Student Media

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint:” How a student newspaper investigated Title IX allegations against a college administrator

(Editor’s Note: I’m a huge believer in student media and the benefits it has for student journalists as well as campus audiences. When a big story breaks on a campus, I like to chat with the students who made the story happen to get the “backstory” on the piece.

Today’s conversation is with Ian Leonard, the managing editor for enterprise at the George-Anne at Georgia Southern University. He is a senior writing and linguistics major from Johns Creek, Georgia. He joined the paper his first semester freshman year, and is now a four-year veteran of the publication. His staff caught a tip about a professor who was the subject of multiple Title IX allegations, including one that is currently under investigation by the University System of Georgia. If you or your staff has a big story and would like to shed light on how you made it happen, contact me and we can take a look-see at it.)

Journalists will often have to make important ethical and editorial decisions about what to publish and when to publish it. Rush a story to publication, you run the risk of undermining your credibility if you don’t cover all sides as completely as your readers expect you to. Hold on to a story too long in hopes of covering all the angles, you might end up losing any reason to run the story at all.

Ian Leonard, the managing editor for enterprise of the George-Anne at Georgia Southern University, found himself trying to balance those issues when he was working on a story that had the potential to damage a faculty member’s reputation. Eric Kartchner had been the subject of at least three Title IX harassment investigations and three grievances during his 10 years at the school. A current complaint was being investigated by the university’s system.

“A professor approached a staff member and just told us that we might want to look into Kartchner…,” Leonard said. “We pulled his personnel file and saw all of the complaints lodged against him and knew it was something we wanted to pursue.”

Throughout the process of working through this story, Leonard and his staff had several important decisions to make: Do we name complainants? How much detail to we use in outlining the complaints? What should we do if the complainants don’t want to be interviewed? Leonard said he worked with his editorial board and his adviser to make sure each concern was addressed in a way that made sense for the story and the staff. In the end, the George-Anne decided to be cautious in its approach, declining to use the complainants actual names and relying heavily on public documents.

“The decision to use pseudonyms was definitely a difficult one to make,” Leonard said. “As an editorial board we looked at the nature of the situation at hand, knowing Kartchner had multiple retaliation cases filed against him, and thought about what kind of environment we would be putting these complainants in if we were to name them. We did reach out to all of our sources of course but not all of them were comfortable going on the record, and so despite the fact that their names did appear in public records, we figured it would be best to use altered names our of respect for their privacy.”

Leonard said the staff also knew that it was important to be transparent in reporting the charges levied against Kartchner without revealing too much, as to undermine the protection the pseudonyms provided. Although they had access to all of this information from the documents they obtained through an open records request, Leonard said the staff members discussed how they wanted to handle all of this.

“We definitely were concerned with making it too obvious,” he said. “Our main goal was to stick as close to the official university documents as possible while also presenting what we thought to be the most important details of the story at the time. We did our best to ensure that nothing we revealed was so on the nose that it was obvious who the source was.”

In stories like these, people who are the subject of the reporting often develop what some folks refer to as “ostrich syndrome.” They refuse to comment on the issue and stick their head in the sand, hoping that if they don’t say anything, the story will just go away. This makes life difficult for the writers, in that to be fair, they want to hear from the person being accused of something. However, they also can’t let the story die because the person involved is being evasive.

Leonard said the balance between letting Kartchner have his say and deciding to run the story without him required patience on the part of his staff. The same was true in dealing with his supervisor, Curtis Ricker,the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

“As far as Kartchner and Ricker, we reached out to them multiple times and given them over two weeks to get back to us, so we just came to the conclusion that if they didn’t want to comment, that was up to them,” he said. “We would have liked to hear from them, but we felt that the community as a whole would benefit greatly from this piece, regardless of whether they chose to be a part of it.”

Once the George-Anne published the piece, the community responded. Leonard said the staff received additional complaints from other sources about allegations of inappropriate behavior on campus. Others just thanked the staffers for their efforts.

“I think it was the response we received to this piece that really made it all worth it,” he said. “It was so overwhelming how many people contacted and reached out to us, just to share their own experiences, or say thank you. We weren’t really sure what to expect because none of us had really done anything of this caliber before, and were, rightfully, pretty nervous. There have been grumblings of some, not yet confirmed, meetings that may be taking place, but so far we’ve been focused on hearing from all of the new people who have reached out to us.”

“At the end of the day, I think the most important thing to come out of all of this is the conversation that was opened on our campus and in our community about the environment and culture we expect at Georgia Southern,” he added. “We were able to not only be a part of that conversation but, in a lot of ways, be at the center of it. And I personally think that’s the best job a newspaper can do, generate and encourage people to have those tough talks and address issues that are facing their community.”

When it comes to doing the big story, as Allison Hantschel noted before, nobody does it alone. Leonard noted that he worked with two other reporters on the story and spent a lot of time checking in with various other people he trusted. In the end, the story was a solid piece of journalism that made a difference on the GSU campus.

“I think the most important thing is to remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Leonard said. “Rushing something like this will almost always lead to mistakes and this is a topic that has no room for them. I also think this is far too large a subject for one reporter to tackle alone. Form a small team of 2-3 people who can constantly be working on this together and looking out for each other. (Fellow staff members) Blakeley (Bartee) and Jozsef (Papp) were obviously instrumental in getting this to print at the level of quality that it did. It wasn’t just “nice” to be able to work on this together, it was absolutely necessary to tell the story the way we knew it needed to be told.”

Journalism education, first impressions and the importance of working hard for what you want: The Doctor of Paper on the Edupunx podcast

One of the greatest joys of being a professor is having students come back to see you, years later, once they have found their joy and passion.

Even if their first impression of you was, “Man, this guy’s a dick.”

