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The South End

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

This article is about the student newspaper. For the Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood, see South End.

Front page of The South End, November 4, 2004.

The South End is the official student newspaper of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, published in print and online. It was founded in 1967, and its publication is funded partly from university funds and partly from advertising revenues, and is distributed free of charge.

The paper is published five days a week during the fall and winter terms, and twice weekly during the summer. Since the September 13, 2004 issue, the front and back pages of the paper are in color and inside pages are infrequently color as well. The daily printed circulation is 8,000 and the online readership community is over 30,000.

Syndicated features run by The South End include the Tribune Media Services crossword and a horoscope by Linda C. Black of Tribune Media Services. A Knight Ridder wire service provides these features as well as national and international news articles.

Cartoons run by the paper include Perry Bible Fellowship and Melby Comics, the latter by a local Detroit artist, and occassionally cartoons by staffers and students.

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History of the paper

Before The South End, the paper was called The Daily Collegian, having been The Wayne Collegian and The Detroit Collegian earlier on. The last year of The Daily Collegian was Volume 57, while the first year of The South End was Volume 58, in 1967. Keast, the University president at the time, objected to the name. The logo of the paper then consisted of the name in lowercase over a drawing of a city skyline. In its first few years, The South End published a lot of poetry.

On September 26, 1968, when John Watson took over as Editor-in-Chief, a drawing of a small black panther facing to the right was added on both sides of the logo, which remained the same. From October 15 to the end of the year, the black panther on the right was flipped to face left, for symmetry. This symbolized the paper's ties with the Black Panthers.

In 1995, The South End won a gold medal from the College Newspaper Critique of Columbia University.

Circulation of The South End hit a high when guest columnist Joe Fisher wrote a controversial column entitled "Islam Sucks" in the February 26, 2002 issue. The column was mentioned by noted journalist Jack Lessenberry in his Metro Times column, saying that it should have been titled "Fundamentalist Islam sucks." The South End received so much mail about Fisher's column that they were printing letters for days, including letters from anti-defamation leagues.

The paper is not consistently antagonistic to Muslims, however. When a student group consisting mostly of Arab-American women got together on campus to protest the 2003 occupation of Iraq on April 13, 2004, the paper reported on the protest the next day with a headline reading "Students Rally for Justice." However, the article itself appeared to make an effort to be neutral.

In 2003 - 2004, the circulation was highly unreliable and spotty when the task was entrusted to WSU's interoffice mail, which is notorious for losing documents. Although there are stands for the paper at many points throughout campus, they were sometimes either full of old issues or completely empty. It was that school year that a gray line drawing of a tower of Old Main (a campus building) was added to the paper's name atop the front page.

In April 2004, the Conservative Union, a student group at Wayne State University started a biweekly (now monthly) newspaper, The Wayne Review, without university funding, to counter what was seen as the South End's liberal bias with a conservative viewpoint. Wonetha Jackson, then editor in chief of the South End, wrote a column extending good wishes to the new paper. The Wayne Review often includes on its last page a section called "The Back End," an obvious parody of The South End. Wayne Review editors often write letters to The South End.

In 2004 the Knight Ridder wire horoscope was occasionally replaced by the Warrior Spirit Horoscope, which was considered cheesy because of its advocacy of WSU sporting events. A good example of Keplerian astrology, the horoscope often adviced readers to avoid casino gambling.

Another start-up newspaper, the Warrior, has been publishing on and off since spring 2004. Its staff includes former South End staffers who've graduated.

For the April 1, 2005 issue, the paper ran a satire issue called The Rear End, printed the date as "March 32, 2005" and ran fake news stories, such as "WSU partiers conquer, reign" "Raisin mistaken for roach, student still catches buzz" and "Warriors Basketball awarded National Championship." The issue was codenamed "Onion", after the satirical newspaper The Onion. For that issue, the paper had a color logo of humorously anthropomorphic Old Main tower with rear end exposed.

After that issue, the old gray line drawing was replaced by a color photo of the facade of Old Main with a blue sky, though the blue sky was removed after three issues.

Although The South End often has misspellings in its articles, it occasionally has misspellings in its headlines. The headline of the June 8, 2005 lead story read "CULMA to be disolved [sic]" and its secondary headline was "Vote closes 18-year-old urban studies school and moves it's [sic] programs throughout WSU". The South End very rarely runs corrections.

Currently, the most popular article on The South End website is an article about community users who watch pornography on the school's library computers.

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