Beginning writers are fond of openings stories with quotes that aren’t strong enough to lead with. Who is the speaker? Why do we care? Until they have more experience distinguishing a great quote from a merely good one, journalism instructors urge students not to open with some one else’s words. In a profile, opening with […]
College newspapers serve as incubators for the real deal, at least until your local news becomes a national story. When a big story happens, like last week’s shooting of UC Santa Barbara students, the college newspapers often have the best coverage. They know the place and the players. Trusted by and familiar to sources, they […]
Good journalism explains complicated subjects in ways that the audience can understand. Great journalism makes those subjects exciting. In his story about an organization at Boston University that’s trying to build a rocket, Jake Lucas conveys both why the students love what they do and what exactly is so difficult about it. When Lucas writes […]
Learning to capture the details that matter can take years. Beginning writers rely on physical traits to explain subjects, or do a notebook dump of descriptions that tell the audience nothing much at all. Connor Radnovich’s profile of Mike White, a Gulf War veteran with ALS, demonstrates a studied use of detail. Radnovich tells us […]
UCLA’s Daily Bruin published a comprehensive package about sexual assault on campus just days after the White House released a report outlining procedural guidelines for colleges to follow when dealing with such cases. In her thorough story about UCLA’s policies and procedures, Kate Parkinson-Morgan explains the intricacies of Title IX, the Clery Act, and other […]
It’s been almost a month since the UConn Huskies won both NCAA basketball titles, but the pangs of withdrawal are evident on certain basketball-crazed campuses around the country. Without a good game, we turn instead to a good story. Cal Poly beat Texas Southern to secure a spot in the tournament and lost in the […]
When administrators, parents, and professors discuss money in the context of higher ed, they mean student loans and tuition. But when students talk money, it’s much more about who’s got it and who doesn’t. For students of modest means at America’s elite colleges, money acts as a barrier to extracurricular or social activities, or even […]
College campuses are full of ghosts. Alumni magazines have the glossy success stories about the alumnus who made good, but what students remember are the cautionary tales. The tormented writer who worked here for a while. The student who fell to his death from the eighth floor of your dorm. But these stories are almost […]
This week’s College Longreads selection is as much for the publication as it is for the story. Richie Siegel’s article about a Japanese street food restaurant in Chicago called Yoshu is mostly a profile of the owners, with a little bit of a restaurant review on the side. Siegel, a sophomore at NYU, is an […]
Ivory Tower veterans, many of whom were students in the 1960s and 1970s, lament the lack of student activism on college campuses. There are few protests, only a smattering a vigils, and barely any quad chalking. But is all that passion and activism gone, or has it just moved – along with everything else – […]
Yiren Lu, a recent Harvard grad who now studies computer science at Columbia, takes a step back from the startup world to wonder what it means for our tech infrastructure when all the bright young things want to make apps but aren’t skilled in networks and hardware — the stuff that makes the Internet go. […]
The college experience for many American students in 2014 is not a residential, Animal House one. Students work and enroll part time to avoid what feels like an inevitable and insurmountable debt load. They may live at home and commute to classes. They get the curriculum, but have to work harder to meet people and […]
Young women in college have joked for decades about “working their way through school” via pornography. And as with every tired old joke, there’s some truth behind it. The Duke Chronicle profiled a first-year student named “Lauren,” a woman who identifies as a feminist, libertarian, and porn star as “Aurora.” The student who wrote the […]
Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower […]
Mental health issues have lost much of their stigma on college campuses, as they have in the rest of the world. Today’s college students self-medicate just as much as they always did, but they also seek professional help in a much more public way than you might remember from your own school days. You’ll find […]
Journalism, like everything else, has its trends. From celebrity guest editors to abundant Upworthian headlines, there’s a lot of replication in our business. So it was with low expectations that I began to read “Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions,” an oral history of a Canadian Football League team by a group of University of Maryland students. Most […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: If only all universities had someone like Jesse Flickinger to explain their research projects to the masses. Flickinger takes his readers on an intellectual adventure that begins in a Kabul café and ends in a library […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: The New York media world grieves for editor Peter Kaplan, who died last week. Kaplan worked at several publications during his career, and he’s best known as the longtime editor of the New York Observer, but […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Colleges share symbiotic relationships with their neighboring towns, and economic disparities tend to strain those relations. At Dartmouth, the school’s wealth and privilege overshadows the surrounding area’s rural poverty. In a detailed report by Charlie Rafkin […]
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