What distinguishes U.Va. from those other schools? Is it only a matter of time before activists call for Jefferson’s throat here, too?
Most colleges, like U.Va., don’t have more than one daily newspaper. So while weeklies, magazines or other campus news outlets offer some competition, it’s clear which publication serves as the campus’ paper of record. At U.Va., that honor and responsibility falls to The Cavalier Daily.
With student protests gripping the University of Missouri, Yale and now other schools across the country, it’s hard not to ask what lessons to draw from all the turmoil.
Some readers believe there’s a clear line between gossip and serious coverage; I don’t.
To make the most of its digital platforms and to justify the decision to focus on them, The Cavalier Daily should be offering online content that cannot exist in print. Undoubtedly, something is lost when paper is abandoned.
A strong slate of guest columns also helps cement a newspaper’s role as a hub of public discourse. If your friend has written a column in today’s paper, you’re more likely to read and discuss it.
Running a newspaper, even in the Internet age, is not just a race; The Cavalier Daily shouldn’t sit a story out just because it doesn’t get there first. There are surely U.Va. students whose sole source of University news is The Cavalier Daily; they shouldn’t have to turn elsewhere to see important headlines about their school.
It’s also a newspaper’s job to explain, regardless of how unsavory the facts may be.
This week, The Cavalier Daily should have fulfilled its own demand for honest and robust interrogation of the rape culture stories and figures we expect to hear. Readers and journalists across the nation have expressed shock at the numbers the AAU report released, but those numbers still fit neatly into the narrative campus activists and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights have been hammering for years.
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.
