A group of Duke University students arose at 4 a.m. today to plaster campus with posters calling for The Chronicle’s editor-in-chief, Chelsea Allison, to resign. It was a reaction to an Oct. 10 story giving details of an unnamed student attempting suicide. This letter to the editor ran Oct. 15.
Click past the jump to see the posters:
About 1,800 copies of The Renegade Rip are still missing after they were stolen from the newspaper’s racks Oct. 8, the paper reports. “The reason behind the removal of the student newspapers is still unclear. Some … speculated that it may have been due to some controversial stories in the issue” — one of which was a story about three student government members being sent home early from a Washington D.C. summit for consuming alcohol on the trip.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center is frustrated that many college papers are refusing to run his ad, The UC-Santa Barbara Daily Nexus reports.
The ad, “Stop the Jihad On College Campuses,” says the Muslim Student Association recruits and supports speakers who “are calling for the execution of gays, the killing of Jews and support the terrorist jihad against America.”
The Daily Nexus, though, agreed to run the ad.
““I am glad the Daily Nexus has chosen to run this ad because we really don’t have a free press in this country anymore,” Horowitz said. “Several college papers have chosen not to run it, including the Daily Collegian at Penn State and many others. The censorship of America’s college newspapers is a major issue of our time.”
The Daily Nexus abides by a strict separation between its editorial and advertising departments in order to maintain objective reporting. Opinions expressed in ads do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Nexus staff,” the article states.
Missouri Southern State University’s student paper, The Chart, was taken off the racks at a career fair, and editors fear the paper’s First Amendment rights were violated.
From the Springfield News-Leader: “Alexandra Nicolas, editor-in-chief of The Chart, said that a school official did not feel that a front-page story on a decline in enrollment at MSSU should be displayed at the event.
Nicolas said MSSU enrollment director Derek Skaggs issued the directive to a Chart representative who had arrived to set up a display for Wednesday night’s event. Nicolas said Skaggs “informed her that she was allowed to display anything but those papers.’”
Student affairs vice president John Messick has been told to investigate the matter.
The legendary CNN reporter spoke at the University of Pennsylvania, then sat down with some Daily Pennsylvanian reporters.
From their story: “After sharing his tales of war-time reporting and primary-debate moderating, CNN host Anderson Cooper left Irvine Auditorium full of captivated students eager to learn more.
With the same mission in mind, The Daily Pennsylvanian sat down with Cooper for a few minutes to discuss reporting, politics and his lack of culinary skills.”
The first survey from CoPress, the grassroots movement to create a new college media CMS, is about to finish.
From Adam Hemphill: “Good morning everyone! This is just a gentle reminder–or a first notification for new members–that our survey closes in just under one week (at 8 p.m. EST on Friday, October 10). If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do so and/or forward the link to someone whom you think might be appropriate to answer the questions.
We’re making very good headway with this initiative and we appreciate all the help we’ve received from the community–including you–in making it possible. CoPress is a collaborative effort and it will not succeed without support and contributions from people like yourselves. Thank you.”
Rumor has it that ESPN is launching a college sports media project, soliciting student journalists.
From The Big Lead: “According to a source, ESPN will ease into this new venture with big-name schools first (Texas, Florida State, West Virginia, USC, etc) because they have such a large fanbase, and later with smaller schools (South Florida, Wake Forest, etc). The plan, according to a source, is to challenge Rivals for that coveted college demographic, which is extremely passionate and also loved by advertisers.”
A new post on the CoPress site debates the merits of College Publisher and Wordpress as a CMS for a college news site.
The post mostly deals with manueverability and technical knowledge needed.
“Customization is a challenge, to put it mildly. That’s why CP sites look very similar in style and structure. Unfortunately, the standard isn’t a very good one — cluttered, outdated, clunky, often slow and hardly user-friendly,” the post reads. “… However, several adventurous papers have recently turned to WordPress as an alternative. The popular open-source blogging software runs millions of blogs, including this one. It is endlessly customizable through a large number of themes and plugins offered by third parties.
Though not initially designed to be a full-fledged CMS, WordPress can be used as one with a little hacking.”
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is being hailed for signing a law that protects newspaper advisers from retaliation for refusing to censor student work.
