Similar challenges and headaches face advisers everywhere By Jim Killam
One of the people on my College Media Advisers e-mail list asked members to name the biggest issues facing student newspaper advisers this year. Here are the resulting top five, followed by my take on each:
1. The Role of Adviser: administrative attitudes that advisers should be "editors" at student newspapers, which: 1) invites legal liability and 2) holds advisers professionally accountable for mistakes (neither legal nor ethical) made by student editors.
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This one never goes away. Prior review has been deemed illegal at state universities. We deem it unethical for any adviser at any college newspaper. College Media Advisers, the group to which Maria and I belong, has instituted an Adviser Advocacy Program to offer national help for members facing this and other legal and ethical pressures from administrators.
Briefly, here are some arguments against prior review:
- Prior review by anyone other than students makes the university liable for the newspaper's content.
- As a state employee, my requiring students to show me stories before publication would be no different legally than if the university president or the governor reviewed the stories. That's censorship -- and that basic issue gets lost even by well-meaning professional journalists who have written opinion pieces opposing student press freedom.
- Students learn the most when they have the freedom to succeed or fail on their own (with support, of course, from the adviser). There is no better way to teach responsibility than to give it. Just ask any Northern Star alum from the past 30 years.
2. Retention: the ongoing challenge of retaining a quality staff in the face of inadequate stipends and the complications of students' academic and personal lives.
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Adding to that challenge this year was a fantastic job market for new grads. Several Northern Star editors were hired away by suburban daily newspapers months before they graduated.
3. First Amendment Law: interpretations and changes in law which: 1) threaten to weaken student reporters' access to campus police and student court records and 2) may cite Hazelwood with greater frequency in cases involving college media.
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No major problems at NIU this year in this area, although the Kentucky State court decision represents an ominous cloud on the horizon for all college media. The ruling held that the Supreme Court's 1988 Hazelwood decision, which effectively allows administrative censorship of high school publications, also can be applied to college publications. If the Kentucky decision stands, we're all in trouble.
4. New Technology: effectively incorporating Web technology into the daily operations of student newspapers and recruiting staff skilled in building and maintaining online student media Web sites.
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This summer, the Star will upgrade its Web site from top to bottom. The most noticeable change will be improved archives.
5. Ethics: inspiring students toward responsible and quality journalism in an environment of "tabloid" ethics and growing media mediocrity.
I've heard other advisers complain about their students' ethical lapses. I saw it first-hand last October when I taught an ethics workshop at the National College Media Convention. An alarming number of students said they'd be willing to accept free trips or gifts in exchange for a story, or lie or misrepresent themselves to sources. Some failed to recognize obvious conflicts of interest.
I'm proud to say, though, that this year's Star news staff ranked, collectively, among the most ethical people I've ever been around. Ethics are and will continue to be a large part of our staff training each semester. We try to minimize the number of situations that catch editors and reporters completely by surprise.