The following piece is satirical in nature and not meant to be taken seriously. In case you couldn’t figure that out.
A UA student made history Thursday by reading the entirety of the University of Alabama’s student newspaper, The Crimson White.
Rosa Owens, a junior majoring in anthropology, read every story in the March 31 issue of the CW.
“I ended up getting to class about fifteen minutes early because I wanted to get a good parking spot,” Owens said. “I was going to do the crossword but they had reprinted an old one … again.”
Owens, usually only a casual CW reader, began reading each story to kill time.
“My cell phone was dead, too, and my laptop recently broke,” Owens said. “And all the New York Times were gone from the rack, and even the USA Todays. It was weird.”
Owens’ teacher was 15 minutes late to class, which gave her time to read the paper from front to back.
“I even read a story about women’s tennis,” Owens said. “I was so bored. I told one of my friends who’s a reporter at the paper that I read the whole thing, and she was so shocked that she immediately called her editor. The story just kind of grew from there.”
The Crimson White publishes four times a week and prints 15,000 copies each day that are distributed across the UA campus and the Tuscaloosa community. No one has ever read the entire paper, ever. Not even the 8-page ones.
After learning about the achievement, editor-in-chief Victor Luckerson and the Office of Student Media, including Director Paul Wright, quickly put together an impromptu celebration to honor both Owens and The Crimson White.
“I’ve been working at the Office of Student Media for six years, and today was the first day we were a real newspaper,” Wright said.
“It’s quite an accomplishment, “ Luckerson said in an interview with himself. “I mean, I’ve never even read the paper all the way through, and I kind of have a vested interest, you know? It really was the perfect storm of boredom.”
The journalism department is planning to build a graduate-level class around Owens as a way to analyze how to get young people engaged with print media.
“What Rosa experienced can really provide us some insight on the direction newspapers should be taking going forward,” journalism professor Chris Roberts said. “Professors in the department are fighting over who’s going to get to write the book on this research.”
Luckerson is even making a last-minute nomination for Owens to receive the Capstone Hero award, which honors faculty, staff and students whose efforts on campus reflect the values within the Capstone Creed.
“It really takes a combination of perseverance, courage and patriotism to get through an entire issue of The Crimson White,” Luckerson said. “This kid needs a plaque or something.”
As a newly cemented expert on The CW, Owens offered its staff some advice.
“Do they even read what they publish?” she asked. “In one of those little quote boxes, all it said was ‘This is a sentance.’ Like, ‘sentence’ was spelled wrong. Come on, guys.”