Katy Hamm, who graduated from UWO with a degree in journalism, came back to Wisconsin for a holiday visit along with her partner, Craig Bidiman. Katy now works as the Coordinator of Student Activities at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Craig serves as the Health Education and Wellness Promotion Specialist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. They both have a passion for education, college media and a ton of other things related to student life at the college level.

One of their projects is the eduPUNX podcast, which covers a wide array of issues such as sexual assault prevention, educational opportunities and even grad-school blues. On the day after Christmas, they were nice enough to sit down with me and do a podcast about the current state of media, journalism education and how I got involved in this field to begin with. It was a blast and it’s punctuated by some of Craig’s musical choices, which made it even better. They just released the podcast this week, so I wanted to share it with you all. In doing it and listening to it, I learned a few things:

  • I can actually go almost an hour and a half without (really) cussing if I know I’m likely to be recorded. I think I need someone to follow me around with a microphone.
  • I’m not as negative about media as I thought I would be in all this. I think it has a lot to do with having both of them with me and how we kind of fed off of each other’s positive vibes. It’s good to be surrounded by good people.
  • Wisconsin is an objectively frigid place. It was -2 on the day we recorded this with a -25 windchill. Katy and I had to explain to Craig the concept of it being “too cold to snow.” Craig, who spent time in Oregon and now lives in Boston and is an almost fanatical runner, refused to run in weather this cold. He also now knows what it’s like to have your butt freeze.
  • I still hate the sound of my own voice. I feel bad for students who have to listen to me. Or maybe it’s just the “your voice always sounds funny to you” thing.
  • Katy’s first impression of me was not a positive one. The opening of the podcast will tell you that. I’m glad the impression didn’t stick, as she was a heck of a great student, a wonderful person and a top-notch member of the educational community.

You can catch my chat with them here, or you can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes as well. If my voice doesn’t annoy you, give me some feedback if you’d like to have me add podcasts to this site on any topic of interest.

 

 

A look at The Ithacan’s current coverage of its president’s sexual abuse conviction from 2001

(Editor’s Note: I’m a huge believer in student media and the benefits it has for student journalists as well as campus audiences. When a big story breaks on a campus, I like to chat with the students who made the story happen to get the “backstory” on the piece.

Today’s conversation is with Aidan Quigley, a senior journalism major from Trumbull, Connecticut and the editor-in-chief of The Ithacan at Ithaca College in New York. He has worked on the paper since his freshman year, and has served as managing editor, news editor, assistant news editor and staff writer. He has also interned at Politico, Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor and the (Waterbury, CT) Republican-American. If you or your staff has a big story and would like to shed light on how you made it happen, contact me and we can take a look-see at it.)

The Ithacan’s EIC Aidan Quigley published a magnum opus Wednesday on the school’s new president, shedding light on a story about her conviction for sexual abuse in 2001. The piece has drawn national attention, with Fox News, The New York Daily News and the Chronicle of Higher Education all publishing follow-up pieces on the Ithacan’s story.

Shirley Collado, the school’s president, and the school’s board of trustees issued statements on both the incident itself and Collado’s fitness to run the school in advance of the story they knew was coming. Quigley said this move prompted the Ithacan to publish the story a half hour after the president released her statement, although it had been in the works for more than a month.

“President Collado released a statement on Tuesday night that pre-empted the publication of our story, which was planned for the next day,” he said. “After we were aware that she had sent her statement to the community, I thought it was essential that we release our story, which included the patient’s side of the story — the allegations made against Collado — to add context and information to President Collado’s public statement.”

Quigley said the paper received a package of material from an anonymous source in December regarding the Collado case. He then got the full case file from the Washington, D.C. Superior Court and began digging.

“Winter break provided me an opportunity to really dive deeply into the reporting, in identifying and speaking with sources, filing public records requests and continuing to do research into the legal and ethical issues involved,” Quigley said.

The university was also helpful in getting information from key sources, he said.

“We received no push-back from the college while pursuing this story, and the college helped arrange interviews with President Collado, Tom Grape (chairman of the Board of Trustees) and Jim Nolan, who led the search committee,” Quigley said.

“An unexpected twist we ran into was Collado’s decision to pre-empt the story with her statement,” he added. “We were planning on publishing the story the next day, so while the pre-emption caught us off guard, we were able to react quickly and publish the story shortly after the release of her statement.”

The statements painted a more benign picture of the situation, with the board’s statement noting that all of this had been disclosed to the university community almost a year earlier in a published interview where Collado described the situation this way:

[O]ne of my former patients who struggled with significant psychological disorders and had been in and out of treatment sought me out for help. She didn’t have anywhere to go, and I went out of my way to help her. But it backfired when I decided I wasn’t in a position to help her after all and that I needed to focus on getting through my grief. She ended up making claims against me. Unfortunately, this is the risk that many therapists and practitioners face when working with trauma patients or individuals challenged by serious psychological disorders. I fought the claims for a while, but I didn’t have the resources, social capital, or the wherewithal to keep going. I was in my 20s, and I had just tragically lost my husband, so I decided to take steps to end the legal action so that I could focus on taking care of myself and moving on with my life. It was a very difficult decision, but it’s the kind of decision that young people face daily when they feel they have no options, no resources, and no outside support.

Compare that to some of the revelations the Ithacan published:

Prosecutors argued Collado took advantage of a vulnerable, sexual-abuse survivor with mental illness by entering into a monthslong sexual relationship that started when Collado was the patient’s therapist. Collado denies having any sexual contact with the patient.

<SNIP>

The patient was receiving therapy for post-traumatic stress at The Center, as she had previously been sexually abused by a doctor — who was convicted for the abuse — and as a child, according to the prosecution. The patient, who was 30 years old at the time of the court case, was diagnosed with having bipolar disorder and a dissociative identity disorder and had experienced lengthy periods of deep depression and suicidal thoughts, Marcus-Kurn wrote.