It is now illegal to dismiss, transfer or discipline teachers for protecting students’ free speech. Advisers can still be fired for poor performance.
The California Newspaper Publishers Association says teachers have been punished at least 12 times since 2001 because of stories or opinion pieces written by student reporters.
“While this law makes the workplace safer for teachers, the real beneficiaries are California’s students, who no longer must fear that honest reporting on school events will get their favorite teacher fired,” Student Press Law Center Executive Director Frank D. LoMonte said. “Governor Schwarzenegger and the California legislature should be commended for sending a message to school officials — in California and across the nation — that teachers are not to be used as pawns to intimidate kids into avoiding legitimate topics of discussion.”
The man who stole 1,300 newspapers from Texas Christian University and deposited them in recylce bins around campus has turned himself in.
From the SPLC story: “Charles Beecherl, an entrepreneurial business major, told the Daily Skiff he dumped the Sept. 23 papers because it went too far in publishing a photo of a professor involved in a physical altercation with another professor.”
From the Skiff: “The student said he is an avid reader of the Skiff but did not like what the paper published, so he threw away the copies.
‘I went to his classroom, and I noticed it was obvious everyone was talking about him, and it was sad,’ Beecherl said. ‘You could tell he could tell everyone was looking at him. Basically, I did it because I felt bad about the guy.’”
About 1,300 newspapers were also stolen from Central Arkansas University on Sept. 17.
UCLA’s Daily Bruin will have dispatches from China, Thailand and other countries through the Bridget O’Brien Scholarship.
“The intention of the fund is twofold: to give current Bruin staffers the opportunity to see the world and experience reporting from abroad and to localize international events and issues for the UCLA community,” editor-in-chief Anthony Pesce writes.
The Bruin will also print the front pages of each of its four sections in color daily because of a cheaper contract with a new printer.
Nineteen editors of college newspapers around the country liveblogged Friday’s presidential debate for The Caucus, the New York Times political blog.
Posts started at 8:55 p.m. and continued into the wee hours of Saturday morning. The posts garnered more than 70 comments.
About 1,300 copies of the Sept. 17 issue of The Echo were stolen, the Student Press Law Center reports.
Adviser David Keith said he thinks the theft might be due to an editorial criticizing the student government president at the University of Central Arkansas.
From SPLC: “Keith said the paper would pursue legal action against whoever stole the papers. No suspect has been named yet.
This is not the first time The Echo was stolen. The newspaper experienced a mass theft several years ago. The stolen issue carried an article about anEcho staffer stealing thousands of dollars from the paper, though no one was ever charged or prosecuted in connection with the theft. ”
The Vanderbilt Hustler made the controversial decision to run the 51 mugshots of Sigma Chi fraternity members arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and underage drinking.
After many critical comments, the editor posted this response.
“The presentation of the cover story was meant to be provocative and eye-catching; this reflects the extraordinary nature of the story. There was no intention of singling out individuals, forwarding an agenda against Sigma Chi or its brothers, or drawing negative or unnecessary attention to the Hustler or its editor. The editor did not intend to make a value judgment on the actions of either the Vanderbilt students or Polk County authorities involved,” it reads in part.
From Media for Freedom: “Student journalists worldwide can register for a free, one-year membership to an online writing portfolio Web site that they can use to show off their writing and demonstrate their web savvy to potential employers.
Writer’s Residence, an online portfolio Web site for writers, is offering the memberships to university and college students with a legitimate school-provided e-mail address.
Writer’s Residence allows writers to create an online writing portfolio that hosts their writing samples, resume/CV, contact details and Web site.
Students can sign up at https://writersresidence.com/signup. When the year is up, subscriptions cost US$8.29 per month.”
CoPress, the grassroots movement to create a new college media CMS, is surveying college newspaper online editors on their current CMS and how satisfied they are with it. Seven newspapers had submitted responses as of Tuesday.
“One of the big steps is our survey for online editors across the country, which we hope to use to gauge where other college newspapers are with their sites, what kind of talent they have and what their ideal content management system would include,” the site states.
College Media Matters has an entertaining interview with Paras Bhayani, managing editor at the Harvard Crimson.
From the interview:
What is the coolest part about being Crimson ME?
