It was in October 2002 that the first issue of the The Graffiti Review came out. A friend of mine and I had decided to start up a monthly paper in response to the badly edited, trite and often pointless articles in the school newspaper. However, this is not to say that our paper was the greatest piece of literature since War and Peace.

In fact, we really had no idea what we were doing. We enjoyed reading the satirical newspaper The Onion and figured we could do the same, or something similar at least. The first few issues weren't great by any means.

The first issue featured hard-hitting articles like “How area ruler can save the world,” a movie review of “Apocalypse Now,” some famous quotes and a short poem I wrote about writing. We didn't settle though. OK, we initially did settle out of laziness, but after the fourth issue we decided to start improving the paper.

Although we began with overhauling the design, the focus later became the content. The assumption became that no issue was perfect and because of this we never took ourselves too seriously.

The question I asked of both readers and myself was, “What was wrong with the last issue?”

We tried not to take ourselves too seriously, and if we accomplished anything, we accomplished this. The problem with taking yourself too seriously is that you run the risk of parodying yourself, which is why The Onion and programs like “The Daily Show” even exist. Unfortunately, two stories in this paper in the last month have been the type of stuff such outfits routinely make fun of.

The first time came when I saw the nearly 9-by-6-inch picture of a student bleeding on the front page. Because of the gigantic size of the picture, the near two-thirds of the page the story took up and the serious nature of this paper, I thought that someone had gone on another rampage.

After quickly dismissing the school shooting idea, I decided it was more likely that someone had instead set off a bomb. But then I learned of the tragedy that had struck campus: a bicyclist flying into the back windshield of a car.

But worse than taking up two-thirds of the front page was seeing the tiny box at the bottom of the front page that read, “Dow Jones loses 450 points / The loss is the worst since the Sept. 11 aftermath.”

Had the box instead read, “Gorilla steals sandwich from Jimmy Johns,” I could understand devoting so much space to the bicycle story. There are slow days, but this was not one of them.

It wasn't easy seeing this paper stoop to the level of the big news networks.

Say it ain't so, Kansan, say it ain't so!

If this had just happened once, I wouldn't be writing this. And then came another story that took up most of the front page with another massive picture — this time about snow cones.

I'm still disturbed that anyone would try all of Tad's Tropical Sno flavors not once, but twice.

However, more disturbing is the prospect that something, anything, of more importance happened on that day and was marginalized in favor of this story.

I know this is a college paper, so no one is expecting perfection or professional quality from it, but this time around the stories were fine.

The problem was that they were above the fold with giant pictures and took up most of the front page. The narrow focus worked against them and became like a journal entry or an in-class essay.

In the process they become esoteric and irrelevant to anyone not directly affected.

So the audience tuned out, or the ones who tuned in became so angry that next time they wished they’d never started reading.

— Mangiaracina is a Lenexa senior in journalism.