The patient alleged that she began a sexual relationship with Collado on May 20, 2000, which lasted until October 2000, according to the prosecution. Marcus-Kurn wrote that the patient recorded encounters with Collado in a journal that was submitted to the court but is not included in the case file.

<SNIP>

The patient alleged that she had participated in a three-way sexual encounter with Collado and an adult male on Sept. 9, 2000, according to the prosecution. The patient alleged Collado told her it “would be psychologically helpful for her.” The man and Collado denied that the interaction had taken place.

<SNIP>

The patient did express her feelings to Marcus-Kurn over the telephone. Marcus-Kurn wrote that the patient said the following:

“It brings on such immense pain and it is very, very intense feelings of confusion. I start hearing her calling her name, I start smelling her, I start remembering her telling me that it would be good for me to sleep with (name redacted) , and I remember being raped, and I have blocked that all out and I’m afraid that it would kill me if I start dealing with it right now. She has hurt me beyond belief and it’s like so bad that I can hardly touch it because it hurts so bad. I have to take it really slow. I know that I feel a lot inside but I’m not really sure what all of those feelings are because I try really hard not to feel them but I know that they are painful as hell. I literally feel that I will fall apart every time I think I’ll deal with it. And it hurts too much. And I’m really angry that she slept with me and that she convinced me to sleep with her boyfriend and I feel that I was raped and that there is nothing I can do with it because I believe it isn’t against the law in D.C.”

In the wake of the story, the discussion on the Ithaca campus has been centered around The Ithacan’s approach to the story and how it came about, Quigley said.

“While the initial reaction has centered around our decision to publish the story and the identity of the whistle-blower who sent us the information, I’m hopeful and optimistic the community will engage at a deep level with the complicated issues the story presents,” he said.

As for the “big take away” he and his staff had after working through this story, Quigley said he found it is important to dig deep on stories that matter to a publication’s readership.

“I think it’s important to write these type of difficult stories in a straightforward, nuanced and balanced way. It’s important to write stories you can stand by and let the reporting speak for itself,” he said. 

 

Still Tinker-ing with free speech: 50 years after a landmark SCOTUS decision, the case’s namesake continues her First Amendment work

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(One of my happiest geeky moments: A photo with Mary Beth Tinker at a journalism convention.)

Journalism students tend only to get jazzed up about court cases when they manage to accurately recall them for a media law final. Hosty v. Carter, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, NY Times v. Sullivan and more tend to blur after time and become a jumble of, “Wait, wasn’t that one about…” recall after the fact. (One of the few favorites I can recall is Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, a momentous case that dictated how the First and 14th amendments related to parody and public figures.)

One case that refuses to collect dust is Tinker v. Des Moines, thanks in large part to plaintiff Mary Beth Tinker’s lifelong crusade to keep the importance of free speech front and center. Tinker and her siblings, along with a family friend, wore black armbands to school in 1965 in protest of the Vietnam War. They were subsequently punished, leading to a lawsuit that made its way to the Supreme Court. The Court heard the case in 1968 and issued its decision early the next year, ruling 7-2 in favor of the plaintiff. The majority noted that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Today, Mary Beth Tinker continues to use her experiences as a learning device for subsequent generations of U.S. students. Over the past few years, she hit the road with the “Tinker Tour” project, which aimed to bring real-life civics lessons to students, faculty and administrators throughout the country. The project, which started in 2013 with some help from the Student Press Law Center, continues to promote the ideas of free speech, free press and more at the student level.

For more information on Mary Beth Tinker, the landmark Supreme Court Case and the Tinker Tour itself, you can head over to the Tour’s official website.

 

 

How to handle “I’m going to sue you” as a college newspaper (even if the person threatening you is Anthony Scaramucci)

“I’m going to sue you.”

Few phrases start more heart palpitations in a student newsroom than that one. Even though, as a good friend once noted, “It ain’t a lawsuit until it’s filed,” the sense that someone is coming after you with the full force of law can be terrifying. If you spend enough time in any part of the media field, you will likely hear that phrase and have it pointed in your general direction.

The student newspaper at Tufts University had that experience recently, thanks to a few columns written about a famous, outspoken alumnus: Anthony Scaramucci.

Scaramucci spent 10 days as the White House communications director under President Donald Trump. During that time, his wild ride included an off-color interview with the New Yorker, that disparaged several former colleagues and eventually led to his downfall. Scaramucci is also an alumnus of Tufts University where he served on an advisory board for the university’s law school. Graduate student Camilo A. Caballero penned several opinion pieces for the Tufts Daily, arguing that Scaramucci shouldn’t hold that position.

Scaramucci, a 53-year-old, Harvard-educated lawyer with an impressive background in financial success, decided the best course of action was to threaten a lawsuit against the author and the paper, unless an apology was issued and the content was retracted.

Caballero has referred all questions to the folks at the ACLU with whom he is working, but Gil Jacobson, the editor-in-chief of the paper, was nice enough to exchange a few emails with me on the topic.

Jacobson said he first heard rumblings about Scaramucci’s board position in October, and The Daily ran a news article on the topic in early November. Around that time, the paper ran two of Caballero’s columns as well. On Nov. 20, he said the paper covered a session between administrators and concerned community members of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The cease-and-desist letter came the next day.

“I spoke on the phone with a lawyer from Student Press Law Center last week, and based on the information he gave me, we decided to print the cease-and-desist letter today and keep the original op-eds online in their original text,” Jacobson said in an email to me early last week.

In the mean time, all of the content pertaining to the Scaramucci situation remain online via the paper’s website.

“I have the final say as far as potential retractions and apologies go,” Jacobson said. “The op-eds remain online in their original text, and we’ll just have to wait and see where things go from here.”

