PressEthic

I think it’s pretty safe to say that a lot of us really cut our journalistic teeth on college newspapers. I did, and I was proud to be a part of the news team that, at its peak, included dedicated reporters, near-obsessed editors, competent copy-editors (that was a lot to ask for at the time), and photographers who did an amazing job given the technology they had to deal with. Some of us fell in love with journalism; others became disillusioned with the whole thing.

That’s the point, isn’t it? To test out journalism, and find out if the newspaper is home, hobby, or hell.

And I know for a fact my work was flawed. We all supplemented articles with facts found online, and sometimes citations were forgotten (or, worse, cut for space). We called our friends for quotes, or were satisfied when we were referred to press releases.

Then, those of us who were serious took the very few journalism classes offered, and passed advice to the incoming reporters. But in the meantime, when you have a freshman who has never done this before, and a copy editing team that is competent at its pinnacle, you’re going to have to accept that mistakes will be made

Slate discusses this. Today, any college paper can be found online. That means any mistake is made known to the whole world, rather than a bunch of 19-year-olds who only pick up the paper to read the incidents of crime.

And this isn’t all bad. Imagine if Jason Blair had undergone any scrutiny when he was a college reporter.

But the whole word can see your rookie mistakes. I mean, that’s daunting enough in this blog, where we have at least a feel for what we’re doing.

But Bryan Curtis really summed it up when he reflected on his college reporting days:

As for metaphors, I preferred tortured ones. An out-of-control student committee operated "like a water sprinkler"; spring break was a "runaway train"; fall registration an "April shower." I once began a column with a quote from the historian Frederick Jackson Turner—the only mystery being how many seconds elapsed between my hearing the quote in political science class and committing it to the printed page. It was one of my many acts of heroic transcription; the ethos of the college journalist being that if one is required to appear in class, then one should at least be able to get a column out it.

Curtis has another concern.

The newspaper is the scourge of the college president, his most relentless observer and his most vocal critic. On a respectable college newspaper, writing about the administration with anything other than lightly concealed disgust is tantamount to treason.

This is true; a good friend of mine won a dinner with our university’s president, and invited along three friends: myself, my former news editor, and a staff photographer. Since we had already graduated, Father could tell us what he really thought.

But that intimate, terrorize-the-administration attitude could be in danger, Curtis suggests.

The fear is not just humiliation in front of their future colleagues. The fear is that with the attention of big media, ambitious collegians may be tempted to skip ahead. They will put aside the date-rape and cafeteria stories and move too quickly into the dreariness of the "adult" world: COLA adjustments, forged National Guard documents, and so forth. The cherished intimacy of college journalism will give way to the partisan stew of the rest of it.

On a convenience level, I’m glad The Hawk and other college newspapers are online. But I share Curtis’s concerns.

After all, my reputation and the Hawk’s nature are on the line.