Football, an Arrest, and College Media Excellence

Wide receiver and return specialist Bryant Eteuati played in a game for Weber State University’s football team last Saturday.  His return to the field marked the end of a journalistic drama that started about a month before, immediately after his arrest on outstanding warrants for aggravated assault that he’d accrued for hitting people with his car.

 

The Signpost student newspaper at Weber State broke the story, even informing the football team’s coaches when a staffer called them for a comment on Eteuati’s arrest.  Student journalism at its finest!  And people were pissed, seemingly because they believed if the paper had not run the story Eteuati would not have been suspended.  

 

 

Part a local TV news report at the time:

 

The university’s student paper is taking heat from some fans for breaking the story. . . . School policy says athletes facing charges like that don’t play.  But some fans didn’t see it like that, and when Eteuati was suspended right before a big game, they blamed The Signpost.  The comments, many aimed at [editor in chief Jessica] Schreifiels, poured in.  Things like: ‘She makes me irate, and she needs to think about more than just herself when she writes. This movement that the football team is in is way bigger then her and her career.’

 

This past month, the paper admirably stuck to its editorial guns, covering every aspect of the student-athlete’s case (from its initial postponement to Eteuati’s not-guilty plea to the plea bargain that concluded it) and its implications for the football team. 

 

In a staff editorial run soon after the angry fan lashing had commenced, editors wrote:

 

The Signpost did not get Bryant Eteuati suspended. Bryant Eteuati got Bryant Eteuati suspended. . . . As sad as this truly is, Eteuati did this to himself. The Signpost in no way, shape or form tried to smear him or the football team because of some personal vendetta. We reported the facts. It would have been unethical of us if we didn’t. . . . This was textbook journalism.

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University of Scranton Student Paper Debuts New Site

Below is an editor’s video introduction to the new Web site for The Aquinas, the weekly student newspaper at the University of Scranton.  The site strikes a simple, easy-to-navigate chord on first scroll-through and it’s always nice to see a publication unafraid to break ranks with the student-Web-overlords College Publisher. 

 

Also, be sure to click on the About page to see a shot of the Aquinas student staff from 1929-1930 that made me smile.

 

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Obama Mania in College Media: A 2008 Election Recap

Since its launch, the most-viewed posts on this little blog of mine have been those with the words ‘sex’ or ‘Obama’ in the headline.  Am I attempting to exploit the blogosphere’s fascination with the latter here?  Absolutely.  (Happy Thanksgiving!)

 

A brief rundown of college media’s Obama-mania on and around Election Day 2008:

 

• An Associated Collegiate Press collection of campus newspaper front pages on the day after the election (viewable slideshow-style) and side pieces on the papers’ sudden uber-popularity among readers looking to preserve history (and a wonderful rebuttal post by Bryan Murley at the Center for Innovation in College Media on the importance of not reading too much into the one-day printerrific lovefest)  

 

The post-election front page of The Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon.

 

• Examples of new media-tastic campus press election coverage, including NewsHub’s live updates at Hofstra University and election day (and night) footage at Chicago’s Grant Park captured by Columbia College Chicago j-students (the only college media personnel granted access to the area)

 

• Recaps of racial controversies accompanying the otherwise positive historic event, including a cartoon run in The Daily Wildcat at the University of Arizona containing the ‘N word’ that caused a stir and the buzz around a set of vaguely-racist leaflets slipped inside the student paper at Lehigh University

 

• A look back at college newspapers’ overwhelmingly pro-Obama presidential endorsements and the flak one student paper at a conservative Christian school received for favoring the soon-to-be president-elect over McCain

 

• And finally, an interesting pre-election piece by The Michigan Review questioning just how much, and what kind, of an impact the college press actually has on student voters

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Student Newspaper, School Administration Settle Lawsuit

The free press battle at The Inkwell appears to be over.  The Inkwell student newspaper has settled a lawsuit it brought against its administrative overseers at Georgia’s Armstrong Atlantic State University over what the paper contended was an unfair funding cut tied to its suddenly critical university coverage.

 

 

 

According to The Athens Banner-Herald, AASU will provide the paper with an additional $15,000 and pay student editors’ $7,500 legal fees, an implicit acknowledgment that the paper’s suit and stance had legs (or at least that there was no positve outcome for the school in seeing the fight through). 

