The SOUL of Reporting

My fledgling little organization, SOUL (Student Organization for Undergraduate Literature), hosted a Banned Books event Wednesday night.  A reporter and photographer from The Daily Tar Heel covered it.

This semester, I have gained hypersensivity to reporters since I'm having to do an insane volume of reporting.  As I saw him typing all resigned on his Macbook, dreaming of what his Wednesday night could have been, I felt much sympathy for him.  He just seemed so bored by our little event.

SOUL events are tiny, nerdy affairs.  We have them every other Wednesday night on a topic we can somehow construe as literary. Next week, our topic is super heroes.  Previously, we've done fairy tales, Harry Potter, Coriolanus, depression themes in literature, feminism and Disney... the list goes on.

The discussions are famous for going in the direction of Marxism or colonism or strangely enough, how evil Disney is.  People bring varied expertise to the talks and we can rarely guess how they're going to go.  Attendees are primarily English majors (though one of our co-presidents is history and comparative literature) but anyone can come. The unifying factor is caring about literature and learning and cultural issues or phenomena that go along with it. Sometimes we bring in an (un)lucky professor to give a guest lecture and eat free pizza.

Since I've been with SOUL since the beginning, and I've been the secretary for three years, I'm very attached to it. So I was excited when the reporter showed up.  We could use some more publicity and get outside our niche of people.

I thought he was getting into it.  He even contributed to our discussion (by telling us about book banning laws in his native Algeria) and he kept pulling people out in the hallway for what appeared to be intense interviews.

So I looked up the article today.  My favorite section:

“Everything, regardless of your opinions on it, deserves to be discussed. Even if you disagree with it,” she said.

Sophomore political science major Stephanie McCormick agreed.

“You have to recognize alternative viewpoints than your own,” she said.

Sophomore physics major Emma Dedmond agreed. 

 The most interesting point about that is the fact that Stephanie is my cousin, and I didn't know she was majoring in political science. 

The article makes us sound like we just sat there and agreed for two hours. I suppose essentially that is true, but it just didn't really hit at the essence of the event. I am too involved in it to to view it objectively. 

But this experience re-invigorated my approach to reporting.  Doing so much is making me jaded. I start to hate the people I'm writing about because I had to get squished on a bus for thirty minutes, get to my car, navigate an unfamiliar city and get lost for another thirty minutes, before finally arriving flustered to the thing I'm covering.  But that's not their fault.  They still just want to be accurately represented, just like I wanted SOUL to be accurately represented, ruined Wednesday nights be damned. 

Or I might be just be bitter that he didn't talk to me. I don't know.