Letter to The Pacer staff in response to the April Fool’s section of last week’s paper. Specifically concerning its title: “There’s Real Journalism, and Then You’ve Got Us, The Front Row.”

Pacer Staff –

I’m glad to be able to inspire an otherwise less-than-creative newspaper through my own personal effort and the efforts of my writers in The Back Row. After seeing your April Fool’s issue I had a hard time deciding how to respond.

Whether ‘The Front Row’ is just a long since conceived idea of Mr. Crouch’s or if it took the entire staff to devise, there was no single name taking credit. The Back Row takes credit for our own criticism of The Pacer so I’ll have to direct this letter at your whole staff.

The way you can only attack my publication in an off-handed manner suggests to me that you do not have the conviction to do it directly. When I write something about your ‘newspaper’, I have the confidence and the responsibility to take direct credit for it. If you all want to go to sleep and dream about being ‘real journalists’ that’s fine, some of you might even get jobs in the field.

However, since you are the only people that I ever hear praising the school newspaper, I will wait until I hear that somebody other than Pacer staff and those related to Pacer staff respect The Pacer.

You appear as though you are very insecure. The Back Row is not direct competition to The Pacer. We are not a newspaper. Can you find in print my claim to be a newspaper? No, you won’t find it.

The Back Row does not want to be The Pacer. We are not a hard news publication. Maybe in your oversimplification of the entire media industry you have overlapped all printed media. Perhaps I have to clarify things.

Real journalists, as I have said before, do not rely primarily upon press releases. PR is propaganda and it is not objective in the least. It is also not written by your staff, except for Candace Cooper, but only because she works for University Relations.

I am not a newspaper, you are. When you print an editorial on your front page it makes the paper look stupid. When the editorial claims that Phil Bredesen is the reason that The Pacer has no color, your editor looks like a fool and your paper looks like a bunch of spoiled brats, crying. I thought that the budget cuts were all NEXT semester, why does a cut next semester affect this semester? Oh, maybe you’re behind on this semester’s budget?

The next time you take an indirect jab at The Back Row you may want to use some factual information, instead of slandering us and shifting your own faults onto us. I hope that next year your editor will make a push to return to good journalism, but you might have to go back to your first news class textbook and reread the definition.

If whoever (Mr. Crouch, I’ll assume) created the title for your April Fools’ issue had the spine to take credit for it I wouldn’t have to send an email to the whole staff and insult everyone, but I do not know which of you are so concerned with The Back Row and the threat it represents to The Pacer.

If you want to believe that we compete, then you can keep on imagining this. Or you can use the imagined competition to actually motivate you to improve something other than the appearance of the paper; the content.

I know that “It’s a Joke,” but I do not consider your issue appropriate simply because your paper is not an example of real journalism either. If our few negative comments about The Pacer really bug you all that much, do something about it other than saving your insults for the April Fools’ issue and make some improvements.

If you have to call The Back Row out, then do it like “Real Journalists” would, with your name attached and a factual complaint.

Until then, you’re just going to continue to represent yourselves like cowards and unprofessional, child-journalists.

Steve Helgeson Editor, The Back Row