My Zephyrant

The front page of Zephyrus is not at all appealing or very journalistic. First of all, the I-35W bridge story is not timely in the least, and no one at Edina really cares anymore seeing as it doesn't affect their daily lives at all. Also, the second story about Thanksgiving charities was NOT front page news, seeing as there was no controversy, excitement, or new information. This article seemed very biased, and the big thing that made me mad was that the author couldn't even get their acronyms right. The article says "Volunteers Enlisted to Help People (VEAP)" and last time I checked, VEHP is not the same as VEAP. The charity is actually called Volunteers Enlisted to Assist People, and it amazes me that the editors and the author were unable to catch this mistake.

Next is the first of two articles written about the same subject: the new cigarettes that are targeted at women. Even though these articles are written differently, they could have been grouped in to one objective article. Also, I feel like these articles were written to "make up" for the sexist article in the last issue, which I will discuss later.

The illegal music article was very relevant to the students of Edina, but it was written horribly and without quotes. This would have been a great place to get student input on the subject but the paper just didn't find it necessary to the article.

The article about the girls only gym class and the boys only english class started with a generalization that was very concerning to read and turned me off from the article in the first sentence. Also, the Zephyrus date piece was worthless and a waste of space.

I really enjoyed the way that the classroom pets article was written, and also the teacher coaches article because they were well written and I felt like I actually learned something about the people who have an impact in my life. Overall they were great articles to read, however the rant about Jerry Seinfeld wasn't a good read, and the entire opinion piece clashes with another story about the Bee Movie opening. Also, why should I care about her opinion of Jerry Seinfeld, and why should he care about her? The other article on the page was the dominating perspective article, which to me was hard to read and lazy, seeing as more than half the story was quotes.

I thought that the central article of this issue was terrible. I found it extremely difficult to read partly because of the colors, and also because of the fact that the articles were not tilted clearly. However, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the articles on this page except for the one about the 90s fads. I didn't like this article mostly because the author used "I" throughout the whole thing, which most people learned not to do in 6th grade, and also because his opening was cliche.

The freedom of speech article was just uninteresting, period. Everyone knows that we have freedom of speech and no one cares or thinks about it, and this article doesn't make me care about it. The response to the letter written to the editor was just a bad move in general. I'll admit that it was good that the editors took some responsibility, but at the same time the article sounded like they just didn't care about what the reader thought and insisted that it was a tasteful article. I don't understand how something like this could get past a board of female editors and cause this much commotion.

Finally, the back page of this paper is just horrible, because they tried to be funny and failed miserably. With the silhouettes the writers said that the answers were "on the back" but the answers were never provided. Is this their Idea of a joke? The first part of the Soulja Boy article was very vivid, interesting, and fun to read, but once it got to the steps I gave up reading because the wording was so difficult to understand.

overall, I think that Zephyrus really needs to work harder on their stories, and learn how to edit their paper. I just read over this whole paper, and it took less than a hour, how hard could it be for them when they have a class period every day to do it?