 

The settlement is one of those best-of-a-bad-situation shindigs.  Obviously, it’s good news for free press advocates, the Inkwell‘s coffers and hopefully in turn for its editorial coverage.  It’s just a shame the whole thing had to involve lawyers and billable hours and public statements of animosity.

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A Headline About Media Scholar’s Death That Really Irks Me

Brent Hurd, an American documentary filmmaker and visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media, died this past weekend after being hit by a bus while bicycling in Bangalore, India.  I am blogging about this to ensure some small measure of rememberance for a life cut short and also because the headline of The Times of India story reporting on the accident just honestly bothers me.

 

The story itself is fine- seemingly factual, decent background on short notice, nice job tracking down alternate sources, including Hurd’s Web site.  But the header irks me: “BMTC crushes American professor.”  (BMTC is the well-known acronym in that part of India for the bus company.)

 

Even in the betwixt topsy-turvydom of our new media age, I do still hold the basic rules of headline writing as sacred.  And this hed at first glance follows many of the traditional tenets.  It’s active and present-tense with an alive-and-kicking verb and a bit of context/teaser without red-alerting into info overload.

 

But it’s just damn insensitive.   The guy is gone.  The accident is tragic.  Does the use of the word ‘crush’ not just add insult to the beyond-injurious suffering of his loved ones?  And as a student who first saw the story mentioned to me, “It almost sounds like the paper is trying to paint it as a positive,” like a sports header (a recent one, obtained through a quick check of Google News, “Ravens Crush Mistake-Prone Eagles”).

 

Is it just me?  What do you think?

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College Papers Not Immune to Economic Doom and Gloom

As I wrote in early October, “The story of the student press so far this semester: The existence of the first sustained crack in college print papers’ seeming invincibility to the online takeover and economic downturn.”

 

Since then, the economy has continued to collapse faster than Amy Winehouse’s career, prompting an unprecedented ad-revenue slowdown and a cost-cutting mentality at some student papers nationwide, according to a new Daily Princetonian report.

 

With the “bottom dropping out of the economy,” as the business manager of The Daily Pennsylvanian put it, the biggest disappearance from the ad blitz of times past’ has been financial and consulting companies, who typically place advertisements in papers prior to appearing on campus to recruit students.  Stanford Daily business manager and COO: “There’s a huge gap between last fall and this fall.  Last fall we had all these recruiters for advertising.”

Examples of cutbacks that papers have instituted or are considering due to the ad gaps: The Daily Northwestern is publishing “smaller papers with fewer pages because we don’t have advertising revenue to support our editorial news hole”; and The Indiana Daily Student is “looking at ways to economize in every area,” including staff pay rates and the paper’s travel budget.

 

Interestingly, The Daily Tar Heel continues to be a voice of optimism.  The DTH general manager notes that increased political advertising from the recent campaign season and current reader interest in men’s basketball puts the paper in “a unique position here to do better than some of our buddies.”  This echoes earlier statements about the paper’s financial robustness.

 

Aside from the DTH, is college papers’ current pessimism a sign that the end is growing ever-nearer for their print news products?  As I’ve stated before, I don’t think so.  This latest report and the in-the-red reality it presents for some papers is simply proof that college newspapers are not immune from the economic doom and gloom.  When an Obama-fied economy (hopefully) bounces back, the financial companies’ recruiting efforts and related ads will return, something The New York Times notes this morning is in the recruiters’ best interests.  And in turn, hopefully student papers’ ad-revenue stream will return to the black.

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76-Year-Old Nigerian Man Signs Up For Journalism Studies

We’re never too old to be students of journalism.  Case in point: Clement Alubiagba, a 76-year-old Nigerian grandfather with a lack of formal education but a love of reading, has joined the Times Journalism Institute in the city of Lagos to pursue his long-held dream of being a journalist.

 

According to the Nigerian newspaper The Vanguard:

 

[B]ecause he barely completed his standard six as it’s usually called, which is today known as primary six, he couldn’t practice journalism.  But his quest for knowledge, drove him towards reading every book he comes across, knowing that to be a good journalist, he needs to be versatile and conversant with happenings in the environment.  As a result, he was able to make headway and improved drastically in his vocabulary. . . . Mr Clement wishes to practice as a journalist after his education if only he would be given the opportunity to do so irrespective of his age.

