No news is—well, no news

In the Nov. 16 issue of , you’ll notice a photo and caption from the ’ public speaking contest (lower left corner, page 2). If you’re like me, you’ll ask yourself, “Haven’t I seen this before?” And the answer is: “Yes.” Several times before, in fact.

While the staff of is always proud to promote the accomplishments of our students, we sometimes struggle with whether we’re promoting the same event too many times in a row. In fact, this photo almost didn’t appear in this issue for this reason.

The editorial staff had decided that it was sufficient to run this photo on the Web only because we seem to run what appears to be identical photos with captions of this event several times each year. (In actuality, different students are featured every time.) The question remains: When stories or photos appear repeatedly in , do they lose their newsworthiness?

We removed the photo of the public speaking contest and replaced it with a photo and caption from this year’s Midnight Breakfast—another event that is documented in quite frequently. Which was more newsworthy? Not sure. They both measured the same to me—and you can probably guess what that was…

Alas, it all boiled down to photo quality. The better photo—technically speaking—was public speaking.