Welcome to the first article for the new column here on the Idol Bat, Things that Hurt my Soul. Every Friday, I will be exploring various things out in the wide world that hurt my soul. This week, I’d like to start off by taking a look at the campus student newspaper here at Whitman, the Pioneer.

To the people at the Pio, let me just say first that you folks are doing a good job. You’re publishing a weekly paper, managing the large number of people involved with that, fighting through all the issues caused by those first two things, and generally making ends meet. I didn’t write this article because of you. I wrote it because, unfortunately, the Pio hurts my soul.

What volume is this, anyway?

Ever since I was a first-year I haven’t read the Pio all that often. I’m not much into factual news when you come right down to it, and even then I couldn’t get through too many articles without discovering several typos or grammatical errors. As I’ve gotten older and more set in my anal-retentive ways, things haven’t improved. In point of fact, I’d say that we’ve taken a turn for the worst. Admittedly, the most recent Pio (Issue 5, March 1, 2007) is a big improvement on past issues. But despite the fact that the Pio is being refined, there’s still some serious room for improvement.

One of my personal favorite Pio screw-ups this semester is the volume number, printed prominently on the top left of the page. The first couple issues claimed to be part of volume CXVIX. For those of you not as familiar with Roman numerals, this is not a number. It might possible be construed to be 114 (100 + 10 + 10 - 6), or maybe even 125 (100 + 10 + 5 + 10), although that’s stretching it. Someone at the Pio finally caught on to the fact that their volume numerals weren’t a number, though, and switched it up to CXX (120). Too bad that last semester’s papers are all clearly labeled CXVIII (118), which means that the volume is actually 119 (and thus should be CXIX on the front page). Oops.

Update: Karla, Caretaker of the Volumes over at Penrose Library, has written to inform us that the current volume number (120) is actually correct! Apparently, the Pio has been printing the wrong volume number since spring 2006. Now not only is my soul hurt from the Pio’s volume-number shenanigans, but I am saddled with guilt at incorrectly accusing the Pio of being wrong when they were, in fact, right! Oh, the burning!

Color mayhem!

Now for something completely different, I’d like to share a general description of my interactions with the Pioneer’s front page this semester.

I’ll be traipsing through Reid Campus Center, maybe doing a bit of a waltz (it’s like swaggering for the upper classes), when I glance over and notice a nice fresh bunch of Pios in the newstand. “Hot diggity dog!” I say to myself (which is like swearing for really old people), and I waltz over to pick up a copy.

I snag it off the newstand and glance at the front page in a “Hey there, Pio!” kind of way. But instead of getting a polite, “Hey, Ian! You should read me!” what the Pio says back instead is “COLORS IN YOUR FACE!”

Aaaagh, my highly sensitive rods and cones! It’s like wandering into a bar expecting a bunch of sexy people (possibly a foolish expectation going in) and finding instead a bunch of clowns with grins plastered all over their face and squirt guns disguised as flowers pointed at you. I don’t know where to look, and in the end I just end up running away screaming (in a metaphorical sense, of course).

My eyes skitter over headlines that are unreadable because they’re overlapping pictures, dark backgrounds whose ink has faded and bled into the light text inside to the point that the text is utterly unreadable, images absolutely everywhere, and colors that seem to be reenacting the bloodier parts of the Civil War, except that some of them are dressed up like redcoats from the Revolutionary War. “Get your time periods straight!” I shout at the page, and the people checking their email next to the newstand give me a shifty sideways glance and back away slowly.

My eyes, drawn back to the page after a quick glare at the emailers, bounce back and forth between the blocky header (whose blue and yellow colors appear nowhere else on the page) and the various bits of text that are trying to hide within the dark images behind them. Fortunately, my eyes are momentarily snagged by a headline—drugs on Whitman campus? Sounds good!—so I flip to the page mentioned and find that it actually doesn’t start until the next page. The many fonts, most of which don’t appear to feature anywhere else in the issue, assault my senses anew. Finally, I stuff the Pio into my backpack, and go look at a tree.

Trees are so nice. They’ve got everything going for them: complexity, variation, and a color scheme that is diverse and yet cohesive. I could look at trees all day.

So in the end, I have just one request for the Pio: please, be more like a tree. Printing on paper is a good start, but with a little more attention to detail, a willingness to try a simple design rather than throwing everything and the kitchen sink (which probably needs cleaning, anyway) onto the front page, and a little more of that go-get-’em attitude I think that you’d have an attractive publication that wouldn’t hurt my soul whenever I picked one up.

Level of pain: moderate

When you come right down to it, I’ve actually just scratched the surface of why the Pio hurts my soul (I haven’t even touched on the padding issues, obfuscating page headings, boxes instead of letters, or any number of other oversights). On the other hand, the people at the Pio are trying hard, even if they tend to overlook the details that make it a cohesive whole instead of a bunch of articles that happen to be published on the same pieces of paper. Given that the Pio seems to be steadily improving its design (if in small steps), it only causes moderate harm to my immortal soul. Thank you, Pio, and good luck in your future endeavors.

Check back next week for the bane of any student who has had to sit through a classmate’s presentation: PowerPoints!