

I was a college newspaper advisor - trevin
http://www.jeffpearlman.com/i-was-a-college-newspaper-advisor/

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jawns
Just in case you aren't familiar with Jeff Pearlman:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Pearlman>

Former SI writer. His expose of baseball player John Rocker shook up the MLB
world at the turn of the century. He's since written a bunch of sports
biographies that have sold very well.

He also wrote this, of interest to Hacker News readers:

[http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/21/pearlman.online.civili...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/21/pearlman.online.civility/index.html)

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awwstn
In different context, the school could have brought this PR-focused individual
on staff the right way.

Having a master's in journalism myself, I have much faith in the value of pure
journalism, but also little faith in the idea of pure journalism being
inherently sustainable (financially).

To kick an experienced, passionate journalist off the paper staff is
ludicrous, and so is the idea of censoring the paper to show the school only
in a positive light. However, a PR/consulting professional could provide much
value to a group of young students who are pursuing an industry that will
likely be quite harsh to them.

Understanding how ads work, learning how to build a personal brand and
learning about other industries that seek similar skills to those of a
journalist are three things that come to mind.

Many working journalists and journalism professors I've encountered have a
highly negative view of PR – calling it the "dark side." Many of them entered
a job market years ago where it was far more feasible to get a job at a
newspaper and climb to larger and larger papers until you have a solid career
– today the more likely path is one of repeated layoffs, shutdowns and
underpaid contract work.

In my mind, these two professors could run this paper as a team very
effectively. The business-minded PR professional could help the paper work
toward financial independence and help students better understand the current
career landscape, while the OP could teach pure journalism and stand up every
time the former individual tries to cut out an article that reflects poorly on
the university.

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brokentone
I can't access the website (WP DB error), but reading some of these comments
seems to give the gist that he's complaining about being a prior-review
publication that the school administration decided was a PR vehicle of the
school.

It was the same thing for me as a student, I was pursuing a journalism degree
at my school, and gave 5 years of blood, sweat and tears to my paper as Photo
Editor, News Editor, and Editor in Chief. We had a very high degree of
oversight where we could not do stories that could reflect poorly on the
school in any possible way.

Legally this is actually questionable as the money we received from the school
was actually from student funds, similar to our ASB, so we technically worked
for the students, not the school. Further, being a prior-review and PR paper,
means the school approves of everything we write, which opens them up to libel
issues if anything slips through.

This made it very, very hard for me to get a decent journalism education. A
lot of journalism is about the (attempted) presentation of two sides--often in
college it's students vs administration, city vs school. And when they decide
we're not covering an issue because it's too hot, or we only present a
rewritten PR release, I'm only learning how to write content-farm content. And
don't even think about starting an underground paper, you'd get thrown out of
school. My school really handicapt my possible journalism career which I
really learned out on my internship. Luckily I built my own tech career and
fell back on that and now run tech for a news company.

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betawolf33
I think he hits on what's really the issue, but then gets distracted. The
college wanted a PR publication, not a truly independent newspaper.

Given that they paid the printing costs (I'm not sure if this was always the
case, but it was at the start of the venture), I guess it's up to them if they
want to control it like that.

What doesn't seem right is them telling him that his later independant paper
can't 'compete' with their PR mag. So long as they're not funding it, it's not
their concern.

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rada
_Given that they paid the printing costs, I guess it's up to them if they want
to control it like that._

Students paid the printing costs (or, on students' behalf: their parents,
taxpayers, or private donors).

~~~
chc
This is essentially the same argument as "You can't arrest me — I'm the one
who pays you." It's facile and will not get you far in the real world.

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rada
"You can't arrest me, I pay you" is facile in the legal context of individual
rights vs. the common good. This is, in fact, the opposite - suppressing the
common good (loosely, freedom of the press) for individual gain. I don't see
how it's "essentially the same argument" at all.

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terrycb
"What if prospective students, taking a campus tour, pick up the Touchstone
and see a column about crappy food or bad policies?"

The prospective students would know that they were visiting an institution
that values the free expression of ideas and criticism, over the college's
marketing image.

~~~
fusiongyro
Students don't choose colleges by their food or policies anyway.

~~~
rpmcb
you'd be surprised.

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maaaats
I'm working in a student newspaper, where we are 50+ people working 12-20
hours a week. It's very fulfilling, social and fun to see that we can actually
achieve something. I recommend everyone who has the chance to join their local
one.

And as a CS student it's nice to meet people outside engineering, like
humanities, psychology, medicine etc. Fun with a heterogeneous clique.

~~~
danoc
As another CS major working at a college newspaper, I agree! Are you the web
developer? Shoot me a message.

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maaaats
(Can't message you, feel free to send me a mail on the address in my profile):

No, I'm not really the web developer. Atm I'm working on a web-app that allows
the journalists to log in and collaborate on articles, see the status on this
issue's articles, export them to inDesign and some other book-keeping.

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cafard
Good grief. I know nothing about Manhattanville, and at this point not much
about student journalism--my own days were long ago, and the offspring has
graduated and no longer does it.

However, a) I don't think we had a faculty advisor back when; there was a
board with faculty on it that picked out the editor from among self-nominated
candidates, but that was about the level of involvement the faculty had.
Writing, editing, layout, all that institutional knowledge was handed down
student to student.

And b), the notion that the student paper can serve a college's PR purposes
strikes me as silly. Before I went to college, I saw one copy of of the
newspaper where I later worked, and I was already signed up. I guess we saw a
couple of the publications from my son's school, but it had no effect on his
desire to attend it. And, though family loyalty is a good thing, and I'm proud
of his work, I really didn't see many of the issues he worked on--half a dozen
from four years.

