To what degree should readers trust a newspaper? In our era of bloggers and Twitter, when any guy with an iPhone can break news or comment on it, it’s too tempting to think the pros don’t matter — that the news will out and the source is just branding.
And to what degree should readers trust a college newspaper? After all, the job there is harder: not only are a college paper’s writers and editors students — learning the trade on the job — but the staff is part of the community it covers. A victim of a campus crime may also be an editor’s roommate; reporters take classes that could become the site of the latest microaggression scandal. Intimacy can be the enemy of objectivity.
To tell a full story, reporters may have to publish ugly truths about people they know. College journalists must be doggedly committed to running hard stories; they must have faith that publishing those stories can build and strengthen a community, that there is an inherent good in the dissemination of facts and untiring investigation of the pat stories a school likes to tell itself.
That’s the hard task before college journalists. But college newspaper readers — that’s you and me — have a hard task of our own. We are the beneficiaries but also the judges of the newspaper, and we have to take both those roles seriously.
We owe it to college journalists to treat them as professionals, not students — to expect that their integrity and ambition will not be hindered by their dual roles. We have to determine when reporting is fair and thorough, when it gets to the heart of life on Grounds. We must demand more than University boosterism.
(Let’s start here: the University is overhauling its cyber systems after an attack by Chinese hackers, and everyone with a U.Va. email address has been affected. Where are the stories on who the hackers were, how they got in and all the havoc — from silly delays when the technically-challenged struggled to change their passwords to any real losses of data — the attack has wrought?)
But we also have to buy into a newspaper’s premise: that readers deserve to know about the world they live in and that the newspaper will deliver stories more probing, more devastating and more moving than that guy on the street with his iPhone would provide. We should trust that The Cavalier Daily’s staff is committed — every day, if only twice weekly in print — to full and honest reporting, and that what we read is always the product of a good-faith effort to deliver on that commitment. What we should judge is how well the delivery is carried off.
Together, as readers, we have to figure out when The Cavalier Daily’s reporters have earned the trust we’ve given them and when they have fallen short.
And my job is to represent you, the readers, as we plumb these questions together. It is somewhat unusual for a college newspaper to have an ombudsman, a public editor. By pulling me in and giving me this space to explore, criticize and ask and answer questions, The Cavalier Daily is asking a lot of both itself and its readers. It’s asking to be no different from the pros. A paper with an ombudsman opens itself to criticism and thus promises to be worthy of the thought its readers spend on criticizing.
I’ve worked as a journalist professionally and as a student, and I’m very content musing on and criticizing — and thus promoting — college journalism. But I can’t do this job well alone. I want to hear your reactions and questions when you read the paper. Write to me. Let’s demand that The Cavalier Daily win our full trust.
Julia Fisher is the Public Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com or on Twitter at @CDPublicEditor.
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