ANYONE who checked their e-mail yesterday and received Editor-in-Chief Patrick Harvey's e-mail about an Oct. 27 cartoon will probably expect me to be writing in this space my response to the issue. Sorry, folks. I learned about the uproar at about 1:30 p.m. yesterday, so I didn't have adequate time before publication to thoroughly think out and write a response.
The cartoon surmised on the roots of the honor system at the University and depicted an imagined conversation between Thomas Jefferson and a slave.
There's one upside to that. Now I have the entire week to field your e-mails about the topic. Please send me your thoughts on the issue, and check back here next week for my response.
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Being a journalist in a university setting can be one of the most interesting and rewarding experiences in the field. The story possibilities are virtually limitless, especially when you're at a liberal arts or research university with dozens of fields of study. People come from all over the world to study and teach here, which means that almost any global story can be localized.
The problem is how and where to devote your staff's manpower. Though the Internet is breaking down space barriers that have traditionally confronted and confined publications, personnel issues will always force editors to make choices. There will likely never be enough reporters, editors and photographers to write about everything that could affect the university community.
In a number of my columns so far, I have scolded the news department for not thoroughly covering a story that I thought deserved more attention. I want to call attention to this problem again, this time with a focus on news judgment.
When editors decide what to put on the front page or what to assign writers to, they are using their judgment to decide what is or is not news. A bake sale in Florida to raise money for a new basketball hoop might not be news at this university, but if it's an "affirmative action bake sale" on campus, it will likely be news. That's an obvious one.
Editors usually use the following criteria when determining what is news, and not necessarily in this order: proximity, timeliness, impact, human interest, unusualness, prominence and conflict.
A quick rundown of what that means: The closer the location, the more recent, the more unusual, the more people affected, the more famous the players, the more heated the conflict and the more interesting the story, the higher the news value.
That's why I was surprised when I only saw one article last week on a security breach at the University that exposed 2,600 students' Social Security numbers and personal information online.
(As a side note, I thought the article, "Housing office reports possible security breach," published Oct. 26, a Wednesday, let the housing office off too easy, misusing the words "possible" and "could have." Chief Housing Officer Mark Doherty himself said, "These files
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