The UH Student Publications Committee unanimously elected communication junior Matt Miller as editor-in-chief of The Daily Cougar for the fall 2009 semester.
The committee interviewed Miller and two other candidates about their ideas and qualifications for the position before voting at Wednesday’s meeting.
‘There are some things with this paper that I like and some thing I don’t like,’ Miller said. ‘I’d like to be able to be able to have a hold on what goes on and also get the experience of being in charge of a newspaper.’
Miller’s said he plans to improve the student-run newspaper by enforcing stricter deadlines and adding video and to The Daily Cougar‘s Web site.
‘This semester we’ve had a little bit of trouble with the news editor because he works by himself to get deadlines down,’ Miller said. ‘I definitely want to require that the news editor has an assistant so that will help – this could possibly happen with sports, too.’
‘ Six of the 10 voting members of the Student Publications Committee attended the meeting. Ex-officio committee member Michael Berryhill contributed a seventh vote in place of absent communication professor Garth Jowett.
Anthropology sophomore Shaista Mohammed, opinion editor, and anthropology senior Sarah Tucker, life and arts editor, also ran for editor-in-chief.
Miller is the sports editor and will replace communication senior Zaneta Loh as editor-in-chief after Loh graduates in May.
‘One other thing that I’d like to do is put more focus on watching the ads. We had the Holocaust denial ad, and there is no excuse for that to run,’ Miller said. ‘I think that the coordination between the production people, the ad people and the editors wasn’t where it needed to be so that we could prevent this.’
Before Miller became sports editor, he wrote for The Daily Cougar‘s sports and news sections and was the sports editor for the San Jacinto Times.
‘There have been times where there have been little mistakes, little elementary mistakes, things that shouldn’t happen,’ Miller said. ‘We can pay more attention to those things if we can get the deadlines down, because then we’d have a little bit more breathing room to look over things one final time and make sure everything is as clean as possible.’
