The media use certain news values to determine what makes an event worth reporting. The proximity of an event to a media outlet, the event's impact on the audience, whether a conflict exists or even whether something odd happened all affect the media's decision on what to report.
One of the most important news values is timeliness. "Old news ain't news" is one of journalism's cardinal rules. Newspaper readers want to learn about what just happened or what is happening, not what happened a week, a month or a year ago.
I'm bringing up the quick journalism lecture because Angela Carrico, chair of the University Judiciary Committee, e-mailed me Tuesday morning and said that the Board of Visitors made an important change to the UJC's Standards of Conduct. The change extended the jurisdiction of Standards 2 and 9 to the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.
The Board unanimously approved the change Feb. 4. The UJC received notification of the change Feb. 6. Nothing about it appeared in The Cavalier Daily until Thursday ("UJC expands jurisdiction," Feb. 10).
The Associate editor, who normally covers UJC, wrote an article for Monday's paper on the single sanction debate. The news editors likely pushed the article on the Standards of Conduct change back so Bonner could also write that story, Editor-in-Chief Patrick Harvey told me.
Unfortunately, college journalists can't spend the same amount of time covering stories and writing articles as a professional because they're also students who have classes to attend. I could certainly understand the editors bumping the UJC story to Tuesday's paper to give the beat writer an extra day to work, especially considering she already had to write another story for Monday. But The Cavalier Daily shouldn't have waited nearly a week after the BOV passed the change to publish something.
The Standards of Conduct changes directly affect all University students, Carrico told me. Something that has an impact on that many people in a paper's audience needs to show up in print as soon as possible.
Assuming the UJC beat writer didn't have time to write the story, the editors could have reassigned it or had her write it jointly with someone else, like the reporter who covered the BOV meeting. If the problem was that there wasn't enough room on the News page, the editors could have bumped something less time-sensitive. Either way, this story should have appeared in The Cavalier Daily by Tuesday at the latest.
Fighting 'bus blues'
Another unhappy e-mailer and a fourth-year student who wrote a letter to the editor ("Safety, then schedule," Feb. 9) complained last week about how The Cavalier Daily portrayed their group -- University Transit Service bus drivers.
The source of their displeasure with The Cavalier Daily was a brief article in Monday's Life section called "Bus blues." The first half of the article contained common complaints from University students about UTS. The second half featured a rookie bus driver who tried to explain how the bus system actually works.
"Bus blues" was part of a regular feature of the Life section called Odds & Ends, which traditionally has served as a brief feature story that "highlights an event around Grounds or a recent trend," Life editor Michelle Jamrisko explained. The Monday article was meant to take a quick, balanced look at an easily recognizable issue for University students.
The e-mailer questioned the use of a new bus driver to strike that balance, saying the driver "neither had the knowledge or experience to speak on behalf of UTS." I agree with him on that point.
Journalists, including feature writers, should always strive for clarity in their writing, but it becomes so much more important in a short piece like Odds & Ends. The perspective of UTS drivers would have been clearer and better represented if the paper had talked to a more experienced driver rather than a rookie. A veteran driver could have raised some of those points about UTS that the e-mailer and the Wednesday letter to the editor expertly brought up.
On every college campus I've been to, students complain about delays in public transportation, fairly or not. "Bus blues" was meant to take a quick look at some of those common complaints at the University and give readers the bus drivers' perspective. The Cavalier Daily could have better accomplished the latter objective by talking to a driver who was more familiar with UTS.
Jeremy Ashton can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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