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The student staffers at the Oregon Daily Emerald have ended their strike after winning three of their four demands. They will be entering into mediation with their board of directors next week to resolve the remaining issues.
As the Emerald staff noted on their blog, thirty-three student newspapers across the nation have published a joint editorial in solidarity with the strikers.
The entire editorial staff of the Oregon Daily Emerald, the University of Oregon student newspaper, went on strike yesterday morning.
The background to the strike is somewhat convoluted, but it has its origins in a power struggle between the paper’s student staff and its board of directors, a body that includes students, faculty, and others. In recent weeks, the board has moved to hire a non-student “publisher” to oversee the paper’s operations, and the process of filling the position has left the staff believing that their editorial independence has been compromised.
At a board meeting on Tuesday night, the Emerald staff demanded that the board rescind a job offer made to a candidate for publisher last month, that it open up a national search to fill the position, that it bar anyone who serves as publisher from being simultaneously employed by the university, and that it establish the publisher and the paper’s editor as “equals in the organization,” rather than granting the publisher supervisory power as the board had planned.
After the meeting, board chair Jeanne Long sent editor-in-chief Ashley Chase an email declaring that the board would not “be bullied and blackmailed,” and that an acceptance of the demands “would essentially dissolve the structure of the corporation.” At six o’clock the next morning the staff published what it said was “the last edition of the Emerald we will publish until the board meets the four demands,” and declared itself on strike.
The university’s student government, which provides a portion of the paper’s funding, has released a statement in support of the staffers’ demands, and the Emerald website reports that the board and staff will be meeting on Thursday morning in an attempt to resolve the dispute.
Update: The striking staff of the Emerald has a blog up. As they note, the newspaper’s board has published a non-student edition of the Emerald this morning, with editorial content drawn almost exclusively from the AP wire. We’ll be following this story as it develops, both here and on our twitter feed.
March 6 update: The Emerald staff has ended their strike, and is going into mediation with the board.
A fake news story claiming that herpes was being transmitted via beer pong on college campuses migrated from a student newspaper to a national student news service to local television to Fox News before coming to rest on the Colbert Report last night.
On February 11, the Ohio State University Lantern ran an article speculating that playing beer pong could transmit mononucleosis and herpes. That piece was picked up by the national campus media service UWire, inspiring similar stories at other campus papers. One of those stories, an article in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, added the false claim that the Centers for Disease Control consider “unprotected beer pong play … nearly as dangerous as unprotected sex.”
It was at about this time that the story made the leap from campus newspapers to local TV news, who — like the Daily Collegian — integrated “facts” from a humor article posted last July at BannedInHollywood.com, into their reporting. KNBC in Los Angeles not only passed on the claim that the president of Arizona State University is distributing germ-free beer pong cups in ASU’s dorms, it reprinted Banned In Hollywood’s fake CDC list of “safe pong” tips. Another station led with the tagline “it’s all fun and games until someone gets herpes.”
From local television, it was a short leap to Fox News, whose morning show Fox and Friends ran a segment in which the show’s anchors discussed the dangers of beer pong while playing beer pong with a doctor in a minidress, as can be seen in the Colbert Report clip.
A gay first-year student at Jacksonville State University in Alabama claims that he was rejected by the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity because of rumors about his sexual orientation. On one level, this is an unsurprising story. But on another, as Pam Spaulding notes, it’s very interesting indeed.
Steele Jackson says Pi Kappa Phi blackballed him when rumors that he was gay began to circulate, but chapter president Chris Stokes denies it, saying the frat doesn’t “discriminate based on … any kind of orientation.” In that, Stokes is following the mandates of the fraternity’s national body, which bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
So Jackson, a gay student at an Alabama state college, was willing to say so publicly. The president of the local chapter of the fraternity he pledged denied explicitly that the frat discriminates against gay pledges. And they both made their statements in an article in their campus newspaper.
As Spaulding says, “this particular story has a lot to offer in terms of observations about life in Red State America and the changes that are under way.”
Administrators at Harrisburg High School in Harrisburg, Illinois are requiring the school’s student newspaper to use courtesy titles such as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” when referring to faculty, staff, or members of the school board.
The move is a reaction to a December editorial that a school superintendent called “disrespectful to the principal in content and attitude.”
When newspaper staffers went to the school board to ask that the rule be overturned, senior Molly Williams said, “they basically came out and said that it was about content and that they didn’t like what we were writing.” Added Williams, an editor on the paper, “it’s almost like they can’t take constructive criticism well.”
The practice of using courtesy titles contradicts the Associated Press Stylebook, the standard reference for newspaper style.
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