 

If this doesn’t make you smile, at least slightly, you’ve been overdosing on your cynical pills. :)

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Students’ Questions About the Future of Journalism

I recently asked my news editing students here in Singapore: What is one question we should all be asking much more often about the current state or future of journalism?  In the age of j-reinvention, coming up with the right questions to ask seems as important as finding the right answers.  What question would you like to ask?

 

Below is a smattering of their responses:

 

How does a journalist keep reinventing him/herself?

 

What skills do future journalists need in order to survive in the changing media landscape?

 

What does journalism- currently a sunset industry- mean to us in the modern world?

 

How realistic is it to keep championing objectivity as a basic journalism tenet?

 

What are we giving readers that they can’t find anywhere else?

 

How can we retain our readers in this changing media climate?

 

Is journalism a dying industry? (Because if it is, why are we here?)

 

What happens when the new generation gets bored with the hard news that really matters?

 

When will the media truly be considered free?

 

Do you pick up the papers to read every day?

 

Will print media really be dead, especially once the new generation takes over the world?

 

Is journalism really informing the masses for the better?

 

Is there integrity in journalism today?

 

Why are you doing what you’re doing? 

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The Cracks in College Media 2.0

In a new MediaShift post, Center for Innovation in College Media Director Bryan Murley writes that student newspaper Web sites have made leaps and bounds from their “little more than shovelware” days that were even as recent as three years ago. 

 

It’s a thoughtful piece, reflecting on the proactive journalistic push and general happenstances that have led new media to be tackled and tamed by many student papers.  In the happenstance category, Murley notes that at times a breaking news event has triggered a reporting plan that has laid the groundwork for continued online success, such as the historic Collegiate Times Web coverage of the 2007 school shootings at Virginia Tech and The Arbiter‘s newmediatastic reporting on Boise State football’s 2006 Fiesta Bowl triumph.

 

A screenshot of today’s Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech.

 

For me, however, the most attention-grabbing aside of the post was the plight of the others that Bryan mentioned, the college media have-nots, the analogs in a digital world, specifically the more than one-third of U.S. college newspapers still lacking a Web presence (or those whose online identities I’ve found to be nothing more than prehistoric shovelware, with a page of PDF links to archived print issues).

 

Bryan talks in the piece about the cultural and journalistic hurdles that have stood in the way of new media’s seizure of a prominent stake in the student press pantheon and we talked recently about the continued print-online divide.  However, this seems to run deeper.  I mean, my goodness, I’m left with nothing but bolding to express my shock: Thirty-six percent of student newspapers with no Web presence at all.  The heft is not an indictment against the press outlets. It’s a call to arms!

 

What can we do to make that percentage drop faster than the Dow?  I went to a small liberal arts school as an undergrad, one that is still among the have-nots.  I know the challenges- too few staffers doing too much work with no j-curriculum set aside to teach them advanced reporting let alone Web work.  There’s got to be an answer though, a Googlable smoking gun, a way to ensure student news outlets at schools like these don’t fall through the cracks of the Web or the cracks still existing in college media 2.0.

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Student Journalist Spotlight: Nicole Alvarado, The Battalion

In the photo below, Nicole Alvarado appears to be holding a plastic Star Wars-inspired lightsaber.  The image is fitting given how little time The Battalion student newspaper editor in chief actually sees sunlight.

 

 

 

A journalism professor lightheartedly warned Alvarado two years ago about her work on The Battalion: “You will spend all your time in the newsroom. I don’t care what you say now-if you keep a job there, you will forget what sunlight looks like.”  In a recent state-of-the-newspaper address to readers, Alvarado happily admitted the prof’s words had proven prescient:

 

I find myself locked away in the basement of the Memorial Student Center five nights a week, eyes glued to a computer screen, watching the time with bated breath. Deadlines, stories, copy editing, AP Style…industry terms rush through my head as quickly as the second hand on the clock. The adrenaline rush and positive stress of working for the paper is what really gets my blood pumping. I can’t imagine myself being this happy with any other job.

 

While in a perfect world, Alvarado admits she would rather be attending Hogwarts with Harry Potter and the gang, the communication/journalism major from Houston is leaving her mark on Texas A&M one Battalion at a time.

