Rarely does anyone fight the good fight and win; the good fight is, by its very nature, a losing one. This week at the University of Georgia, though, a group of students stood up for their rights as journalists, and it appears that their refusal to roll over in the face of censorship may pay off. So how, exactly, did the staff of the Red & Black, UGA’s independent student paper, go from walking out of their offices and starting a Twitter account to being written up in the New York Times in barely more than 24 hours?
The August 15 mass resignation and staff walkout, which included all of the Red & Black’s senior editorial staff, was prompted by a memo draft from the paper’s non-student board of directors, acquired by one of the paper’s editors. It outlined upcoming shifts in editorial policy, reportedly spearheaded by Red & Black publisher and board member Harry Montevideo, that included turning all final decision-making responsibilities over to Ed Morales, who had recently been promoted from Editorial Advisor to Editorial Director. Those decisions had previously been in the hands of student editors, with pre-publication input from Morales only if it were specifically requested by the students. That tradition dates back to at least 1980, when the Red & Black became a nonprofit corporation fully independent from the university.
The board, which consists of local businesspeople, news industry executives and at least one current University of Georgia journalism professor, has long been rumored to be unhappy with the somewhat adversarial relationship that the paper has with the university community that it covers. The memo draft outlined the ways in which that relationship would change going forward, including pressure to cover stories that show the university in a positive light, increased penalties for common errors and a move away from stories that expose people doing things that they shouldn’t be doing. (Which, essentially, is a move away from performing anything that resembles actual journalism.) Most important, though, was the stipulation that Morales and a newly hired staff of non-student professionals would have veto power and final approval before anything the students wrote reached the public. Suddenly, a paper that had been proudly student-run for decades had turned into a professional paper that simply took advantage of student labor.
At this point, I should admit my personal affiliations. I hold a journalism degree from the University of Georgia, and during my time in school, I was a contributor to the Red & Black, just as my father was before me. I had an incredible experience at UGA’s j-school, and the things that I learned in those classes and while writing the Red & Black are the reasons I’m employed today. Knowing the kind of journalism education that the paper’s student staff is currently receiving, it wasn’t surprising to watch them stand their ground when faced with censorship, nor was it surprising when UGA’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications issued a statement in support of their protest. What the R&B’s board planned to do is in diametric opposition to everything that the school teaches.
On the evening of August 15, the former staffers went about spreading the word. They set up a WordPress blog called Red & Dead, which contained a statement by former Editor-in-Chief Polina Marinova that detailed the staff’s reasons for resigning. Then came a Twitter account and Facebook page, which the former staffers shared with their friends and classmates through their personal Twitter and Facebook accounts. That evening, I heard about the walkout on Twitter from a member of the national sports media, also a UGA j-school alum.
By the next morning, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (a publication chock full of UGA journalism school grads) had picked up the story, followed throughout the day by the Huffington Post, Raw Story, Gawker, Poynter and eventually the New York Times and CNN. It took the students a little over 24 hours to have the nation’s attention. Meanwhile, the Red & Black’s board of directors was still struggling to pull together an official stance, apparently blindsided that student journalists might actually apply both their in-class lessons and social media skills to a real-world situation.
The story of how it happened only underlines something that the board members should have already known: pissing off journalists never serves your best interest. The University of Georgia’s journalism school is both large and prestigious, and all of its graduates who currently work in regional, national and international media probably remember what it was like to be a college kid, toiling away at the Red & Black. A lot of the journalists who covered the story, no matter where they went to school, likely received their first jobs at least in part based on their college clips. For all the cynicism within and about media, it seems that professional journalists still want to protect the people who have the opportunity to do things the right way, and they’re willing to to use their sometimes-enormous audiences to do it. Social media, as it so often does for otherwise small stories, only helped the students quickly coordinate the attentions and efforts of the people who would naturally be interested in making their stand into national news.
With attention, of course, comes pressure. With their first statement, which confirmed what they had wrested control of the paper from the students while simultaneously trying to dress up that decision in the most positive terms possible, the R&B’s board also announced that an open house would be held on August 17th at the publication’s office building for those interested in writing for the paper. Where I’m from, that sounds a whole lot like union busting, but apparently the board decided that it should double down on its quest for negative media attention by trying to bring in student scabs.
The staff-in-exile, buoyed by the media’s attention and support and still churning out editorial content for their own website from a local apartment, attended the open house in hopes of having its questions for the board of directors answered on the record. They had to wait through statements from two board members (who then proceeded to act like spoiled children and refuse to stay outside and listen to two statements by UGA alumni in support of the students) and one incident of possible publisher-on-student-reporter assault (video below, story here), but eventually, the former editors got answers to the questions that the board had previously dodged at all costs, and among them were a few important concessions.
During the meeting, Morales (who, by all accounts, wasn’t the architect of any of these changes) announced that he’d be moving back to his old job as editorial advisor. Ed Stamper, the author of the memo draft that spurred the walkout, apologized and tendered his resignation from the board of directors. Most importantly, the board backtracked on the stipulation that any professional staff member would have final approval over the editorial content that the students produce. Control of the paper had been returned to the students.
It isn’t a full win. Montevideo still has his job (and his almost $200k salary, the payment of which accounts for nearly a fifth of the Red & Black’s entire annual operating budget), despite the fact that he’s proven himself boorish and unconcerned with the details of responsible journalism, to say nothing of the fact that the the UGA NewSource 15 cameraman who he took to the ground in front of dozens of witnesses is reportedly considering pressing charges. The editors and reporters who wish to return to the paper will have to reapply to their old jobs instead of simply being reinstated like they rightfully should be. In that way, they’re still being punished for their journalistic integrity, which shouldn’t happen to journalists, particularly at a newspaper where the entire purpose is to train responsible, ethical journalists.
That problem, of course, gets to the heart of why so many people have taken an interest in this little paper in the first place: student papers serve a critical function. They give young reporters and editors a space to hone their journalistic judgment, acquire and test new skills and learn from their mistakes in a way that doesn’t cost them their jobs. Taking editorial control out of the hands of students and punishing them harshly for the errors that every student reporter makes only produces a generation of journalists that has no skills or curiosity beyond writing exactly what they’re told to write, when they’re told to write it.
While that’s arguably a marketable job skill in the current media landscape, it’s inarguably the type of training that’s bad for both journalists and everyday citizens who rely on the work of reporters and editors not only to bring them everyday news about the world about them, but also to act as a check on power that might otherwise be abused. In standing up to a source of power that threatened to quiet everything they might do, the students of the Red & Black unintentionally proved themselves to be impressive journalists as well as a brave group of college students.
