Two stories in one week–the first from the College of San Mateo, a Bay Area community college and the second from the University of George’s Atlanta campus–may not make a war, but anyone concerned with the future of the free press, should take heed of these warning shots aimed at controlling and even silencing student press freedoms.
Last week the College of San Mateo canceled all four journalism courses whose students produce the 84-year old San Matean student newspaper, The Palo Alto Daily Post reported.
College President Michael Claire cited budget cuts and low enrollment in the courses as the reason for the cancellation of the classes, but Kayla Figard, the paper’s executive editor last year told the Daily Post that the administration had issues with the way the paper reported some budget cuts at the school, which led to some tense meetings between the student editors and some administrators.
Claire said the newspaper didn’t have to close, suggesting that students could continue the newspaper by starting a club. Meanwhile a petition has been started by a student, and Ed Remitz, the San Matean‘s faculty adviser announced his retirement following the cancellation of four of the five journalism classes he taught.
Read the rest of the story: College Axes Journalism Classes via the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.
At the University of Georgia in Atlanta, Polina Marinova, editor in chief of the student newspaper Red & Black, resigned and walked out with the newspapers’ top editors, design staff and photo staff and reporters. The walk-out was in response to changes in the newspaper’s editorial policies and the loss of student autonomy in making editorial decisions, according to a report last week in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
The student newspaper has been independent from the Athens university since 1980 and is self-funded. Many of the university’s journalism students work at the paper for real-world experience coinciding with classwork.
But an editorial board that oversees the newspaper is at the center of the conflict, Marinova wrote in her resignation letter.
“For years, students have had final approval of the paper followed by a critique by the adviser only after articles were published,” Marinova wrote. “However, from now on, that will not be the case. Recently, editors have felt pressure to assign stories they didn’t agree with, take ‘grip and grin’ photos and compromise the design of the paper.”
Here’s a link to the memo from the editorial board that admonishes the student journalists to find a “balance” between “GOOD” (human interest pieces directly relating to the UGA student audience) and “BAD” (which the memo defines as “Content that catches people or organizations doing bad things. I guess this is ‘journalism’.”). This was followed by a final note to “[i]f in question, have more GOOD than BAD.”
Here’s a link to the student journalists’ protest paper Red and Dead
One Comment
Actually, the news in California community colleges is even worse than this. We have learned that newspaper classes have been cancelled at five colleges, though one college –San Jose City College– has received a reprieve to try and bring its numbers up. I chronicle a worsening condition in my blog post at http://richesmusings/Wordpress.com. We could see as many as a third of the community college student publications disappear. I sure hope I am wrong.
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