Clemson student newspaper doesn't run Watkins arrest story

No. It wouldn't run because they don't have a newspaper coming out and don't have a staff working right now. We're talking about fucking students. What's so hard to comprehend?

The tweeter is a student. He's not a beat writer except when he's playing that role for his student newspaper during the school year. It's unprofessional. It's also how many student newspapers work. They're not professional news organizations.

 

Do they have an adviser?

I know, an adviser can't tell them to run or not run something, or to Tweet or not Tweet something. But it's obvious these students need some guidance in this case.

 

I understand the print point you're making, Verse, but if they're going to tweet that snarky bullshit, they should provide the actual news to which it refers.

On a somewhat related note, my guess is that T-Rexes make terrible journalists. The typing's a bitch.

 

Sure. The tweeter could have linked to The State. Would that have appeased people?

Has anyone ever seen the entries (not winners) for Society of Professional Journalists contests? There's usually a handful of promising work and a whole bunch of miserable dreck. Toss away the top 10-20, most of which are in the Ivy League or extensions of top journalism schools, and the standards for student newspapers are really, really low.

This incident would be an outrage at a legitimate news organization. It's meaningless at a student newspaper. It doesn't matter if The Daily Tiger staff is full of homers or crappy journalists. It's a student newspaper. That people on staff wouldn't take it as seriously as professional journalists took their student newspapers shouldn't surprise anyone. Most of this staff, I'd imagine, has no future in professional journalism. A good portion probably isn't even interested in it.

 

Beat writers can post opinions?

Not at my place.

 

What is the news value in this story? Because grown adults enjoy watching teenagers run around with a ball for a few hours every weekend, this student should have his life paraded around in the newspaper? Is the story him breaking the law--plenty of college athletes break all sorts of laws all the time but don't get caught--or just the police catching citing him? If the latter, why is that much more newsworthy than the former?

The story will reach the public whether the student paper reports on it or not, because the media has decided that anything that's "public" information can be public. Rather than using police information to help those harmed by the state--the reason information is public in the first place--it uses it shame the accused and serve as an adjunct prosecutorial unit. If the student newspaper rightly wants to protest both a broken media system and a broken criminal justice system by not writing a story, what's the problem? It has nothing to do with being a homer--it has to do with being a responsible person.

 

Clemson doesn't have a j-school, for what it's worth. The Tiger News does have an advisor.

 

The majority of the pro beat writers I follow on Twitter opine on the various issue on their beats, be it a decision in the bullpen or the Tim Thomas Obama stuff.

It's slippery in terms of the old columnist/beat writer don't have an opinion divide. Different places might have different rules. Def. a topic of discussion in modern journalism and the Twitter world.

But I don't think its unheard of and if the news is reported and the kid thinks its much-ado-about-nothing I don't begrudge him for saying so.

 

In fairness, if you run one arrest you run them all. That's always how I've looked at it. So yeah if the kid got arrested that's newsworthy.

This is like arguing that you don't run DUI arrests because people drink and drive without getting caught all the time. Not a good argument.

 

It's not like arguing that at all. I would hope we can all agree that the underlying crime of possession of marijuana is just a teeny bit different than drinking and driving.

But, in any case, if you know someone was drinking and driving but didn't get caught, should you report it? If not, what public value is served in doing so if a person is arrested?

 

Its not the newspaper's job to decide what is an "important crime" and what is not. A crime is a crime. If you get arrested, you go in the police log. I know this might be different in different areas; we're a small shop. We get the log from every town we cover, we run the arrests. I've always been very comfortable with that because there's no judgment on our part.

 

Newspapers decide everyday which of the millions of events occurring over the previous 24 hours deserve mention. Why should crime be different? You're making a "judgment" by running all arrests. You can't simply absolve yourself from the consequences by creating a rule that makes your life easier.

Further, do you contact all the people that have been arrested? They've been accused of crimes, not convicted. Do they get to tell their side of the story? Or only the police (who may have arrested the person based on information they received from someone else)? It's shameful many newspapers treat these stories--even if just one line in a police log--with so little scrutiny given the impact they have on the subjects. I don't mean to aim all the ire at you--your shop's policy certainly isn't alone in the industry.