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jordo37
Stories like this make me feel so LUCKY to have gone to both a high school and
a university with excellent, nationally recognized publications. I learned
more about writing, design, inter-office politics, management issues and how
to balance a busy life than I had in class up to those points in my life. I am
who I am today because of student journalism, more than perhaps anything
except my parents.

My school (The University of Virginia - Wahoowa) is going through a change
right now moving to digital distribution and less frequent daily issues. I
think they team is doing a great job from the little I have heard as an alum,
but I would miss the feeling and pressures that we went through when I was
there.

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edw519
Hi Jeff. I hope you read this.

Why don't you just look at this experience as something that had to happen to
set you on the path where you're really needed...

You took on an unpaid overworked responsibility to help 15 people and it
didn't work out.

Why not use that same energy and love of journalism to help a lot more people
on-line. For example, can you engineer a way to help us hackers write better?
Believe me, we need it.

Perhaps you can come to Hacker News and help us in some fashion. You can reach
hundreds of thousands of us, we'll double your pay, and you won't have to
drive and hour and a half to pick up the paper. I imagine someone here can
figure out how to push those bits anywhere you want while you sleep.

Don't let this speedbump become a roadblock. 86 that anger and find a better
outlet for that love.

~~~
repdetec
*write <i>more</i> better

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cykod
I'd say this captures it: "Our Mission"
<http://mvilletouchstone.com/?page_id=171>

~~~
austenallred
It looks like this page has been taken down?

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itsybitsycoder
I think that's the joke. "Our Mission", then a whole lot of nothing. So, they
have no mission.

~~~
austenallred
Ah. *whoosh

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eertami
If the University itself is what pulls the strings of the student media, then
it is not free to be the student media. You need independence, the freedom to
criticise the administration.

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danso
I worked in school publications since I was a freshman in highschool all the
way through college...I was very lucky to be at schools where the papers were
well-respected and independent...in high school, even, it was considered one
of the "cool" things to be involved in, and non-newspaper kids would come hang
out all the time (it helped that I installed a N64 with Goldeneye in our staff
lounge when I was a senior).

That said, scholastic journalism has always been a tricky issue...while they
do have advertising, they still take in some part of student fees and school
resources, and so the administration will always feel they have a right to
intervene.

And the fact that the exciting part of journalism is about exposing misuse of
power and coverups...well, you can see the conflict of interest that an
administration has when sponsoring any kind of journalism on campus grounds.
With journalism dying as a professional career, these campus newspapers (which
are bleeding ad revenue) become only more dependent on the administration,
which will inevitably lead to more control of the student press.

Even if journalism is no longer a viable career, I hope that campus newspapers
continue as a real option for students to participate it, if only as a place
to learn. My high school advisor was absolutely ruthless in his critiques of
our work, such that some students would break down in tears during his
hilarious (if you weren't the target) read-throughs of the just printed issue.
Looking back, the high school journalism program was the only time in high
school where our scholastic writing had real consequences, and I count myself
lucky to have gone to a school that valued civic education over worrying about
being embarrassed by student journalists.

~~~
spc476
Even though I'm a programmer, I did take journalism in high school, and worked
as a humor columnist for my college newspaper.

In high school, the paper was fully funded by advertising. As such, each
student who worked on the paper was responsible for selling a certain amount
of advertising each quarter, with your grade depending upon it (no, really! I
could have been writing on the level of Normal Mailer, yet if I sold no ads,
_at best_ I could expect a D- (in the US, that's the lowest passing grade)). I
was there to write, not to sell (and hell, I never complained about the
stories I had to write, having gotten stuck with stuff no one else wanted to
write about). It took an intervention by my mom to get me out of that class.

Now, I can understand the the need for advertising, but to force grades based
upon money raised, especially seeing how it's not the primary purpose of the
class? Drama class (yes, I was also a drama geek in high school) also relied
upon advertising (in the program bills, plus the occasional fund raiser) but
grades there weren't dependent upon the amount of money raised, nor was
everybody expected to sell (or at least the drama teacher realized that for
some people (ahem) their skills lied elsewhere (in my case, accounting)).

College was a bit different. I'm not sure if there was a journalism major, and
working on the newspaper was open to anyone willing to work. I only got
involved because I had time to kill on Wednesdays, and all I did was write a
humor column (<http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/murphy/>) and it
ended because the paper ended in a major scandal, involving student funding
and an inappropriate relationship with the student government (which itself
was mired in a huge scandal, where the President resigned somewhat
suspiciously, along with the Senate Speaker; then the Judicial branch declared
the recently held elections invalid, and the Senate responded by starting
impeachment proceedings against the Justices---nice to see college was
preparing them for life in the US government).

The newspaper tried to go it alone, off campus (and by taking all the
equipment from the former on-campus office to the new off-campus office) but
it folded in less than a year. I think it took over a decade before a new
newspaper (new name even) started.

So yes, I did learn quite a bit working for a high school and college
newspaper. I just don't think I learned anything related to journalism though.

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TannerLD
The paper's website: <http://mvilletouchstone.com/>

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kylelibra
Anyone have a mirror?

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trevin
Google has it cached:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0BKpgOg...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0BKpgOgDrYoJ:www.jeffpearlman.com/i-was-
a-college-newspaper-advisor/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

~~~
kylelibra
Thanks! Not sure why my original comment was downvoted, but whatever.

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cinquemb
"It was about mediocrity."

Welcome to college :D

