly at 5:30 this morning. I might have overreacted or maybe I'm PMSing. But out of the entire article, only 7 sentences didn't make it. And for the first one, that's not so bad. Is it?
No comments:
Post a Comment