Hey reader! Are you looking for a news source but are tired of news being so breaking? Are you excited to get the juicy scoop on an event several months after it took place? Do you want to know about tryouts weeks after the team competed in their championship? Well, look no further, for you’ve found exactly that here at the North Star!
The North Star is like a winery, but for news. We begin by harvesting information when it happens and where it happens, with on-the-scene journalists and photographers. Although, sometimes, to really add a complex flavour, we’ll pick topics that happened days, weeks, and sometimes even months late. Once we’ve picked information for a story, we assign it to one of our writers, editors, videographers, or any member we can assign a story to, qualified or not! The writers* then work on it for weeks, sometimes months, to create the perfect article. However it doesn’t end there. You wouldn’t drink a wine fresh from the press; it needs to age. So we send the articles through the editing process, in which the editors age these articles to perfection. Let’s take a look at the selection Chateau North Star has to offer.
Let’s begin with the article simply titled Food Drive. The article covers the SAC/Black Diamond’s collaboration with the Regeneration Community Marketplace Food Bank, as they collected nonperishable food donations. This article has a complex bouquet, as it covers the topic gracefully to raise awareness, while managing to completely miss its mark with a publishing date of December 18th, which was 14 days into the food drive and a day before it ended. The article provides the reader with a sense of “oh crap we had a food drive,” with a distinct after taste of “ah well, too late now,” that really distinguishes the North Star from the other news outlets.
Looking back at the first batch, a standout article would be North Park Students Bring Home DECA Glass. This originally light article deepened with age as the date line and first sentence hits readers with a conflicting first taste by covering Deca’s April ICDC win months later. The DECA winner must have been so excited to read about their achievements long after the celebrations and mere weeks before school’s end. This truly set the standard for North Star articles to follow.
Finally, let’s sample an offer from the recent release. Lights, Camera, Dance! covers North Park’s 2023 Semi Formal and has a dense astringent taste from its extensive ageing. This article is intended to release April 2024, which is perfect for an article covering an event which took place on December 7, 2023. The only suggestion your humble article sommelier could provide is that maybe this article could have been aged just a little longer. Four months was clearly not long enough, and instead the article should have been published two or even three months later than it was to capture the North Star quality we all expect.
The North Star is a student-run newspaper, and like all student-led organisations, it is being barely held together. However, they’re always improving and maybe one day they’ll make a switch and start serving fresh articles. Maybe one day.
*A North Star writer defined as any member currently in the room at the time of assignment.
THE NORTH STAR 