THE MANAGING Board usually uses its lead editorials on the Opinion page to, well, express an opinion.
The Board found a different purpose for its editorials on Monday, instead introducing readers to a series of news articles ("A series on sexual assault," April 4) and a new type of columnist ("Contributors," April 4). Both features have so far proven themselves worthy of the special attention the board devoted to them.
The series
The four-part series of articles, which ran Monday through Thursday, documented one former student's experience of accusing a fellow student of sexual assault. The series followed then third-year College student Kathryn Russell from the night she claims an acquaintance sexually assaulted her through a Sexual Assault Board hearing and the aftermath.
The Cavalier Daily has published numerous articles this year on the SAB and the push to reform the University's sexual assault policy. Most of those articles talked about the reform debate in abstract terms. This series personalized the way the University has dealt with sexual assault in the past. Russell's experience likely doesn't represent the experience of every student who has pursued an SAB hearing, but it did give readers an amazing amount of detail about the process.
The newspaper couldn't have published this series without someone like Russell who was willing to talk openly. But for the story to effectively "focus on the process," The Cavalier Daily also needed high-quality reporting and writing. It got both from senior writer Chris Wilson, who wrote all four articles.
Wilson thoroughly researched this story. Rather than simply relying on Russell's account of what happened, he used pages and pages of documents to confirm what she told him. Those documents leant an air of authority to everything he wrote.
Wilson also exhausted nearly every human source possible. Some of the key figures in the story, like the student Russell accused of sexual assault, refused to talk to The Cavalier Daily, but he let readers know in the articles that he attempted to contact those people. And although the administrators he interviewed refused to specifically talk about Russell's case, Wilson incorporated their general comments about SAB and the University's sexual assault policy into the series.
Wilson wrote the first three stories in a narrative format rather than the usual style for a news article. He really couldn't have written this story any other way. The narrative style -- not to mention the quality of Wilson's writing -- were much better suited to pulling readers into Russell's story than the normal news formula.
Wilson's work was outstanding, but the editors also deserve praise for the way they presented the series.
The name of the accused student, who declined to comment, was conspicuously absent from the four articles. The editors chose not to reveal his identity because SAB acquitted him. They made the right call.
The Managing Board wrote in the editorial introducing the series that it wanted the story to examine the process. If The Cavalier Daily had published the accused student's name, the focus would have shifted to a debate over his guilt or innocence.
The editors even planned the timing of the series just right. By publishing the series the week of the Take Back the Night march, they made it immediately relevant to the University community.
Contributors
The other new feature introduced Monday by the Managing Board will appear regularly on the Opinion page.
The Board announced it will start using contributing columnists, student leaders who have "expertise in a certain area." The Board described contributors, who will write about once a month, as columnists who "fall somewhere between a guest columnist and a staff columnist." Steph Shaw, associate director of Promoting HIV Negativity, wrote the paper's first contributing column Wednesday ("Sensible sex ed," April 6).
Regular columnists cannot write about organizations or causes they actively participate in because of the paper's conflict-of-interest rules. As the editorial explained, the board wants to use contributors who are actively involved in organizations or causes to add an authoritative voice to the Opinion page. The idea is a sound one, but the Board should keep something important in mind as this experiment progresses.
Shaw's column included her title at the end. Every contributing column should have that information. When they see one of these columns, readers should immediately know the perspective of the person who wrote it so they can judge for themselves how much they trust the contributor's opinion.
Jeremy Ashton can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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