Knowing a great deal about Harvard and being able to immediately shine a spotlight when you hear a story that needs to be told
The editor-in-chief of The Daily Campus, Jordan Hofeditz, writes about the hardest parts about being a student newspaper editor at Southern Methodist University : choosing content, filling space and managing classwork and journalism.
The Parthenon, the student newspaper of Marshall University, will resume its Monday publication beginning next week. They were able to fund it after parntering with a local paper.
“‘The change from a four-day to a five-day publishing week came as a result of a new publishing deal with the Herald-Dispatch,’ said Corley Dennison, dean of Marshall’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
‘The Herald-Dispatch now carries our advertising,’ Dennison said. ‘Prior to this agreement it would have been impossible to have the Monday edition.’”
Nate Carey at The Daily Cardinal writes in today’s paper a piece calling for a sports journalism course at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and other Big 10 schools.
“…there exists no viable option available to someone interested in the vast, interesting and important field of sports journalism, which includes writing, reporting and broadcasting.
This is not a problem unique to UW-Madison, either. Every Big Ten university besides Penn State has few or no courses in the arena of sports communications.”
As previously reported by CR, Quinnipiac University President John L. Lahey has declared that no university employees talk to student reporters at the Quad News, an independent campus news site.
The Hartford Courant sat down with Quad News editors this week.
A group of editors at the established campus newspaper, The Chronicle, walked out last year when Lahey told them they could not post news to the Web in advance of publication, which is weekly. Lahey eventually relented, but the editors had already started the site.
From the HC column: “”Our main focus is to give students the opportunity to get the news and learn what is going on, on campus,” said Quad editor in chief Jason Braff.
We met on a park bench near campus because the university doesn’t like people like me prowling around the grounds.
Braff, a senior from New Jersey who spent the summer as an intern for the Journal News in Westchester County, told me it’s been difficult to be branded a traitor.
But, he said, “it’s worth it to me. We are standing up for the right thing.”
For this, the university has threatened to evict the chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, an officially sanctioned student group, if it keeps assisting the renegade Braff and his Quad News comrades.”
Rikki King at Washington State University’s Daily Evergreen notes the difference in treatment for reporters at professional papers and at college papers.
“While I was at the Daily Herald, sources were almost always polite, punctual and professional. They returned my calls and wanted to help me get the information I needed. It forced me to up the ante, doing more research and writing better questions before making the calls.”
The Howard University student newspaper, the Hilltop, is returning to publication Monday through Friday, the Washington Post reports. It is the only historically black institutions to have a daily paper. The Hilltop shut down in the spring because of budget woes. It updated its Web site infrequently during that time.
A brief history from the story: “The Hilltop was founded in 1924 by, among others, Zora Neale Hurston, who later wrote the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” From 1930 to 1991, the newspaper was published weekly, then twice weekly off and on through 2005, when it went to five days a week. It consistently has been ranked one of the best college newspapers in the country by the Princeton Review, taking the top spot twice, and can claim Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson as a former editor in chief.”
Supporters of the SPLC can now be a fan of the center on Facebook.
Another Seattle community college has lost its journalism program and student newspaper. Seattle Central Community College cut its journalism program and put the City Collegian out of operation, The Stranger reports. Last year, North Seattle Community College also did the same thing to its journalism program and The Polaris.
A letter from the SCCC journalism adviser to the school’s administration said “The Publications Board, chaired by Laura Mansfield, has been hostile to the Collegian all year, and this is one of two reasons for my departure. The board has remained willfully ignorant of the operation of the Collegian, the precepts of student journalism, and student press law.”
University administrators at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln aren’t granting interviews to the student newspaper. A board editorial explaining why the administrators were no longer being quoted suggests that after a records request an associate to the chancellor instructed many to “not answer any questions or look into any inquiries or requests from journalists working at the Daily Nebraskan.”
NYU journalism student Alana Taylor wrote a piece criticizing her “Reporting for Gen Y” course for not being advanced enough. Then:
“She told the class to read the article,” Taylor wrote at MediaShift. “Then she asked, ‘You all read Alana’s article, what did you think about it?’ There was silence for a good 30 or 45 seconds, and it was awkward and weird. And she said, ‘OK, we can all agree that there will be no more blogging or Twittering about the class.’ It was weird. It seemed like the students were scared to say anything.”
