I would like to begin my first blog by voicing my frustration with the way my classmates were represented in the C-SPAN article. The article described disinterested, ignorant, and borderline smart a** students when that is simply not the case. The students who were quoted are intelligent, active, and valuable assets to our community contrary to what the article might imply. Secondly, I would like to voice my anger directed at Bret Pancake, editor of the Rapid City Journal. Mr. Pancake wasted a perfect opportunity to interest a class of highly capable high school students in the journalism process. Instead, he elected to put himself on a pedestal and tell us that we were over reacting and need to "look in the mirror." I did not appreciate his arrogant and belittling attitude towards Andrew Montoya, who likely has a much more impressive resume than Mr. Pancake only 18 years into his life. Thirdly, I question the direction our Journal is heading as Editor Pancake himself said that he is a "heavy-handed re writer". I don't argue that often Rapid City's news may not be incredibly interesting. I don't even argue that it is a hard job to find articles to hold an audiences attention. But it seems that the Journal's approach to solving our "boring community" is to follow the lead of the Pancake man and rewrite stories so that they are more controversial and in turn, more interesting. What Waffle boy doesn't understand, however, is that our community does not find controversy interesting. Rapid City is a small, tightly knit town that enjoys heart warming stories, not stories that highlight high school student's lack of interest in "a bunch of white dudes fighting".
P.S. He wore a polka-dot tie with a striped shirt... come on man. Show some fashion.
All I can say to this article is, thank you. Thank you for expressing the feelings of our class in a funny and appropriate way. The editor is a little right and wrong in how we took it. He is right that we may have taken it a little to hard but it would have been a better representation of the high schoolers if the article had included opinions from people form other schools like Central and Stevens.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Mr. Pancake may have seemed rude, he did have a lot of valid points like freedom of the press and the fact that all media can be provocative and unfair. One aspect of his presentation that I did appreciate was that he did have a talk with Ms. Colias to try and prevent future problems like what occurred here and that he supposedly took Andrew's letter seriously.
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