Whooping Llama

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/25/Floridian/First_Amendment_101.shtml

Found this article on the interwebs the other day, and it’s got me thinking. As I understand it, public universities cannot censor student media because they’re funded by the government, even if the student media is supported by the institution (as most small papers, like The University of Charleston Eagle, are).

The law concerning private institutions like UC is fuzzier. As members of the student media at a university that does not recieve government funding, working for a paper that is mostly funded by the university, what are our legal rights?

Let’s say I write a big controversial article that, although not libelous, makes everyone in the administration mad. Could they just shut us down?

Now, I don’t see that happening (I think the last thing the university wants to do is stifle its students’ voices), but what if it did?

The last issue of the semester always sucks, big time. We’ve got a huge paper coming out (12 pages again with two ads and several reporters handling multiple stories), and it looks like Vanessa and I will be putting it together Tuesday night…to print it Wendesday.

We had our last meeting of the semester on Friday, and some of the writers hadn’t even started their articles for a couple reasons. Some haven’t had time, some of their sources have been sick or otherwise unavailable, some…well, this is a habit for some of ‘em. One of our writers (one of the ones writing two articles this time around) had to pass off an assignment to her twin sister because of her classload.

This happened last semester too, right before school let out for the year. To tell you the truth, I wonder why we’re doing this at all since nobody’s going to be on campus for a month…we put this thing out Wednesday and they all leave Friday.

Oh, well. Maybe they’ll grab a copy on their way out.

About two weeks ago, I was sitting in the University Relations office watching copies of Issue 6 roll out of the printer (Issue 7’s coming out next Wednesday, by the way). It was about 1 o’clock in the afternoon and I hadn’t had anything to eat that day, so I grabbed a stack of about 50 newspapers and headed to the Coffee Tavern.

I walked in and grabbed the wooden rack we put the paper in from beside the trashcan. When we’ve got a new issue out I like to position the rack in front of the entryway, so everybody that comes in can see it. Anyway, I slung the kiosk into place and dropped in my stack. As I walked away to get a turkey sandwich from the sub shop, I heard a girl from a booth full of girls yell “Oh, is that a new copy of the Eagle?”

I always think people somehow know I’m the editor…even though my picture’s never in the paper, and editing that newspaper is my one and only bit of campus involvement. Big man on campus I am not. Still, I turned around thinking this girl was addressing me.

She wasn’t, but I did see something that still makes me very happy. One of the friends at that table (I have a feeling they were nursing students, but I don’t really have anything to base that assumption on) had gotten up and was standing at the kiosk, counting out copies for each of the friends. “Get me one too!” another shouted from the table.

As I came back towards them toting my lunch, everyone at that table had their nose buried in our paper.

Whenever anyone has asked me about the paper this semester, or if I’ve been in a conversation where I could wriggle the topic toward the paper (honestly, I like talking about it), I’ve harped on and on about the our “new focus” and “honest-to-God news content,” about making it a “real news outlet.”

I could rattle on about all that stuff until the cows come home…but if nobody read the thing none of that hard work would matter. I’m extremely happy that the student body has embraced our paper the way it has. It makes me feel like all our (mine, Vanessa’s, and our awesome staff’s) efforts are worth it.

If anybody from UC’s reading this–thank you.

As soon as school had started and all the staff was in town, I sent out an email informing everyone about our first staff meeting, to be held that Friday at 1pm in the main lounge of the Geary Student Union. Thursday night, I typed up the meeting agenda in a nice newspapery Courier font and printed out a couple copies for Vanessa and I.

We met in the lounge before the meeting, going over my notes and speculating about things. How many people would show up? Would anyone respond to the ad we’d put on the campus email system for new staffers? Would we get all of our writers from last semester? Would they be willing to do the extra work our plan would require? Would deadlines be a problem? We didn’t know.

Eventually the writers showed up. By about 5 minutes after, we had everybody. We picked up two new writers, neither had written a news story before.

The reporters responded positively to the new format, even if they wouldn’t get a story in every issue (since we were only putting out 4 pages instead of 8). They assured Vanessa and I they were ready. The meeting was a success and we all left feeling energized about the semester ahead of us.

After talking to our writers we went and saw Andy, our adviser in the University Relations office. We wanted to run all the changes by him now that we had the writer’s support.

To our surprise, he didn’t seem to care as much about the budget as we did. He said we could go ahead and put out 8-page papers twice a month, try and sell some ads, and just worry about funding when we had to. Music to our ears.

At the deadline the next week, things started looking like a repeat of the previous semester. Journalists, by nature, are procrastinating creatures. Our staff was no exception.

When I was a staff writer, I’d done the same thing (waiting until the night before deadline to start the piece, emailing it in a couple days late with apologies to Leah). The only difference was that now, we didn’t have a lot of time to play with. This would become a recurring problem.

