I’m getting really fed up with all the complaints about the Daily from you readers. People constantly come up to me and rant about how the front page has grammar errors, or how the editorials all seem to originate from the planet Zarrkon, or how the Daily doesn’t pay enough attention to blah blah blah. Well, I’ve had it, and it’s time for me to take a stand for my newspaper and proudly say, “Don’t look at me! I’m just a columnist!”

Ha, just kidding. Columnists are legit journalists too, except we don’t deal with what I think of as the “theoretical foundations” of journalism, such as “research” or “truth,” unless we run out of better ideas. But before I worked for the Daily, I was the Health and Recreation editor of my high school newspaper, which for the most part consisted of showing all the other editors how to install Nintendo games onto their computers. Once in a while I would have time to do hard-hitting investigative pieces, such as “Why people jog.”

So I know that running a newspaper is difficult work. After all our careful planning and proofreading, sometimes mistakes just slip by. For example, one time, the sports editor at my high school paper couldn’t think of a heading for a soccer article. So he just typed in “Boys soccer looks to give its opponents fits and grow some tits,” and decided to play Nintendo until he could think of something better.

Unfortunately, he forgot to change it before the paper went to press. Not that there’s anything wrong with men growing breasts – heck, the heading was probably factually accurate given some of the drugs that the soccer players were inclined to experiment with. But it’s just not the kind of sentence that the Pulitzer Prize committee hands out awards for.

What was even more amazing, though, was that no one who didn’t already know about it noticed it, even though it was in big bold letters. Keep in mind that this newspaper was read over by hundreds of pubescent boys who normally should be able to find the word “tits” and giggle at it uncontrollably, even if it were printed backwards in Sanskrit.

But that sort of snafu doesn’t happen at the Daily. If it did, no way would it get past the eyes of our loyal and bloodthirsty critics. In fact, there are probably some readers, like the Iowa Legislature, who can sense that there was a dirty word in this column even before it went to print, and are already taking steps to eliminate the education budget to make sure students like me will never be a danger to Iowa’s educational environment.

But proofreading errors are only the least of the complaints that the Daily has to deal with. Then you have the intellectual crowd who want us, for once in our pathetic little careers, to cover some “real” issues. Well, I know there are at least a few Daily journalists who are capable of going out and covering “real” issues like the current Argentinean political upheaval.

The problem is that there is that huge sections of the ISU population (engineers, freshmen, crows) just don’t care about or understand these “real” issues. For them, the closest they get to experiencing Argentinean political upheaval is when they choose to eat at La Fuente instead of Taco Bell.

So, when I think of “real” issues, I think of compelling issues that affect every ISU student and Ames resident, like the completely made up rumor that former President Jischke is the illegitimate spawn of Ozzy Osbourne and several Enron executives. Unfortunately, “ethics” get in the way of letting us tackle the more compelling stories. So that’s why I’m going to point my finger at you.

Yes. You, the reader. Has it ever crossed your mind that the reason why the Daily never interests you is because you, and everyone else in Readerland, are being boring?

Look at my hometown of Iowa City, which is highly respected as a journalism haven. Is it because the journalists there are harder-working or more intelligent? Of course not. Iowa City just happens to have that quality that we journalists refer to as “a place where dumb things happen.”

Take, for example, the issue of alcohol. Here, when it comes to reporting about alcohol, it usually amounts to “Let’s whine about dry Veishea some more.” But over in Iowa City – as recently reported in local and national newspapers – bartenders are literally setting their patrons on fire! Under-21 patrons! Free of charge!

The result is that the journalists there don’t have to do any work. They don’t need to – the news is so thick that their computers can spontaneously generate headlines on their own, such as “FIRE, ALCOHOL – A DEADLY COMBINATION,” and the Pulitzer committee just goes wild for it!

And look at our Morrill Hall issue. Because President Geoffroy and his committees want to “consider options” and make “well-thought out plans,” Daily reporters are limited to writing about the genealogies of each brick.

Compare this to the University of Iowa, where they actively burn down historical buildings that are actually usable. I’m referring to the incident this past winter when officials let workers use blowtorches to renovate the famous Old Capitol dome. When University of Iowa officials noticed that, once in a while, flaming debris would fall from the dome, they courageously acted by doing absolutely nothing. This soon resulted in the loss of a 160-year old treasure and more easy-to-write headlines like, “FIRE BURNS WOOD – WHO WOULD’VE KNOWN?”

So before you readers get all up in arms about how the Daily is irrelevant and sloppy, you need to remember the words of Richard Nixon and ask yourself what you can do for your newspaper. So go forth and do newsworthy things for us to write about. Last time I heard, crows are also susceptible to blowtorches. But you didn’t read about that idea from this columnist.

Dan Nguyen is a senior in journalism and mass communication and computer engineering from Iowa City.