Since that set of emails, Scaramucci has resigned his position from the board, he has not retracted his request for the paper to “unpublish” its content and the ACLU has helped craft a response to Scaramucci’s demands. In addition, in defending his honor against the commentary of a 26-year-old law school student who is writing for a college newspaper, Scaramucci got the Washington Post, New York Times and Boston Globe to shine a light on everything Caballero accused him of being and doing. When I touched base with Jacobson for a brief follow up on this, he remained pretty even-keeled:

“With anything we publish, we must be prepared for the full scope of outcomes to occur, no matter how severe. Words have consequences, just like actions,” he said. “We’ve seen this happen this week with Mr. Scaramucci, as well as many other cases involving journalists.”

This situation has about 91 things you can learn from it as a journalism student, not to mention at least 112 more amusing moments you can enjoy. (My personal favorite is the ACLU’s examination of this statement:)

Statement 3: “[T]he man who sold his soul in contradiction to his own purported beliefs for a seat in that White House”

Mr. Caballero’s statement about Mr. Scaramucci’s selling of his soul is both a constitutionally-protected statement of opinion and a statement that is  not actionable because it does not contain objectively verifiable facts. See Scholz, 473 Mass. at 250. The “contradiction” underlying this purported sale is of course well- documented; Mr. Scaramucci appeared to change his prior positions when he accepted his White House appointment. But the purported sale is an idiom meant to express an opinion about Mr. Scaramucci’s integrity, and it cannot be proved true or false. Your client clearly understands the idiom; he has in fact devoted a book to it.

That said, the best teachable moment to come out of all this is how to react when someone, even a rich-and-famous someone, threatens to sue you:

  1. Remain calm: The threat itself is enough to freak you out, but when you are nervous for no reason, you can make the most (and largest) mistakes. You need to realize that the threat of a lawsuit is just that: A threat. Take the threat seriously enough to gather crucial information and speak with the person involved, but remember, it is highly unlikely that the person will sue you at all, let alone sue you successfully.
  2. Determine the problem: Just because someone doesn’t like something, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they have grounds for legal action. In one of the earlier articles on this topic, this was a key point legal experts were making: Just because you don’t like something that someone wrote, it doesn’t necessarily follow that libel or defamation has occurred. In the case of the Scaramucci letter, it was inordinately clearly what he and his legal team felt the problem was, so that made it easier for the newspaper staff to figure out how to proceed. In other cases, people are just generally angry, so you need to keep the dialogue flowing until you can zero in on exactly what happened and why this is so troubling to the angry person.
  3. Don’t make a promise you can’t keep: A “fight or flight” instinct is pretty strong in most folks. When a person threatens you, the “flight” instinct to apologize profusely and promise to fix everything might feel like the best way to handle a situation. On the other hand, you might feel the need to “fight” the situation with some anger and vitriol of your own. Neither of these instincts tends to work out all that well when you are dealing with angry readers. The best thing you can do is work the situation like a reporter: Gather facts and opinions from this person, do some research digging and then come back with an answer when you feel fully informed. In some cases, those answers won’t even come from you, but rather a legal representative or someone higher up the food chain at your place of work. In either case, don’t back yourself in a corner out of fear.

The staff of the Tufts Daily seemed to nail this approach perfectly. It should be interesting to see what happens next.

 

13 random observations from #CollegeMedia17

I’m spending the end of this week at the annual national college media convention in Dallas, Texas, where I’m finding a few immutable truths about travel, student media and how we all function as journalists. In hopes of having a happy weekend, consider a few random thoughts and observations about this wonderful experience:

  1. No matter where you are going, the cheapest flights are always at the most ungodly hours. Our flight out forced us to leave Oshkosh at 3:15 a.m. and our flight back will force us to be picked up by a shuttle at 3:15 a.m. This means we constantly face the conundrum of “Should I try to get some sleep or should I just stay awake?” Ask my managing editor, who manged to oversleep through three alarms he “swore” he set on the day we were slated to leave.
  2. Your best friend in a convention town: 7-11. I paid $4.89 for a 12 pack of Diet Coke as opposed to the $3 per can the hotel was charging.
  3. Barbacoa is awesome. Just don’t ask what it is.
  4. The greatest joy in my life is critiquing newspapers (OK, and websites, magazines and any other student press product). It is absolutely fantastic to sit down with students and find out ways you can help them to improve what they’re doing or to reassure them that they are doing awesome work.
  5. If you want to win something in a silent auction, you need to be there at the end and snipe. I’d apologize to the people I did this to at the SPLC book auction, but the money goes to a good cause, so the more the merrier.
  6. A necessary plug for SAGE: The publisher of my book is cooler than I had any right to expect. They overnighted a bound, proof copy of the Reporting text as well as an additional copy of the Media Writing book for free so that they could be given to the SPLC book auction. That took work and they never thought twice. (Congrats to Steve Listopad of Henderson State University who now owns my book before I do. Tell me if it’s worth it…)
  7. Bring an extra $25 for overweight fees on your luggage, especially if you’re taking home copies of the tons of student newspapers available at the paper exchange or if you’re really good at that whole “book sniping” thing.
  8. Don’t text your adviser and ask, “If I bought a beer, would you put it in your checked luggage?”
  9. As much as I tell my students, “It’s great if you win an award, but it’s not a bad thing if you don’t,” I’m as anxious as they are before awards are given out. A small part of me wants to get a convention coordinator drunk on a mix of tequila and sodium pentathol tonight…
  10. One of the hardest things to do is figure out what sessions to attend. There are so many going on at the same time that are all good. You almost have to have several people there to do a “divide and conquer” approach.
  11. We are all dealing with the same stuff, even if we don’t know it. (Part I) One of the things that I am always grateful for when it comes to these kinds of conventions is that it allows students from all over the place to realize that we’re all dealing with the same general levels of excitement, apathy, dysfunction and amazement. Every staff has one a-hole, one person who is “doing everything,” one person who SAYS they’re “doing everything” but isn’t doing anything, one person who is “too good for this place,” one person who is scared and one person who is wondering what they got themselves into. Bonus points are also available for people who have at least two random relationships going on or breaking up in the newsroom that leads to more drama than an episode of “Real Housewives” on meth.
  12. Hats. People in Texas are reeeeeeally into their hats.
  13. We are all dealing with the same stuff, even if we don’t know it. (Part II) The sense that we can do something great, want to do something fun, that we have found our family and that we can’t imagine what we’d be doing if we weren’t doing this is pretty much universal. And maybe that’s the best thing.

