Lavery-log

As the features editor for my university’s newspaper, I do my best to come up with creative, engaging content. Since we have such a small staff, and since my main journalistic passion lies in writing, I usually end up writing a large portion of my section’s content.

But I still manage a team of about a dozen writers who aren’t exactly pillars of reliability. They are college students, after all.

This past semester, a student died in his dorm room. This kind of event always puts Sidelines into high gear. The death—determined by police to be the result of the student’s diabetes—was covered extensively on our front page and throughout news.

When something like this happens, though, I always hope to have a corresponding feature—an in-depth look at what happened.

Earlier that same semester, a female student was beaten nearly to death in her dormroom, allegedly by another student. I thought—I hope—I handled it well in my section. I was able to obtain exclusive interviews with the victim’s good friends (the people who had been waiting in the hospital with her day and night) as well as her parents. I was able to get information that the police refused to release to our paper or any media outlet.

But when this male student died, I assigned the story to someone else (a hard thing for me to do with an important story. I’m a bit possessive).

The writer was late on his deadline. I told him to write an in-depth piece, to talk to friends, dormmates and fellow students.

What he sent me, however, was a compilation of excerpts from the student’s MySpace page, on which he kept a detailed diary of his life. The excerpts were good. They were engaging. They showed that this student had a rough time during college, but that he was just beginning to find his place. His health, he wrote, had been improving. It made for a compelling feature.

But the writer wrote nothing, aside from a short introduction.

There was thirty minutes to the paper’s production deadline, and I had no more content. So I ran the story.

The next day, the paper’s Web site was inundated with angry responses. “This whole feature seems so out of place,” one student said. “All that’s been done is copying and pasting this guy’s Myspace and Facebook into the paper.”

“I’m kind of weirded out at the though of someone copying my blog posts and putting them in a newspaper,” another said. “That just makes me uneasy.”

“I guess it was his [the writer’s] decision to copy and paste Jeremy’s blog into the newspaper,” a family member said. “Since I just read here that someone else said it bothered him that his blog could be printed in a newspaper, it validated how exploited I felt, as a member of Jeremy’s family, when I saw this entire page in the paper today. Then I thought, well, he himself posted it on the Internet. But I don’t think his intent was the same as this article today.”

In my opinion, that family member was right. There was nothing illegal about republishing his public journal, but I literally felt haunted by my decision to allow this “article” to run in my section. It was lazy; it was slightly exploitative; it disregarded the feelings of his family members; it didn’t illuminate any newsworthy information.

On the upside, though, I’ve learned my lesson as an editor: be as clear as possible when communicating with writers about expectations for assignments; and when a story doesn’t meet your standards, just run AP.