From the Nov 4 – Nov 10, 2004 issue

News

Daily Grind

Upstart UW Paper Targets the Staid 'Daily'

by Amy Jenniges

Last Wednesday morning, as most newspapers, including the University of Washington's Daily, showcased headlines on timely election-season issues like GOTV efforts, upstart publisher John Heylin's paper, the Weekly Enema, ran with "Suicide Isn't So Bad, Give It a Chance." In UW's Red Square with a megaphone, Heylin, a 21-year-old senior with a mop of curly brown hair, handed out 1,500 copies of his new campus paper--four pages and ad-free--under a banner with an adversarial message for the big paper on campus: "Fuck the Daily!"

Contrast the new paper--which Heylin edits, helped by a few friends--with the other campus publications: The Daily has been writing up campus political debates, and touching on issues like what the election means to the Muslim student club. Two other student papers, the conservative Right Turn, and the lefty Ruckus, take decidedly partisan stances; Right Turn recently praised an anti-John Kerry book, while a Ruckus writer crowned Kerry "exactly the kind of president we need."

But the Weekly Enema--"the name is grotesque so people will notice it," Heylin says--is overtly apolitical, appealing to students' sense of humor instead. Heylin, a history major who rows for UW's crew program and belongs to the Pi Kappa Alpha frat, thinks his fellow students would rather read comedic rants than "hard-hitting" news about campus events. Take the aforementioned suicide story, a 10-point tongue-in-cheek questionnaire on whether suicide is right for you: "If you just got out of a bad relationship and you feel like things are never going to get better, you're right. Everyone knows that suicide is the only option."

Heylin's paper is a direct attack on the school's venerable Daily, which Heylin's "been choking down" for the last three years. "Everyone just picks it up to do the crossword," Heylin argued, as he walked his bike home on a drizzly afternoon last week. He's not the first entrepreneur frustrated with the Daily--UW has two successful "alternative" papers that started, at least in part, to counter the Daily: Right Turn just began its' sixth year, and Ruckus launched in 1997. (In its defense, the Daily is certainly still popular, circulating 14,000 copies a day. The Daily's current editor, Heather Cope, did not return a call from The Stranger.)

Heylin has his own issues with the Daily: He accuses the 113-year-old publication of trying too hard to be a journalism lab, aimed more at bolstering resumés than at UW's students. Moreover, he jabs, the Daily lacks a sense of humor. "The students will now have something better to pick up and read than your paper," Heylin wrote to the Daily, in Enema. Heylin beleives that the Enema is to the UW Daily what The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is to the NBC Nightly News--a comical attack on mainstream media. "It is opinionated, rude, immature, and hopefully, intriguing. The Enema has no responsibility to bring you real news," explains Frank Emfbo, Heylin's buddy. (The paper has already been hit with its first negative letter, which dubbed the Enema "obnoxiously juvenile" and "downright petty").

So far, though, UW's newest paper seems to have found its niche: Students visited the accompanying website, weeklyenema.org, 2,000 times in the two days after Heylin hit Red Square--not bad for a tiny, brand-new publication (once Heylin's "academic club" photocopying privileges run out, at 8,000 copies, Enema may be web-only). Submissions are pouring in for the next issue, but nothing political--instead, Enema will offer an inside look at The Price Is Right.

amy@thestranger.com