Onward to Day 3. Hope to see you there.

An open love letter to the SPLC (or why you can own my new book before I do)

coverdone
(It took me more than two years to build this thing and you can own the only print copy in existence before I do.)

I’m heading to the ACP/CMA National College Media Convention in Dallas, Texas tomorrow and waiting for me is a UPS package that contains the only physical copy of my book, “Dynamics of News Writing and Reporting.”

And you can own it before I do because I’m giving it away for a great cause: The Student Press Law Center’s fundraising effort.

If you have never heard of SPLC, it means a) you have never been in any kind of legal trouble as a student journalist/student media member or b) you really should get to know the people at this organization. SPLC started in 1974 and has been providing free legal advice to students at all levels who are trying to keep government open, prevent censorship and basically operate freely under the First Amendment. They also find lawyers to work with students who are in a jam or trying to unjam an unlawful withholding of information or records.

My first experience with them came two days after I started as an adviser at Ball State University. A letter from them seeking donations was laying open in my mailbox, and came with a scrawled message on a Post-It Note:

“Hope you work closely with this agency. – L.E. Ingelhart.”

Louis Ingelhart was the founding chair of the department, a legend of student press and the namesake or winner of every meaningful free expression award in the country. He had long retired, but he knew I was “the new guy” and he wanted to make absolutely sure I knew about the importance of SPLC.

The folks at SPLC became the first call or email for us whenever we weren’t sure if we were on solid legal ground. If something went wrong with a story, we called SPLC. If someone was threatening us, we called SPLC. If someone stole our papers, we called SPLC. Over the years, I got to know the executive directors who ran the show: first was Mark Goodman, then Frank LoMonte. I can’t wait to meet Hadar Harris, who was recently named to the post. The folks there have always been gracious and helpful.

One of my favorite SPLC stories involved Ball State’s efforts to hire a provost. Students, faculty and staff were allowed to see the candidates in open sessions and then fill out evaluation forms that told the committee what they thought of each one. These are traditionally not for public consumption, but the chair of the search committee said in an open meeting that anyone who wanted to see them could go to the administration building and look at them. That was a mistake on his part, as it made them open records.

When we tried to get them, we were first denied. SPLC pushed. Our reporters were then handed some quickly created form that they had to sign before seeing the documents, agreeing that they could never disclose what they saw. SPLC told the reporters to write on the note that this was in no way enforceable and they were signing under protest. About five minutes after receiving the documents, the secretary came in (completely flustered) and began grabbing them all back from the students.

SPLC advised the reporters on how to file an open records request for these documents. The request was denied under some part of Indiana law that we didn’t understand. When we turned the letter over to SPLC, I remember the staffer laughing loudly upon figuring out the statute: The university was claiming that these documents were “internal memos” that were only meant to be shared with the 19,000 students and several thousand workers on campus, not with the whole world. SPLC filed documents for us and gave us legal help all the way through the process of presenting our position to the state arbiter. The state sided with us and we got the records. We never would have gotten close without SPLC.

On a personal note, SPLC saved me from a fate worse than death: the potential loss of my advising job.

Two years ago, the student government here at UW-Oshkosh decided I needed to go. The reasons are vast, but they decided to use a simple cudgel: We were in debt. That did not make us unique as a paper or as something at this university. It also wasn’t a surprise to the student government folks, as we had been petitioning them for more than six years to help us fix a broken financial model. Each time, we were told, “Don’t worry about the debt. We’ll figure it out.” (In fact, one of the people leading my ouster used even more colorful language in describing his position on our finances to a room full of staffers. It didn’t matter at all, he noted in the parlance of the movie “Scarface.”)

Now, however, they saw an opportunity. They drafted non-binding resolutions requesting that I quit and if I didn’t, that the chancellor fire me. They pushed for debt payments that could in no way be made. It looked like a downhill run to the end. The newspaper staff called SPLC and asked what could be done. SPLC doesn’t provide legal services to advisers, but they sure as hell don’t sit around watching as student media get kicked around, either.

They covered the event for their own website and put out news flashes on our plight. Frank availed himself of every opportunity to speak with local media and administrators to help outline the law and explain how this shouldn’t be happening. I remember being in a meeting once where one of the students coming after me had this perplexed/annoyed/fearful look on his face as he made note of this “national special interest group from Virginia” that was somehow gumming up their plans.

In the end, I had a lot of support from a lot of people, including an amazing chancellor and an anonymous donor who helped us launch a fundraising drive. (Frank personally even chipped in to aid in our efforts.) The paper is on solid financial ground again and producing great work. Still, I honestly believe it all started with the help of SPLC, who told us, essentially, “This isn’t happening. We got your back.”

That “formal resolution” petitioning people to fire me hangs on my wall in the office as does that letter from Lou Ingelhart, the writing fading from years of exposure. They remind me how lucky I am to have SPLC around and how much those folks do every day to keep the free press free.

