Newspaper Death Throes, Student Edition

Does the IDS use AP. I know some student papers don't, budgets and all.

 

Just saying: the IDS would have a better high ground to stand on if it didn't tell the two kids that they could pay their own way if they wanted to go. If you take a stand that you won't accept any coverage you cannot pay for, that's great. But to say college kids can dole out a grand of their (parents) cash and that's cool, you have trouble justifying what happened here.

 

The problem is that at any given time, there are probably hundreds of things the newspaper would like to cover but doesn't have the resources to do so.

So if you start covering the things that draw donation, money is now directly driving your coverage.

 

We didn't have AP art at my student paper and we always sent a photog on travel events. Yeah it would have been nice to have two reporters instead but that's not how it works.

Budgets are real. Not every writer that does NFL home games goes to the Super Bowl. Is it fair? No. But that's life.

Far as paying their own way there have been plenty of discussions about employed writers paying their own way, sleeping at friends houses to save the paper the hotel fee, etc. Most of us balk at it because its enabling the bean counters, but there's always someone zealous enough to want to be seen at the big event. But its a common question.

Donations to cover travel is much less common.

 

That seems like an stretch at best. They're not covering something that draw donations, they're getting donations to cover something the were aiming to cover anyway.

It also implies that money has no role in driving real-world coverage, which seems asinine. I cover HS football more than golf, mostly becuase of interest, which has a direct correlation to papers sold and money.

 

Absolutely true.

 

Romenesko is paying attention.

http://jimromenesko.com/2012/03/14/ids-returns-money-raised-for-staffers-to-attend-ncaa-tourney/#more-11097

This just got real.

 

As somebody who owes everything to his college paper, and who has known so many IDS writers well, I realized how important it was for those writers to get a chance to travel to Portland. When I saw the donation drive, I thought nothing of it and chipped in.

But I see where the editor is coming from. The issue, to me, is that there could be the appearance of a conflict of interest. People who clearly are fans of the Indiana basketball team gave money, and many of them listed their names on a public web site. That's a much more direct connection than advertising. Yes, advertisers pay for the paper to exist -- and IU athletics itself is an important advertiser for the newspapers in Bloomington -- but that's a relationship built with the business departments of those newspapers. Advertiser X isn't calling Joe Reporter to say, "Hey, I paid for that cheeseburger you just ate so write nice about my favorite player." And knowing many of the people who donated, I know that they wouldn't do anything of the sort, either. It's just that the paper, by taking the money, would give skeptical readers a reason to have doubts about the sanctity of the coverage.

If student newspapers are going to continue to be the robust operations they were even 10 years ago, they'll probably need to rely on donations. But those donations should be dumped into a general fund and dispersed by the editor as he or she sees fit.

 

Ethics are good to have, but most of the time, it's a term used by publishers and editors to screw the rank-and-file while they have low ethical standards as to their own conduct.

 

Interestingly, Boston University's Daily Free Press does not have the same reservations as the Indiana folks: http://t.co/zxY3EwNI