Eventually, though, all the articles came in, Vanessa edited them, and I laid out the pages and got the issue printed. It flew off the stands.

So here’s where we are now: we’ve put out six issues of The University of Charleston Eagle to great acclaim, including one special 12-page “Finance Issue,” inspired by the US economic crisis. Students love the new format, so do professors, so does the university’s staff.

We’ve covered “real news” without any problems from the administration, ran articles featuring interviews with the school’s highest officials.

We’ve got a new sports reporter, and even a staff photographer. Our less experienced writers are getting much better thanks to Vanessa’s feedback and editing talents. We’ve still got problems.

Deadlines are still a big problem. There hasn’t been an issue where Vanessa and I haven’t sat up waiting on articles to come straggling in to fill the pages. I’ve pulled near-all-nighters every single time.

Sometimes our reporters don’t turn in enough copy, don’t get enough information to write a story big enough for the subject. Sometimes they do email interviews instead of phone or face-to-face interviews (which I’ve told them time and again not to do).

Sometimes the angles are wrong. Sometimes they spell names wrong, and we’ve had at least one misquote.  Bad information’s made it in too, and we’ve left important information out. I’ve made errors in headlines and in layout, I messed up a whole paragraph in my Obama victory story.

We’ve had difficulties going to print on time, too. We’ve tried and tried to get Andy a copy of the paper a day before it goes to print, but it’s never worked out for a variety of reasons (broken printer, late articles, etc.).

Once the printer was so broken for so long that we had to outsource to the UPS Store. That was the day we were advertising an Anne Barth rally featuring WV first lady Gail Manchin, former first lady, presidential candidate, and now Secretary of State appointee Hillary Clinton–and a surprise visit from US Senator Robert C. Byrd. That was frustrating to say the least.

And that’s it, that’s what you need to know to see where I’m coming from. I’m really enjoying my stint as editor and I’ll be sad to give it up. Until then,  I’ll be blogging about my experiences. Maybe I’ll entertain some of you people out there in the interwebs. Maybe I’ll give hope to some other struggling student editor. I’m doing this for catharsis, though, an exercise in very public whining. Any positive side effects are unintentional and flattering.

Vanessa and I produced one issue the spring Leah left, a way for her to slowly hand over the reigns and give us a safety net (an experienced hand hanging around). With that issue, we provided a sort of “trailer” for what was to come.

Leah had steered The Eagle toward becoming a magazine. Magazine writing was Leah’s forte, the kind of stuff she enjoyed. Her reasoning was good: college kids don’t read newspapers, they respond better to magazines and magazine-style writing. The paper was also working on a once-a-month print schedule, and she figured it was too difficult to run a real news publication with that kind of cycle (and she was right about that). Under her leadership The Eagle was filled with columns, entertainment reviews, Homeric poem parodies, and a little bit of sports and campus news. Our first issue ran with only a couple reviews in it, the finale of the Homeric parody, and lots of bad graphic design (my fault).

Over the summer, Vanessa and I talked and talked about our plans for The Eagle. We decided that in order to accomplish our vision, in order to make our paper a real news outlet, several things would have to be accomplished.

1. Change the content. No more reviews would be published (unless we were desperately in need of copy), no more parodies (which relieved Vanessa, the pseudonymed author of the epic poem). Most importantly of all, no more columns about how hard it is to leave mommy and daddy and strike out on your own. Vanessa and I wanted news and nothing but news. We just hoped everyone else would share our enthusiasm.
2. Change the philosophy. When I worked on UCOTM, we functioned as a PR machine (one professor dubbed it “propaganda,” but I think that may be too harsh). We felt that our program was too new to report any real news, point out any of the school’s flaws. Looking back, I think we were too timid. I mean, for goodness sakes, we submitted ourselves to prior review by the university’s public relations office before sending our tape off to the television station…even though the school provided no funding whatsoever to the program, besides letting us borrow video gear long-term from the AV department. When I decided to take over as editor of The Eagle, I vowed to never submit so willingly. No matter what, Vanessa and I agreed that our newspaper would report the news, good or bad.
3. Change the production schedule. You can’t cover news when your paper only comes out once a month…so let’s bring the thing out twice a month. That posed some budget problems, so we decided to just cut the paper in half (4 pages instead of 8). Everything would equal out.
4. Change the design. The Eagle had looked the same for as long as we’d known it.–curly fonts with a picture of our school mascot (a golden eagle named MoHarv). It looked pretty good, but I wasn’t crazy about it.  I drew up a new banner in InDesign (recently purchased with some student loan money and installed on my new laptop), black and spartan. MoHarv disappeared and was replaced by the university logo.  The curly fonts were replaced by big block letters. It was a no-nonsense masthead, and a perfect reflection of our new philosophy.

I sent out an email over the campus system to our staff, making sure they were all on board with this new strategy. A couple reporters had problems–and both soon became too busy to work for us anymore. By and large, though, everyone was supportive and excited.