The South End

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

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File:TheSouthEndFrontPageNov4.png

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.

The circulation is hurt by unreliable and sometimes spotty distribution. Although there are stands for the paper at many points throughout campus, they are sometimes either full of old issues or completely empty. The website updates daily by 2 a.m.

Syndicated features run by The South End include the Tribune Media Services crossword, a horoscope by Linda C. Black of Tribune Media Services. The cheesy "Warrior Spirit Horoscope" that tried very hard to raise school spirit has been discontinued. The cartoon Haiku Circus by Ken Sakamoto also appears regularly.

In April 2004, the Conservative Union, a student group at Wayne State University started a biweekly newspaper, the Wayne Review, without university funding, to counter what was seen as the South End's liberal bias with an conservative viewpoint that some called racist. Wonetha Jackson, then editor in chief of the South End, wrote a column extending good wishes to the Wayne Review. The Wayne Review closed down for the summer after two issues, while The South End continued to publish even in the summer semester. On September 2004, the first Fall issue of the Wayne Review came out, now calling itself a monthly newspaper and expressing in its page 3 editorial perceived victimization by the South End. The Wayne Review has a parody of The South End on the last page of every issue called "The Back End", while The South End hardly ever refers or alludes to the Wayne Review.

Circulation of the paper hit an all-time 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.

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" and "Warriors Basketball awarded National Championship."

Before The South End, the official student newspaper was The Collegian, sometimes called The Daily Collegian.

External links

• The South End Online
• Text of Joe Fisher's article, and official email to the Wayne State University community that followed
• Haiku Circus - comic strips in 5-7-5