jb196605@ohio.edu
On the top of Ohio University's student-run newspaper, The Post, is the maxim, "The Independent Voice on Campus and in Athens." As a reporter for the publication, I'm often asked how "independent" the newspaper can be.
The answer is an ambiguous ... kind of.
The Post receives $38,000 in general fund dollars to help subsidize the salary of an advertising and graphics manager. The business manager, who also crunches numbers for The Post, the Athena Yearbook and other campus media, is paid through the Office of Student Affairs. All salaries (a whopping $20 a week for staff writers) are paid through advertising dollars. The newspaper has no faculty advisor and the university has no prior review.
But we are students at the university we cover. The Post Publishing Board, which chooses the editor in chief, includes E.W. Scripps School of Journalism professors. If I were ever sued ... well, have you ever heard the phrase, "You can't get blood from a turnip." When OU Communications and Marketing asks the newspaper to hold a story until a foreign donor could inform his country of the donation as is his custom, should the newspaper hold the presses? In that case, we did. Would a completely uninvolved paper like the Columbus Dispatch or the Cleveland Plain Dealer have made the same decision?
The student newspaper is not the only publication that tread this line. As mentioned in Chapter 5 of Moral Reasoning for Journalists, News Corps. reviews movies from 20th Century Fox all the time.
"Perceived conflicts of interest are much more difficult to manage, because no matter how hard a journalist works to mitigate perceived conflicts, critics will always seize upon those appearances to find fault." (p. 50)
The Post will always get complaints about being too "pro-university" or too critical of the administration. But those concerns — that line between conflict of interest and engaged journalism — aren't going away after graduation.
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