Being an alumnus of the University of Massachusetts Boston, and a current masters student at the Bacchanalian Amherst campus (and I do not use that word in a positive sense!), I miss the somewhat more balanced and intelligent quality of the MassMedia, as compared with the Pioneer Valley’s leftist rag, “The Massachusetts Daily Collegian”. However, in a recent article by Jay Upton, I noticed an all too familiar problem with college-aged authors, and collegiate newspapers: a lack of proper revision. Mr. Upton commits at least one glaring grammatical offense; he doesn’t use the right form of “there”/”their”/”they’re” toward the beginning of his article. Secondly, and perhaps more galling for some, he places Chernobyl in Russia; it’s actually in the Ukraine. While this may seem a small matter for him, it would certainly be importance to Ukrainians. Such an error, easily remedied by checking sources, implies that the nation most affected by the 1986 reactor explosion–a nation that recovered its freedom at the fall of the Soviet Union, after centuries of Russian hegemony–is really nothing more than a province of Russia.I know this may come across as petty bickering. The point is: check your stories for grammatical and factual correctness. It will greatly increase the value of the newspaper and earn the greater respect of your readers.