Each year, SPLC receives money from a silent book auction at the national college media convention. People donate books of all kinds, as well as various other media memorabilia. The group uses this money to support its efforts to support student media. So this is why when my publisher told me I was getting a single advanced copy of a bound uncorrected proof of the book, I knew exactly where it should go. Without SPLC, I don’t have a paper, a book or a life that keeps me laughing all day at work.

If you are in Dallas, please stop by the auction any time after noon and bid generously on any of the books you see there. I often come home with a suitcase full of stuff. I hope one of you will go home with a few as well.

Including mine.

5 bits of advice for student journalists covering chaos

Over the past month, the level of crime and disaster coverage has really jumped up a notch throughout the country.

We’re running through the alphabet at a pretty brisk pace when it comes to naming hurricanes, with Harvey smashing into Texas and surrounding areas while Irma did serious damage to Florida and many parts of the Deep South.  We had the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that led to a “Tiki-Torch march” on the University of Virginia campus as well as clashes between racists and counter-protestors that left one woman dead and many more injured.

This week, St. Louis was the epicenter of both peaceful protests and violent outbursts, leading to more than 80 arrests Sunday night. The source of this unrest was the acquittal of Jason Stockley, a white, former St. Louis Police officer who was charged with murdering Anthony Lamar Smith, a black man believed to be selling drugs, in 2011.

Student journalists are frequently at the forefront of these events, covering dangerous situations for their fellow students. The folks at the Rice Thresher talked last week about their experiences covering hurricane damage around their area, and they continue to cover the aftermath of the devastation. The Cav Daily at UVA was in the middle of the chaos both for the march on campus as well as the events that unfolded the next day. A more becomes known about the city’s efforts, the reporters at UVA continue the coverage.  In St. Louis, both the student reporters at St. Louis University and Washington University covered the protests in the wake of the Stockley’s acquittal.

Covering disasters, crime and mayhem can be scary as hell. I spent most of my professional J time on a night desk or the crime beat, so I’ve seen more than a few things that would make a Billy Goat puke. I also have sent student journalists into situations where danger was palpable and fear was inevitable. Based on that background, and the fact it seems likely you might end up covering something like this, here are five simple tips when you need to cover chaos:

  1. Stay Calm: Things can be blowing up all around you or you might never have seen that much blood before in your life. You may be fighting the urge to throw up. I once went to the scene of an accident where a compact car traveling about 50 mph went head on into a compact car traveling 50 mph toward it. A lot of blood and glass. A TV reporter was on the side of the road, throwing up into the weeds, trying to hold it together for a stand up. In floods, you might find dead people or wounded people. Fights break out at protests and violence spills everywhere. (Tim Dodson’s line about the “chemical irritant” in the air during the “Unite the Right” rally sticks in my head when I think of how crazed a scene can get.) Whatever it is, you need to keep your head about you. A panicking reporter is a useless reporter. You need to take a deep breath and focus on the task at hand.
  2. Stay Safe: Police and fire rescue folks are trying to do their job. You are trying to do your job. Sometimes, those needs conflict with each other. Regardless of how important you feel you are, you need to realize that their needs trump your needs at the scene of an accident. In many cases, they put up special tape to keep you out of harm’s way. In other cases, they tell you where to stand or where not to stand. I interviewed a fire chief once who told me that a reporter wanted to get a shot of a burning building and moved too close to the structure. When one of his firefighters chopped into the roof, there was some sort of explosion through one of the windows, thus raining fire, glass and debris on the startled journalist.

    Even when the authorities aren’t there to tell you what to do, you need to make sure you use common sense. Don’t stand in the middle of a hailstorm to do your stand up. Don’t drive into a flood zone and then expect people to bail you out. Whatever it is, you need to make sure you’re safe and sound. A dead reporter isn’t much more useful than a panicking one.

  3. Paranoia is your best friend. Always make sure you are following up your stories on disasters. Things can change in a heartbeat, literally. When a young boy fell into a creek and was clinging to life, a reporter wrote a tale of how the priest was praying with the family and how God would make everything work out well. Unfortunately, as deadline approached, it turns out the kid was taken off of life support and died. A rewrite of that story was critical. Make sure you check back to see the condition of people involved in disasters, the official cause of fires, how many people are actually still without power following a storm and more. The more you worry that things might be changing, the better off your copy will be. In terms of crime, make sure you are sure on the specific charges, the ID and name spelling of anyone accused of anything and that you have slapped attributions on everything that needs one.
  4. Be humane. When you cover bad things, chances are you’ll run into bad people. When someone does something that harms others and you have to go after that person, you should do so with vim and vigor. However, that crime also affects a lot of good people as well. It could be the wife of a guy who she never suspected of running a dog-fighting operation. It might be the sister of a victim who was shot and killed by an under-trained cop. It could be a parent who just identified the body of her only daughter. Life isn’t easy on these people. It’s also true in disaster stories, where people have watched their homes wash away on TV or they just lost everything they ever loved. It’s a horrible event and these people are traumatized. Yes, you are on deadline and yes, the adrenaline is flowing. However, you need to make sure you act in a way that will allow you to live with yourself the next day. The story is fleeting, but if you are insensitive, rude or in some other way problematic, your impact will last a long time.
  5. Take care of yourself. Covering crises will have an impact on you in some way. How exactly? I don’t know and neither will you. I can’t tell you how you will react to seeing a dead body, a tornado-torn neighborhood or a road strewn with auto glass. One of the toughest student journalists I ever knew ended up almost broken covering a story about a garbage collector who died when he was crushed by his own truck. Why that story got her when others didn’t, I don’t know. However, you need to understand that these things have an impact on you. The DART center (www.dartcenter.org) helps journalists deal with the trauma they experience every day, from war to crime and beyond. In the end, you might just need someone to talk to. However, you can’t do your job if you are really messed up. Take the time to take care of yourself.

