This Article Echoes

I just wrote another article for the Echo about the Educational Theatre Collaborative (ETC) and it was in Thursday's edition. This was a harder article to write than I thought it would be. To be honest, I am getting a little burned out by the repetition of the "Student Org. Spotlight" articles I've been writing. Sure, I've only done a few but, for the most part, they are not entirely creative pieces on my part.

Something I should not share online, as it will be available FOREVER, but I felt like I "phoned in" this article; this is definitely not one of my top five pieces. Aside from my less than dazzling writing, there were a few other issues.

Image borrowed, without permission, from http://etcollaborative.weebly.com/index.html

For one thing, of the three members from the ETC that I emailed, only two responded and of those two only one had responses that were independent of the group's website; the other person just copied and pasted the majority of her answers into the email. It may be unfair to criticize her though, considering she designed and wrote everything on the group's website herself. If you were asked questions that you had already answered, in detail, before they were ever asked wouldn't you refer back to your own website? I know I would.

In all fairness, of all of the groups I interviewed so far, the people at ETC were the happiest and sweetest group yet. They were nothing less than ecstatic that their organization would be covered by the Echo - they just all got extremely busy when it came time to respond to our email interview. That could, and does, happen to anyone. My lesson in all of this is to request phone interviews from now on. I think better on the fly and the follow up questions usually lead to better responses than my original questions.

One last interesting point to mention. The chairman for the Communication, Media and Theatre Arts Alumni Chapter at EMU will most likely be reprinting the article I just spent an entire blog post complaining about in his organization's March newsletter, so it can't be that bad. Right?

Apologies to ETC, it wasn't their fault. I asked horribly generic questions and then complained when the answers were not outstanding. I just have higher expectations of myself and I feel like I failed to meet them.

Without further ado, here is the article:

"Student Org. Spotlight: Educational Theatre Collaborative offers artistic freedom to students"