 

Below is a brief Q&A exploring Alvarado’s student press adventures:

  

Write a six-word memoir of your Battalion experience so far. 

 

Can I make it six-words . . . or less? “Spread the word, ya heard?” Hahaha . . . but seriously, I think that’s what I would say.

 

To all the student newspaper and campus media haters out there: Why does The Battalion matter?

 

The Battalion does its duty to serve the entire student body. Not just the conservatives, not just the liberals, not just the undergraduates–but everybody. We are striving to maintain journalistic integrity while at the same time keeping the content informative and interesting.

 

What is the coolest part about being top editor of The Battalion?

 

All the free stuff–ESPECIALLY the backpack full of free condoms Trojan just sent us  :)   Just kidding. Being able to interact with every single one of my employees, probably. Our newsroom has more than 70 people in it, but I can honestly say that I know everyone on a personal level. They’re more than just my coworkers or my friends; they’re my family. Also, being the one to accept our very first Pacemaker (for overall newspaper) in Kansas City a few weekends ago was really cool.

 

What is one thing people don’t understand about the job?

 

I really do have to do all the dirty work that nobody else wants to do. Hate mail, nasty phone calls, pitches about irrelevant student website after website, etc. I clean house pretty much every day. Oh, and firing your friends is never fun either. Sometimes I feel like the mama bear of the newsroom and they’re all my baby cubs. I love them but I have to discipline them, and that’s not always fun.

 

Funny newsroom moment.

 

Every day is an adventure, but the most recent I can recall is probably when we had an impromptu, 10-minute Dance Dance Revolution tournament. Either that or when we would play musical computers, though that was probably a liberal mix between funny and disruptive.

 

What is one question we should all be asking much more often about the current state or future of journalism?

 

What all should I be able to be proficient in? I’ve heard from every single speaker that the industry isn’t looking for experts or “one-trick ponies” anymore. Everyone has to be able to do everything: photo, report, new media, page design, web layout–everything.

 

You wake up in ten years. Where are you and what are you doing?

 

Hopefully lying in my bed in my exotic bungalow, my pet koala by my side, staring up at my Pulitzer.

 

Check out the full Q&A here

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Obama endorsement stirs “mini-uproar” at Abilene Christian

A presidential endorsement of Barack Obama run in The Optimist student newspaper at Abilene Christian University has lit a California-sized wildfire among ACU alums and others connected with the school that continues to burn post-election.

 

 

Most are angry at the paper’s support for a candidate whose abortion and gay marriage stances are worrying to conservative Christians.  According to the Optimist‘s top editor: “Even after the election, we’re still getting e-mails.  They use all caps in the e-mails to be angry.”

 

The editorial came in late October after the nine-member editorial board voted five to four in favor of Obama.  The president of the university publicly stated that his main concern is that the preference of five students out of the 5,000 who are enrolled will place the university at-large in a negative light among its McCain-supporting alums and supporters.

 

As a guest column in the nearby Abilene News-Reporter notes, the controversy raises a larger question of whether a student newspaper with such a local focus should be tackling presidential-sized politics at all.  In my opinion, yes, absolutely.  Student readers may dig all-things-local first but the college rag can also play a bigger part in upping their national consciousness.  Student pubs may not have intimate access to the presidential candidates but with the glut of news available on every minutia of modern elections it’s perfectly reasonable for editors to wade through what’s out there and take a stand. 

 

It’s also important to remember: Endorsements, like all staff editorials, are not quantum physics.  They are simply discussion-starters.  It’s the paper adopting a stance, laying out its argument, and encouraging feedback, in the spirit of conversation not antagonization.  To this end, the passion embedded in the cynicism that has greeted the Optimist‘s endorsement is a sign that it was successful.    

 

By the way, here’s part of the endorsement, which I found to be very well-reasoned and the antithesis of inflammatory:

 

Two qualified men emerged from the exhausting nominating process as their party’s choice for the office of the President of the United States. . . . Sen. Barack Obama is a man whose rise in politics has taken the lawyer with a “funny name and big ears” to the top of his party. Obama’s unique American success story has reignited hope in government, and he promises to bring the change most Americans say they want to see in the White House. . . . In this precarious moment in American history, this country needs change. We believe Obama is the right man to bring that change, and is more prepared than his opponent to guide this country out of the perilous waters we have been sailing for the past eight years.

