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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, July 01, 2005

MEDILDO DAYS II


[For an earlier Medill School of Journalism
post, look here.]


The tale of Diana Griego Erwin, the columnist who turns out to have made up scads of her colorful and witty sources, allows UD finally to share with you a deep dark secret from her own past -- the moment, to be precise, when she knew that she should not be a journalist.

She was in a classroom at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. She must have been eighteen years old. It was a dark and stormy winter afternoon in Evanston, which is near Chicago, which has dark and stormy winters. “Get out there with your notebooks and get some quotes from housewives about how they’re coping with the inflation rate,” our instructor said. “Go to the playgrounds. Go to the supermarkets. Go and get your quotes.”

UD shivered. She looked around at her classmates, all of whom were zipping up and zooming out of the room for the long trip across town. UD yawned.

Eventually she was alone in the room, the instructor also having left.

She looked out of the windows to confirm that this was indeed a bitch of a day -- heavy snow, major wind factor, cold as a witch’s tit. She decided to walk to her nearby dorm room.



Where her roommate, hearing of her sorrow, suddenly left the room and returned with the Evanston phone book. “Find your housewives in here, and give them speech!” she said.

UD was shocked at first, but then, well, she wrote and submitted an article rich with colorful and witty expressions of dismay over the inflation rate.




The next day, the journalism instructor began class by reading, word for word, UD’s article to everyone. “See?” she said. “See how a really hard-working reporter gets a great story with great quotes? Make this your model.”

Two days after that, UD began the process of withdrawing from the journalism program. It was too easy - at least for a verbally flashy degenerate like her - to make stuff up.
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UPDATE: See?