A fresh style of news writing was born in the office of SBU’s student newspaper, The Stateman. For two weeks running, front-page Stateman articles have been written in abstract prose, in an effort to inspire deep thought and creativity in its readers.
The latest article, a March 26 piece about I-Con read like a strange sort of poetry. “I was staring at that article for like twenty minutes before I finally got it,” said Giacomo LaCasa, a freshman philosophy student. “It was trippy. It was making this massive statement about the nature of people. Dressing up in costumes or something.”
Some readers mistook the poetic liberties of the editors for errors in news content. Throughout campus, though, art lovers stood up for the avant-garde publication. “The Press is always criticizing the Stateman’s grammar. It’s laughable! Some people are so shallow,” said Tiffany Stoych, a senior art history major. “You either can grasp art or you can’t. I bet people used to think E.E. Cummings’ poetry was full of mistakes at first, too.”
The first article in this new trend appeared on March 22. The article described the impeachment of the Undergraduate Student Government president. “It blew my mind,” LaCasa said. “The way these people twist the conventions of language itself to make points about the artistic subjects. They must be the smartest people at this school.”
“I think it was some kind of statement about the state of politics today,” Stoych said. “The Stateman is like the new Dostoyevsky. Or Marx.”
The mini-artistic movement has caught the eye of some resident academics. “Grammar, and the misuse of it, has become a tool in modern writing,” said Clyde Van Squoik, a graduate student in English. “Recent Stateman articles look like they’re full of horrible grammatical errors. In reality, the editors are attempting to make some sort of bizarre poetic statement. It’s pretty amazing.”
The Stateman has experimented with language many times in the past. However, its articles were often dismissed by rivals as “riddled with fundamental errors.”
Most students at SBU, though, are proud to have their student paper become part of a cutting-edge artistic movement. College publications as far away as Ohio are starting to “poeticize the news.” Average people might see mistakes, but the gems among us will see this art for what it is – the next phase of journalism. Yet another innovation born of SBU.