5 good reasons to work for your student newspaper (plus one more great one)

Got some feedback on what a number of professors who might be using the “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” textbook thought about the blog and one comment caught me off guard a bit:

How about a plug for student media?”

Student media is among the most important influences in my life, both as a student and as a professor. Without my student newspaper experience at The Daily Cardinal at UW-Madison, I would be working in a garage somewhere doing oil changes and wheel alignments. I owe pretty much everything in my life, from my first paid media gig to my full professorship to that little windowless bunker that still smells exactly the same.

If I plugged student media in my classes any more than I already do, I’d be a cross between Lloyd Dobler from “Say Anything” and “Vince from Slap Chop.”

Student media is important, but don’t take it from me. Give Joe Buettner’s piece on his student newsroom experience a read. Buettner is a student at the University of Oklahoma, an alumnus of The Oklahoma Daily and current sports intern at the city’s daily paper. His piece on “Five Reasons You Should Join Your College Newspaper” nails the main elements of everything I could tell you about the experience, the camaraderie, the excitement and more. (Plus, he’s like half my age and he’s done it recently, so it’s not me waxing poetic about the “old days” when Vanilla Ice was cool or something.)

However, since I get the “long view” of student media, let me add one more reason why you should join that has nothing to do with what you get out of it: Your work matters to people.

Look back at the Rice Thresher’s coverage of Hurricane Harvey or the Cav Daily’s coverage of the “Unite the Right” march. (Spoiler alert: I’m getting in touch with Tim Dodson on Friday to talk about the paper’s follow ups on life at UVA these days.) Also look at these pieces:

Beyond these “big” stories are the day-in, day-out pieces that tell people what parking lots are closed, what teams are on a winning streak, who got arrested and who won an award. People read this stuff in student media because in most cases, it’s the ONLY place you CAN read it.

You do a heck of a lot of good for yourself working at the paper, that’s true, but you also have the benefit of knowing you did something that affected other people. It’s as good a reason as any to figure out where on campus the paper is located and give it a chance to change your life.

 

Student media: The aftermath of Harvey and lessons learned (Part II)

Editor’s Note: This is the second piece from my interview with a couple members of the Rice University’s student newspaper, the Rice Thresher, about their experiences and coverage of Hurricane Harvey.

Emily and Anna_colAnna Ta, a sophomore from Spring, Texas, and Emily Abdow, a junior from Ellicott City, Maryland, are the paper’s news editors and coordinated their coverage as they also braced for the impact of the storm. Once the storm had finished dumping 50 inches of water in the area, and “the whole shock wore off” (to quote Emily), they had to pour a ton of resources into telling the story even as the city of Houston remained under water.

Here are a few of their recent stories in the aftermath of the hurricane:

Late last week, they were nice enough to share some thoughts on what they did, why they did it and what they learned in covering one of the country’s largest natural disasters. (One fix to note from the last post is that the students’ newsroom was NOT damaged by the flooding, but they couldn’t use it to coordinate coverage because flooding made it too dangerous to get there. That’s on me.)

Today we look at what happens when the national media moves on to a newer hurricane and you are still there, looking into what all of this means to your readers. In addition, Emily and Anna were nice enough to do some reflecting on what they learned (and wanted to share with other students) through this experience.

As always, the errors are mine, not the students, so please contact me with any necessary changes or fixes.

—

Major news stories bring out major news outlets that create major coverage. Once the big bang is done, they tend to leave and move on to the next big thing.

In some cases, critics refer to this as “helicopter journalism,” in which the media fly in, drop down, gather some stuff and fly out. My favorite reference to being on the ground in spirit only was the term “toe tap datelines,” which meant the source did most of the work from the comfort of a newsroom, but showed up on the scene long enough to gather a few details and add an exotic dateline to the front of a story.

In this case, it’s a bit hard to blame the media in some ways for leaving, as they had another hurricane to cover, but it still leaves the question, “What happens when the bright lights go out and the big names go home?”

In the case of Hurricane Harvey, the staff of the Rice Thresher has more stories to tell about clean up, recovery and how students are trying to return to “normalcy,” if such a thing is possible.

“This upcoming issue we have three stories about Harvey,” co-news editor  Emily Abdow said. “One is focusing on the students at Rice whose off-campus apartments were flooded and who have been trying to be students while dealing with the stress of finding a place to live. Another is focusing on all the scheduling conflicts which have arisen as students try to re-plan social events they’d invested a lot of time and money into organizing. A third is about how the Rice Harvey Action Team, which organizes volunteers to go out into the community, is being handed off to a student organization by the administration.”

The stories focus on topics of interest to the audience: Students and their environment. They also show that even as the national news is closing off its coverage with “And now, the recovery begins…” the local journalists know people are still affected by this storm in ways that haven’t been dealt with.

“As the media and the campus moves on, we recognize that even though you can drive through the streets now, all those people were affected aren’t magically going to get completely better,” co-news editor Anna Ta said. “We’re covering those in the Rice community as they have to simultaneously get back into school/work while trying to figure out living/transportation/etc. in the aftermath.”

Even as they continue coverage of Harvey, both editors said they know it can’t be “all hurricane, all the time.”

“We’ve definitely got a few more Harvey related stories planned for future weeks, and I think one or two a week will serve as a reminder that our community, including students and staff, are still dealing with the aftermath without driving people up the wall with endless coverage,” Abdow said.

“It’s a mix, and we’re hoping that will allow us to cover Rice as comprehensively as possible,” Ta added.

