by Eric Zuerndorfer
CHINATOWN -- In the cramped “Sampan” office, Yang Yang speaks fluent Chinese into a phone and swivels around to look at her co-editor, Christopher Rogacz. “Are you covering the ACDC meeting tomorrow?” she asked.
Rogacz shrugs: “I will, but I’d rather write about a worker’s strike than a stupid council meeting.”
Every two weeks Rogacz and Yang compile Sampan, a Chinatown newspaper that reaches 10,000 residents. Instead of striving for objectivity, Rogacz says he selects stories that capture his interest.
For the past six months, Rogacz, a 22-year-old Cornell graduate, has served as English editor and reporter for Sampan. Rogacz develops his story ideas in the off week. Monday and Tuesday of the following week he writes and follows up on his reporting. Wednesday and Thursday are production days, and on Friday they publish.
“He’s really become more comfortable with the entire process,” said Pei-ning Lo, the advertising manager at Sampan. “When he first started, he did not know what he was doing.”
At Cornell, Rogacz graduated with a degree in political philosophy, but never took journalism class. He says he found ways to apply philosophy towards his job.
“I’m perfectly willing to admit that the stories that I choose to cover, what I choose to put on the front page… they are editorial choices, which are not objective and blind choices,” Rogacz said. “They’re biased choices.”
Sampan does not include editorial pages because that would show more subjectivity.
“[Sampan] avoids putting the story side by side with opinion pieces, so we just leave [editorials] out,” Yang said. “It would be the same writer for the news and opinions on that news, and that causes problems.”
But Rogacz said sometimes he expresses his views in the stories he publishes consciously.
“Whether or not editorials are published, the stories would not change, just the perception from the readers,” Rogacz said.
*CORRECTION* "The crucial point of what I was trying to get across is that there is no such thing as objectivity in journalism, that it is the constituent lie that makes journalism possible, but a lie nevertheless. Your [quote] implies that there does exist something called objective reporting which I have chosen to ignore, when my entire premise is that this never existed in the first place: there is nothing to be ignored because it does not exist. I think this is an absolutely crucial distinction... When you quote me as saying my that my choices for content are biased choices, that is correct, but the critical next part of that is that my choices, and really, ANY editor's choices could not help but be any other way." - Christopher Rogacz