Wednesday, August 22, 2007

About 'Editors'   [Travis Kavulla]

David's right that honors and titles are profligate in the Ivy League—a sad state of affairs that devalues the occasional fought-for honors that still exist.

As to Crimson editors, there are boatloads of them, but this padding is hardly a new development: They have been called as such for over a century, and it seems more self-aggrandizing than it actually is. (The designation was meant to convey voting membership in the editorial board, rather than the term's more current meaning of supervisory control.) The real credential to look for, should you encounter an "editor," is not whether the person is merely a "Crimson editor"—which means he's completed a semester-long "comp" (a training regime which used to stand for "competition" and now stands merely for "competence": no joke) and has a full by-line and a vote in editorial-board meetings. "Executive editors" are those who can properly be called editors in the rest of the world's sense of the term; and there are still 40 or so of those at any given time! But then, it's a large daily newspaper, and it relies on the voluntarism of people who are (or who should be) full-time students otherwise.

Can you tell that I'm a former (executive) editor engaging in apologism? It's that obvious, hmm?  

08/22 12:37 PMShare