In terms of their own experiences with this, the students had a few thoughts they were willing to share with the readers who might find themselves covering a giant story

Emily Abdow:

One of my biggest takeaways from the hurricane is to never forget to be a reporter. At first, because I was such a part of the story, I almost forgot that my role is also to tell the story. Another takeaway is that college journalists have a unique perspective that no other major media outlet has. The Washington Post covered how the Rice University football team finally returned home after being unable to fly into Houston from Australia during the Hurricane.

On campus, we have the ability to talk to those students and tell their stories in a way no one else can. Even though my Facebook feed was inundated with coverage, we had the ability to add something unique, the student perspective. That brings me to my last takeaway: there are so many angles and sides to a story. Harvey was one event – albeit a very major one – but there are so many stories that we can tell about all the people who were part of it and we are continuing to tell those stories.

Anna Ta:

I guess, even when everyone and everything else stops – classes, events, work – you have to keep going as a student journalist. Don’t get swept up in the same kind of coverage everyone else is providing. Tell the stories only you can from the angles that matter to your community.

 

To continue following the coverage on Harvey and all other things Rice, visit the Thresher here.

“You are a journalist:” The Cav Daily, “Unite the Right” fallout and the importance of local media

Editor’s Note: There is a fine line between telling a story and milking a story, especially one like this. To err on the side of caution, this is the third (and last, for now) in a short series of posts about the Cavalier Daily’s coverage of the chaos over the weekend in Charlottesville. Part I reviews the preparation and the Friday march of white supremacists on campus.  Part II talks about the Saturday events, including the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Tim Dodson, the paper’s managing editor, helps me wrap up the trilogy with a look at what people were saying in the aftermath and why student media matters every day. Tim stressed that the ongoing coverage was a team event and you can continue to see that today with a look at Bridget Starrs’ piece on the candle-light vigil on the University of Virginia campus.

Any mistakes are mine, not Tim’s. Corrections and tweaks are likely necessary and gratefully received.

—

National news organizations spent much of Wednesday reviewing President Donald Trump’s reversal on the condemnation of the white supremacists who descended upon Charlottesville. Talking head shows on Fox, CNN and MSNBC debated the big picture of white supremacy. The Associated Press put out a statement on its new rule for the term “alt-right” (in quotes only, as the term “is meant as a euphemism to disguise racist aims”). Great-great-great grandfolk of Confederate leaders spoke out about what should be done with monuments to the era of secession.

In some ways, Charlottesville became almost inconsequential as a town and as a people. In an interview right conducted shortly after the chaos of the weekend, Cavalier Daily Managing Editor Tim Dodson pretty much saw this coming.

“The national news outlets come into town when something like this happens and they report the major facts and the controversy,” Dodson said. “Then they leave, but we are the ones who are going to have to live with the outcomes of this. How are people going to heal from this going forward?”

Dodson wasn’t relying on cliche when he told me, “We live here.” He is from Charlottesville and stuck around his hometown to attend U.Va. after graduating from high school in 2015. As students roll into town in anticipation of next week’s start of the fall semester, Dodson said the staff of the Cav Daily continue to look for things that will affect them.

“I think we need to tell the stories that relate to students that no one else will have access to,” he said. “How does what happened (over the weekend) influence campus safety? How do students feel coming back into this environment? We’re not going to see stories like that on CNN or any other national outlet… I think that speaks to the role of local news and the importance of local journalism.”

Dodson said the staff’s goal was to look for ties between the publication’s campus readership and the events as they unfolded. For example, Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed during Saturday’s events, was a waitress at a restaurant adjacent to campus. Cav Daily reporters interviewed her friends and colleagues, some of whom had ties to U.Va.

The staff covered the candle-light vigil held on campus as well as the lawsuit filed in relation to the car-based attack on counter protesters. The Cav Daily also ran a story in which the university president, citing the violent events of the weekend, requested that students cancel this year’s “Block Party,” an off-campus, back-to-school event often laden with alcohol.

“We are trying to find angles that speak to the student experience,” he said. “We are not just in a bubble here at U.Va… However, you try to figure out how you can differentiate yourself by telling a story as a student.”

As the national outlets go bigger with the white supremacist story (CNN is now telling people where hate groups are in their area), and the Cav Daily goes for more local stories, one thing ties them together: They are all journalists, telling stories that matter to their readers. That can be a harder task for student journalists in a lot of ways.

“I think a lot of the reasons why professors and members of the community don’t like student journalists is because there is more risk involved,” Dodson said. “We’re not as seasoned as the pros. We’re going to make mistakes. We don’t always have the best email etiquette. Those experiences can rub sources the wrong way and that’s a challenge.”

Even knowing that, one of the themes Dodson kept coming back to was this: Don’t settle.

” I don’t think (a student journalist) should be intimidated because when you’re on the scene, you are working with the same situation and the same facts,” he said. “Don’t be intimidated because you are “just” a student journalist. You are a journalist. You don’t have to predicate that with “student.” You are a journalist.”

“I think it can be really problematic when students settle for less,” he added. “If all they do is email and quote from emails and write from a dorm room, well, that’s not journalism. Get on a phone, talk to someone in person, go to the scene in person. That’s what journalists do… Rather than taking press releases and emails, really put yourself out there.”

The Cav Daily crew proved that point this weekend when staffers waded into the chaos of the “Unite the Right” rally. Police in riot gear were everywhere. Members of white supremacist groups waved flags adorned with symbols of hate and toted military-style weapons. Tear gas made it hard to see and breathe at some points.

Still, the journalists did what journalists do: They reported the news.

“There were so many questions and concerns from people in the area,” Dodson said. “The media played a very important role in getting stories out there… I was one person on a team of journalists and I’m very proud of the members of our staff. We saw people with weapons and we saw people chanting and fighting, but we needed to tell the stories. Our team threw itself into it.”

“In retrospect, I probably should have been more worried about my personal safety,” he added. “But we were more worried about getting the stories out there.”