Journalism 101
At first glance the students’ position was baffling. After all, they staffed a citywide daily newspaper and the only TV station in town. Here was a story they understood in their bones like no story they were likely to cover in their professional careers. They wanted to make a statement with pickets, but they could say so much more by being journalists!
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So here’s our prejudice. The best young journalists don’t go into the business out of a passion to process data or to munch free canapes when restaurants open. Elusive, unfathomable, and perhaps apocryphal as the truth may be, it’s a grail that’s worth the quest. And when young reporters are obsessed with revealing it it’s more important to keep this spirit strong than to rub their noses in the reasons why in the real world their strongest convictions will end up spiked.
Because of the Christmas holiday, NU’s Daily Northwestern, which is distributed throughout Evanston, did not comment on this matter until January. But an editorial soon appeared taking Alson’s side. This editorial invoked the hoary phrase “impressionable teenagers” and argued that “condom use should be taught to students in a tasteful way.” It concluded that Alson’s one mistake was not to have replaced the ad with “a responsible, informative message about condom use.”
Cauvin tells us, “College students hate their college papers. Most of the letters we print are critical of us. I said, ‘Heather, if 20 people wrote letters saying “How can this paper condone censorship?” we’d probably print every one of them. It’s not a question of us suppressing a viewpoint.’”
First send it to us so we can read it, we said. Send us everything you have. Johnson had called looking for insights, but we smelled a story. Next we called Landy. Blindsided, she didn’t know what she should say. She admired the Daily; she wanted to write for the Daily; she didn’t want to burn any bridges in the Reader.
Cytrynbaum went on, “Heather called me terrified. She said, ‘Oh my God, I don’t have a career yet–but it’s over. He seemed nice, but he could write anything he wants. I have no control.’