Ashworth University, one of the country’s largest distance-learning colleges, has formed a student newspaper and posted an introductory video to the Web. It will be named the Ashworth Chronicle.
Betty Ray, one of the paper’s editors, said it is due to launch next week and will feature student, faculty and staff profiles, a “Dear Abby” section.
“We’ve just had so many ideas, but we need your participation to make this work,” Ray said as she called for staffers. “The newspaper is another milestone for Ashworth, and the more involved and more exposure that we get, the better we’re going to be.”
The Society for Collegiate Journalists at Eastern Illinois University is sponsoring an open-mic event today in honor of the First Amendment, the Daily Eastern News reports.
“Adam Larck [the man in charge, CP assumes] said if anyone wants to yell out obscenities about the government for five minutes, then they can do it,” the story says.
James Tidwell, chairman of the EIU journalism department, told the paper he hopes the event will get students more interested in the elections and other civil rights.
WEHCO Media is interested in developing a closer relationship with the Columbia Missourian, the Northwest Arkansas’ New Source is reporting. One possibility would involve WEHCO’s Jefferson City (Mo.) News Tribune printing the Missourian and running the business side with students still responsible for editorial content. The News Tribune already prints the Missourian.
Quinnipiac University administrators won’t give reporters for the Quad News, an independent online student newspaper access to varsity coaches, staff or athletes, the Yale Daily News reported. The Quad News is a new venture by the former staff of The Chronicle, who walked out en masse last semester to protest letting administrators pick the editorial board. Andrew Fletcher, a junior print journalism major at Quinnipiac, writes about the decision on his blog: “As an aspiring sports journalist, I find this to be ridiculous. I’d love to cover Quinnipiac athletics, as it is my home community. However, my progress is being hindered by the school’s paranoia of the growing student journalist population. The school does market itself as a great communications school, after all.
Update, 2:30 p.m. Sept. 16: The Yale Daily News also is reporting that school administrators have threatened to ban the school’s Society of Professional Journalists chapter for their support of the Quad News. And here’s the statement from Quinnipiac University’s VP of public affairs, Lynn Bushnell.
The student government association at the University of Redlands cut the student paper’s budget from $39,000 to $10,000. The Association of Students President says that student support at the private university for the newspaper isn’t there, and also that “some students were unhappy with certain articles” the weekly newspaper published.
The Daily Athenaeum
College Republicans at West Virginia University are starting their own newspaper because they are dislike the political coverage in The Daily Athenaeum. “When I say, ‘why do you want to start a college newspaper?’ It’s not because you want to educate people, or because we want to get our voice out there, but I feel it’s because we want specific things on campus to change,” said Deputy Field Director Kevin DeAnna.
The Advance-Titan
The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh will fund free newspapers Monday through Friday as part of the Collegiate Readership Program managed by USA Today until Oct. 3. Oshkosh Student Association President said providing copies of USA Today, The New York Times and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will cost about $3.25/student. “The mission of the readership program is to promote civic engagement, global awareness, and media literacy on campus by exposing students to the news in their living, learning and community spaces,” Wolf said.
UNC professor Ryan Thornburg blogs about a panel discussion at the Online News Association conference in Washington, D.C. regarding newsroom-classroom partnerships. “The room had decided that the news biz did indeed have problems and that the academy just might be stocked with the resources needed to solve them. … If universities want to be R&D shops, then we need to start being the places where services like Pluck or Inform or Apture are born. We need to be the places to create original sites like Slate orMediaStorm or Everyblock. Why not?”
The Independent Florida Alligator Editor Jessica DaSilva writes about her first month on the job. “When I started, I was confronted with a broken staff. My managing editors (Hilary Lehman and Ken Schwencke) and I spent our first week back in Gainesville meeting with members of every desk to assess their needs and hear what they wanted from us. … I really feel like I was just born for this job. I like managing people and brainstorming with all the brilliant people who work here.“
The Oakwood High School newspaper in Fithian, IL, The Oakwood Times, started publishing online this year. “With this many kids in the class, daily stories keep people more involved,” journalism teacher Tim Lee said. “And I think a big part of the future of journalism is online.”
CM Life, the student newsaper of Central Michigan University, now has a Twitter feed.
CR will be working on a database of newspapers that Twitter, similar to that on the graphicdesignr blog. Check for a page link on the left-hand side of the main CR page. If you see a college paper Twitter missing, send us an e-mail or leave a comment.
