NEWSPAPER editors must allocate finite resources, such as reporters and page space, in a way that allows them to best cover news. That makes deciding what qualifies as news a major part of an editor's job.
The Cavalier Daily's editors faced such a decision a week and a half ago. Amey Adkins, a fourth-year student who is black, returned to her car Wednesday, Sept. 8, and found it vandalized with a racial epithet written on the front hood. The Cavalier Daily heard about the incident and decided it did not merit a story.
That initial decision is debatable, but I am not going to question it. Editor-in-Chief Chris Wilson talked to Adkins the night of the incident and thoroughly discussed it with other Cavalier Daily editors the next day. They concluded a simple vandalism, even one with racial overtones, did not have enough news value for an article, Wilson told me. They gave the matter serious consideration and chose to wait and see what the reaction on campus would be rather than risk aggravating already sensitive race relations. This was a legitimate approach to take.
Since that decision was made, information about the vandalism has appeared in The Cavalier Daily twice. Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Lampkin sent the paper a letter that was published Friday, Sept. 10, in its original form as a quarter-page ad. Adkins wrote a guest column a week later describing the incident and challenging the administration not to remain quiet on racial issues.
I find it somewhat admirable The Cavalier Daily allowed Lampkin's letter and Adkins' column to appear as prominently as they did. The newspaper's editors could have restricted both to the Letters to the Editor section. But if Lampkin's letter and Adkins' column were important enough for the Cavalier Daily to run, then why has no news article about the incident shown up on the front page?
The Cavalier Daily had justification for not finding the vandalism newsworthy when it first happened. The incident's newsworthiness changed when Lampkin's letter was published. The University administration publicly acknowledged what happened and declared it would not tolerate "such acts of anger and hatred." That statement and Adkins' column raise legitimate questions about whether the administration is doing enough to address what seems to be an ongoing problem.
Once The Cavalier Daily received Lampkin's letter, the editors should have assigned a reporter to write an article about the incident. The vandalism itself was a minor story (I'm sure Adkins would disagree with me on that point), but it became important when the letter placed it in the larger context of campus race relations.
Editors at the best news organizations struggle with questions of newsworthiness. The Cavalier Daily's wait-and-see approach to this incident was reasonable. The newspaper just waited a bit too long.
Guest columnists
Two readers complained to me last week that they received rude responses from a columnist after sending relatively polite e-mails to the columnist to question a comment he made.
The complaints naturally piqued my curiosity. Anyone who has ever written a column for a newspaper knows at least one person will disagree with something in the column. Etiquette dictates the columnist should be courteous when responding to comments, even if the e-mailer wasn't.
Before I could lecture anyone on this point, Wilson informed me the columnist in question is not a Cavalier Daily staff member. The writer, College Republicans Chair Ali Ahmad, was invited to participate as a guest columnist in a University Forum debate on which presidential candidate will win Virginia's electoral votes in the upcoming election.
Newspapers are responsible for anything appearing on their pages, including news articles, advertisements, letters to the editor and even guest viewpoints. The relationship between a guest columnist and a newspaper ends, however, as soon as the column is published.
I read both exchanges between the guest columnist and the readers. If the writer was on staff and I was the editor, I would have at least demanded the writer apologize for his responses to valid questions about a reference he made to an obscure part of a political candidate's platform.
Unfortunately, The Cavalier Daily bears no responsibility for how a guest columnist responds to an e-mail, no matter how asinine the response might be. The editors can't fire the writer because he's not a staff member; all they can do is tell him he will no longer be invited to write guest columns.
Jeremy Ashton can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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