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College Photographer of the Year Awards Announced

The winning images have been selected for the 2008 College Photgrapher of the Year awards, a 63-year-old contest honoring the best student-snapped shots and photo arrangements in 16 categories.

 

Just for fun, I’ll let three of the wonderful images speak for themselves:

 

 

 

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“Your generation & its ability to innovate will save the craft”

“Wow.  Just wow.  I’m so encouraged to see all the excellent work being done at college papers across the country.  I’m even more encouraged that it’s not just at the traditional ‘big name’ journalism schools.”

 

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Interactive Director and Journerdism blogger extraordinaire Will Sullivan wrote with impressed gusto about the recent slate of Associated Collegiate Press Online Pacemaker award-winners.

 

Screenshots from two of the 15 Pacemaker recipients (encompassing Web sites for college newspapers, magazines, broadcast outlets, and online-only news outlets) are included just for fun below:

 

The Daily Illini, University of Illinois

 

Connect Mason, George Mason University

 

As the judge for this portion of ACP’s larger Pacemaker competition, Sullivan wrote that he observed a few new media elements still needing improvement or more regular implementation at student-run news sites, including: social media usage, visual data, mapping, breaking news online, and blogs.  I completely agree with the latter especially.  On my periodic tours of college news sites, the lack of quality, in-your-face blogging always surprises me.  Excellent op-eds and columns continue to run in student newspapers’ print editions.  It’s interesting that they have not been adapted and blog-ified online en masse as of yet.

 

Better blogging, I’m sure, will come.  In his closing inspirational call-to-arms, Sullivan expressed similar certainty that college journalists’ online betterment overall will be the bread-and-butter of Journalism 2.0’s survival:

 

College is one of the few times in your career that you can try something totally wacky, fail and it won’t really set you back or ruin your career. Try alternative story forms. Learn new technologies. Break the mold of traditional journalism. Your generation and its ability to innovate will save the craft.

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Quad News vs. Quinnipiac Prez: Is Free Press Fight Over?

The latest dispatch from the front lines of the Quinnipiac University free press fight, courtesy of The Hartford Courant: QU’s president is now allowing school staffers to speak with reporters from The Quad News, the indy online outlet started this fall by QU j-students after their campus newspaper was stifled by administrators.  Previously, all university employees were barred from talking to the publication because it was felt The Quad News was out to “undermine the existence” of The Chronicle student newspaper.  Also, Quad News staffers can now use university computers and other equipment to run the site.  

 

 

It’s the first smart moves by the QU administration after an embarassing array of free press slights.  Over the past two years, Quinnipiac bigwigs, led by a president with a seeming abhorrence of student journalism, have instituted a number of policies aimed at controlling or suppressing content of The Chronicle.  Among the most jaw-dropping: forcing the newspaper to contact all university staffers through the school’s public affairs office; asserting control over the selection of incoming editors; discouraging Chronicle staffers from attending public events at which university administrators spoke so that the events wouldn’t become “a press conference to the world”; threatening the newspaper’s editor in chief after he criticized various administrative limitations; and restricting editors from posting breaking news online prior to the paper’s print edition.

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Racist Obama Leaflets Slipped Into Lehigh’s Brown & White

“Your president is black. How does that make you feel?”

 

A leaflet with those words were slipped inside hundreds of copies of The Brown and White student newspaper at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University last week, without editors’ knowledge or permission. The paper’s EIC noted: “Probably someone came around and stuffed them in into each copy. We’ve checked with our printer and with our distributors and there was nothing in it when they distributed it.”

 

 

The leaflets’ message is vague, but its overtones have been taken as racially insulting. According to CBS News in Philadelphia, the culprits are still on the loose, but the inserts have been linked to other incidents of alleged racism on campus, including slurs directed at black students. A university forum was held Tuesday to address the controversy.

 

Beyond the leaflets’ possible racist slant, I was most interested in reading about the creators’ preferred means of delivery for their message: the student newspaper. In a backward way, the leaflets are simply one more symbol of the power of the college press. The individuals who concocted them considered the papers the most effective way of reaching the university audience (and stirring up a mini-media storm and campus furor to boot). A message to those responsible: Next time, stand behind your words. Look into buying ad space or, better yet, pen a guest column!

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