I was a college newspaper advisor

Just in case you aren't familiar with Jeff Pearlman:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Pearlman

Former SI writer. His expose of baseball player John Rocker shook up the MLB world at the turn of the century. He's since written a bunch of sports biographies that have sold very well.

He also wrote this, of interest to Hacker News readers:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/21/pearlman.online.civili...

In different context, the school could have brought this PR-focused individual on staff the right way.

Having a master's in journalism myself, I have much faith in the value of pure journalism, but also little faith in the idea of pure journalism being inherently sustainable (financially).

To kick an experienced, passionate journalist off the paper staff is ludicrous, and so is the idea of censoring the paper to show the school only in a positive light. However, a PR/consulting professional could provide much value to a group of young students who are pursuing an industry that will likely be quite harsh to them.

Understanding how ads work, learning how to build a personal brand and learning about other industries that seek similar skills to those of a journalist are three things that come to mind.

Many working journalists and journalism professors I've encountered have a highly negative view of PR – calling it the "dark side." Many of them entered a job market years ago where it was far more feasible to get a job at a newspaper and climb to larger and larger papers until you have a solid career – today the more likely path is one of repeated layoffs, shutdowns and underpaid contract work.

In my mind, these two professors could run this paper as a team very effectively. The business-minded PR professional could help the paper work toward financial independence and help students better understand the current career landscape, while the OP could teach pure journalism and stand up every time the former individual tries to cut out an article that reflects poorly on the university.

I can't access the website (WP DB error), but reading some of these comments seems to give the gist that he's complaining about being a prior-review publication that the school administration decided was a PR vehicle of the school.

It was the same thing for me as a student, I was pursuing a journalism degree at my school, and gave 5 years of blood, sweat and tears to my paper as Photo Editor, News Editor, and Editor in Chief. We had a very high degree of oversight where we could not do stories that could reflect poorly on the school in any possible way.

Legally this is actually questionable as the money we received from the school was actually from student funds, similar to our ASB, so we technically worked for the students, not the school. Further, being a prior-review and PR paper, means the school approves of everything we write, which opens them up to libel issues if anything slips through.

This made it very, very hard for me to get a decent journalism education. A lot of journalism is about the (attempted) presentation of two sides--often in college it's students vs administration, city vs school. And when they decide we're not covering an issue because it's too hot, or we only present a rewritten PR release, I'm only learning how to write content-farm content. And don't even think about starting an underground paper, you'd get thrown out of school. My school really handicapt my possible journalism career which I really learned out on my internship. Luckily I built my own tech career and fell back on that and now run tech for a news company.

I think he hits on what's really the issue, but then gets distracted. The college wanted a PR publication, not a truly independent newspaper.

Given that they paid the printing costs (I'm not sure if this was always the case, but it was at the start of the venture), I guess it's up to them if they want to control it like that.

What doesn't seem right is them telling him that his later independant paper can't 'compete' with their PR mag. So long as they're not funding it, it's not their concern.

"What if prospective students, taking a campus tour, pick up the Touchstone and see a column about crappy food or bad policies?"

The prospective students would know that they were visiting an institution that values the free expression of ideas and criticism, over the college's marketing image.

I'm working in a student newspaper, where we are 50+ people working 12-20 hours a week. It's very fulfilling, social and fun to see that we can actually achieve something. I recommend everyone who has the chance to join their local one.

And as a CS student it's nice to meet people outside engineering, like humanities, psychology, medicine etc. Fun with a heterogeneous clique.

Good grief. I know nothing about Manhattanville, and at this point not much about student journalism--my own days were long ago, and the offspring has graduated and no longer does it.

However, a) I don't think we had a faculty advisor back when; there was a board with faculty on it that picked out the editor from among self-nominated candidates, but that was about the level of involvement the faculty had. Writing, editing, layout, all that institutional knowledge was handed down student to student.

And b), the notion that the student paper can serve a college's PR purposes strikes me as silly. Before I went to college, I saw one copy of of the newspaper where I later worked, and I was already signed up. I guess we saw a couple of the publications from my son's school, but it had no effect on his desire to attend it. And, though family loyalty is a good thing, and I'm proud of his work, I really didn't see many of the issues he worked on--half a dozen from four years.

Stories like this make me feel so LUCKY to have gone to both a high school and a university with excellent, nationally recognized publications. I learned more about writing, design, inter-office politics, management issues and how to balance a busy life than I had in class up to those points in my life. I am who I am today because of student journalism, more than perhaps anything except my parents.

My school (The University of Virginia - Wahoowa) is going through a change right now moving to digital distribution and less frequent daily issues. I think they team is doing a great job from the little I have heard as an alum, but I would miss the feeling and pressures that we went through when I was there.

Hi Jeff. I hope you read this.

Why don't you just look at this experience as something that had to happen to set you on the path where you're really needed...

You took on an unpaid overworked responsibility to help 15 people and it didn't work out.

Why not use that same energy and love of journalism to help a lot more people on-line. For example, can you engineer a way to help us hackers write better? Believe me, we need it.

Perhaps you can come to Hacker News and help us in some fashion. You can reach hundreds of thousands of us, we'll double your pay, and you won't have to drive and hour and a half to pick up the paper. I imagine someone here can figure out how to push those bits anywhere you want while you sleep.

Don't let this speedbump become a roadblock. 86 that anger and find a better outlet for that love.

I'd say this captures it: "Our Mission" http://mvilletouchstone.com/?page_id=171

If the University itself is what pulls the strings of the student media, then it is not free to be the student media. You need independence, the freedom to criticise the administration.

I worked in school publications since I was a freshman in highschool all the way through college...I was very lucky to be at schools where the papers were well-respected and independent...in high school, even, it was considered one of the "cool" things to be involved in, and non-newspaper kids would come hang out all the time (it helped that I installed a N64 with Goldeneye in our staff lounge when I was a senior).

That said, scholastic journalism has always been a tricky issue...while they do have advertising, they still take in some part of student fees and school resources, and so the administration will always feel they have a right to intervene.

And the fact that the exciting part of journalism is about exposing misuse of power and coverups...well, you can see the conflict of interest that an administration has when sponsoring any kind of journalism on campus grounds. With journalism dying as a professional career, these campus newspapers (which are bleeding ad revenue) become only more dependent on the administration, which will inevitably lead to more control of the student press.

Even if journalism is no longer a viable career, I hope that campus newspapers continue as a real option for students to participate it, if only as a place to learn. My high school advisor was absolutely ruthless in his critiques of our work, such that some students would break down in tears during his hilarious (if you weren't the target) read-throughs of the just printed issue. Looking back, the high school journalism program was the only time in high school where our scholastic writing had real consequences, and I count myself lucky to have gone to a school that valued civic education over worrying about being embarrassed by student journalists.

The paper's website: http://mvilletouchstone.com/

Anyone have a mirror?

"It was about mediocrity."

Welcome to college :D