The Inkwell, Armstrong Atlantic State University’s newspaper, has published four weekly editions this semester as it fights a lawsuit against the school. Three current or former staffers are claiming that budget cuts by administrators were done “in retaliation for editorial content decisions.”
Chris Gillon writes that the network is working to fix issues with the College Publisher 5 system. “We’ve been working through some minor CP 5 site glitches yesterday into this morning. A handful of CP 5 sites were affected by these glitches. These involved some intermittent site issues, including sporadic downtime and slow response time.”
And at least two editors have addressed the problems with the system and asked for readers’ patience: Student Life Editor Sam Guzik and The Daily Tar Heel Online Editor Rachel Will.
The Greenville, N.C., paper’s cover ran with this headline for 9/11: “After five years we still remember.” They also ran the names of North Carolina soldiers killed in Iraq. The PDF of the front page is the most commented in the Web site. Anonymous writes: “So what happened 5 years ago? Im sure you cant be talking about SEPTEMBER 11TH 2001!!!!!!!”
After more than 800 copies of The Minaret were stolen by a student and a professor in two separate instances, the newspaper filed a complaint about one of the thefts. As a result, the student will have to complete 20 service hours at the paper, and the paper was awarded $150. “I noticed about 4 p.m. that there were no papers on any of the racks around campus,” said Peter Arrabal, editor in chief of The Minaret. “All the old papers were gone, too.”
The key to reducing staff turnover is hiring eager reporters, setting expectations and being sensitive to studenet reporters’ time, Independent Alligator Managing Editor Hilary Lehman writes on At the Alligator, a blog covering the trials and tribulations of the UF paper.
The post is in response to the paper losing three of its nine reporters in the first two weeks of the year.
“If people don’t want to put their hearts and souls into journalism now, they never will,” she writes. “Many journalism students don’t understand that the commitments they face at a student paper are much like the demands of an entry-level journalism job like the cops beat. Hire people who understand that in order to work in journalism, they have to be doing journalism in some form every day of their lives. College isn’t pre-journalism time. It should be the start of a journalism student’s career, not just preparation for it.”
Student newspapers seem to be doing fine, despite the problems professional papers are facing: “We’re not experiencing a problem,” said Kevin Schwartz, general manager at The Daily Tar Heel, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.“There’s no advertising downturn for us.”
Thanks to Kevin Koehler, CoPress.org has an updated “About” page that refines the project’s mission.
From the page: “Student newspapers, at colleges and universities, fare no better than the pros. In fact, they’re generally worse off. Few student publications have much technical talent at all on staff, and what they do have is spread very thin. Most are stuck with bad content management systems — either clunky commercial products or simple blogging tools — that take much hacking and “programming” to fit the complex needs of a modern news Web site. As a result, developers spend inordinate effort fighting their CMSes, leaving minimal time to innovate on top of the platforms or build engaging online material. To date, most publications have struggled individually to reinvent the wheel.
We’re hoping to change all of that.”
The University of Missouri’s journalism school is celebrating its 100th anniversary today and unveiling its new building. “Thirty-five interactive journalism sessions, 27 technology discussions and 11 museum exhibits and displays offer a range of ideas about journalism and its future,” the Missourian reports, through registration is $125. A list of events is available in the Missourian article.
CoPress, the grassroots movement to create a new college media CMS, has launched its official Web site.
From the about page: “CoPress is a technical ecosystem of student newspapers all about figuring out better ways to manage, display, and distribute content online. At the moment, we’re just getting things started.”
The project is led by Adam Hemphill, Daniel Bachhuber, Greg Linch and Joey Baker.
Starting next fall, Eastern Illinois University in Charleston will require freshman journalism majors to buy Mac laptops. “What I envision in three or four years, we won’t be meeting in the computer labs and students will bring their own computer into the classroom,” said James Tidwell, chair of the journalism department.
The Jerusalem Post has helped launched the Campus Post, “a newspaper about Israel written for students and others who are interested in feeling more connected to Israel on campus. ‘The Jerusalem Post was seeking to expand its reach to college campuses and bring relevant, updated information to students,’ asserts Amanda Borschel-Dan, editor of Campus Post.”
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