Senior accounting and finance major
By now, most of my friends know I’m a columnist for The Diamondback. And whenever I’m asking for help, whether it’s because I have a deadline coming up and no inspiration or while having a casual conversation with them, they’ll often offer me ideas for column topics. Very often, these will be excellent ideas that would make excellent columns. And yet I almost never write about them.
I would love to write every one of those suggestions. I would love to work for a paper that publishes columns with a wide range of views on every topic that would interest a college student. But I can’t. Even among the 17 of us who are columnists, we don’t have a wide enough range of views and opinions to do that. There’s just too much to write about and not enough of us.
So, when I get these great ideas that I can’t write about, I always ask my friends, “Why don’t you write about it?” Sometimes they will. But most of the time, they’ll just shrug, say they don’t have enough time or skill, and change the subject. And then, a few days later, they’ll complain about how The Diamondback won’t cover topics they feel are important or that a columnist said something they disagree with. Usually, they’ll also add that they wish The Diamondback was more representative of their interests as college students, instead of just the interests of a few columnists who always say the same things.
The thing is, they’re right. The Diamondback as it stands does not represent most Terps’ interests. It is just a collection of a few people’s opinions — and it has to be, because no one ever writes in. We publish guest columns whenever we can, but we don’t get many of them — and so the guest column slots get filled with extra submissions from the staff columnists (like the extra column I wrote for Monday’s edition).
This is relatively easy to fix, though. All it takes is a few people with opinions actually writing in. If we received just a few more guest columns every week, The Diamondback’s diversity of opinions would balloon. It’s that simple.
You, the person reading this column, are probably someone with an opinion about something. If you aren’t, then you probably have at least one friend who is. Between the two of you, you can easily sit down and figure out 500 to 600 words to say about that topic. If you make it interesting and show you care, we will publish it. If you really don’t feel confident in your writing, you can go to the Writing Center in Tawes Hall; they’ll be thrilled to help you.
If everyone starts doing this, The Diamondback will stop being a collection of a few people (like me) talking a lot. If you’re an avid reader, you’ll know by now exactly how each of us feels about any given topic — so help us change things up. The Diamondback is intended to be this university’s student body’s newspaper; the only way we’ll ever live up to that is if the student body actually contributes.
So the next time you see something in The Diamondback you don’t like, or have a strong opinion and want everyone to know about it, write us a guest column at opinionumdbk@gmail.com. It’ll save me the extra work, impress your friends and loved ones and, most importantly, make The Diamondback a better paper.
Ezra Fishman is a senior accounting and finance major. He can be reached at efishmandbk@gmail.com.
