The Daily Nebraskan is asking the students of UNL to continue supporting the DN in its rewording of New York Times articles. “We have always been a newspaper that strives at taking the opinions of journalists working at The New York Times and rewording them to make them sound like our opinions, and we ask for your support in allowing this to continue,” a recent editorial said.
The editorial had an immediate effect on the student body. Many students said that they would never allow the paper to be canceled. “As long as the paper continues to carry that awesome crossword puzzle, I will always support it. The crossword is always so challenging and fun,” said Meghan Dordy, echoing the feelings of many students. After being informed, however, that the crossword puzzle was just a day old New York Times crossword puzzle, Meghan and the other students around her seemed to change their minds. “I didn’t know that, fuck the DN then, I’ll just get the New York Times,” she said.
Matt Buxton, editor of the Daily Nebraskan, defended the paper’s call for support by saying that it is “of upmost importance” for a journalist to be able to just reword articles from the The New York Times since that’s what “any real journalist” does. “I mean have you ever read the World-Herald or Journal Star? All of that stuff is straight from The New York Times. And since working at one of those two papers is the best job anyone at the DN can hope to get, we need to just copy what they do,” Buxton said.
When asked if the Daily Nebraskan would try to get more original content in the near future, Buxton laughed and said, “Who do you think we are? The Daily Texan?”
Rollan Schott, film reviewer for the DN, echoed Buxton’s feelings toward original content. “There is no way I could write my reviews without the help of A.O. Scott (film reviewer for The New York Times). I usually just read how he, or one of the other reviewers at the Times, feels about a movie and then just reword it to sound like a college student would actually write it. Hell, I haven’t even seen half the movies I’ve reviewed. I gave ‘The White Ribbon’ an A but I slept through about half of it. It was boring as shit,” Schott said.
