Perils

We run a small magazine at school that we recently inherited from some other students. Upon looking through all the back issues, we decided that we hated the old version of the thing. The writing was too formal, it didn't have enough pictures and the layout was ugly as hell.

We set about giving it a makeover, with a new logo, a better layout etc. etc.

But as much as we tried asking other people to contribute articles to the thing, no one other than the four of us really did. That has left us short of the amount of content that we really wanted to have.

We brought this up at a meeting with some other people and Meena suggested that we have a contest along the following lines:

1. email general list asking for submissions of about 500 words about television
2. read submissions
3. choose winner, award prize of gift certificate to the mall and 2 free movie passes
4. edit
5. publish winning submission on special page in magazine
6. pat ourselves on the back because we're brilliant

That Meena's one smart cookie.

So everything went well until about step 2.5, where we suddenly realized that of the three articles entered in the contest, each one was crap.

Submission 1 was awful. I don't care who the hell you are, you don't use "lately" and "currently" in the same sentence, especially when the sentence is less than 7 words long. You just don't. It's bad English.

Submission 2 had a really clever title. It was about some sort of late night soap on a specialty channel that I have never heard of before. It was boring. Very boring. That and it had no paragraph breaks and talked about how certain actors were hot. Like I care.

Submission 3 had us scratching our heads. It was about Marshall McLuhan and pink vibrators. Somehow they are related. I didn't get it. I don't even think they used the theory right.

Not only that, but our faculty reads this magazine too, and we didn't want to show them that their hard efforts trying to beat relevant information into our heads had gone to such a waste.

Now we're stuck.

Not only do we not know how we should go about explaining why we're not declaring a winner, I have to come up with something interesting to write about television. I was thinking of writing something about the perils of having a contest like that, but someone told me that that would be mean.

Any thoughts?