One of the chief delights of college newspapers is the close coverage they can offer of campus squabbles. Some readers believe there’s a clear line between gossip and serious coverage; I don’t. Particularly on college campuses, where students’ extracurricular groups can come to matter more than professional organizations and where investment in leadership positions is bound up with friendships, romances and further extracurricular and professional jockeying, there’s a lot of intrigue and human foibles to be found in the occasional organizational scandal.
The Cavalier Daily hit nicely upon one of these stories with its coverage of the Asian Student Union, where board members issued a letter of no confidence in the organization’s president, Kevin Cao, who then announced he would take a month-long leave from the job.
Clearly, the story hit a nerve; the online article had garnered 17 comments by the time this story went to press. That may not sound like a large number, but compare it to the low numbers of comments Cavalier Daily articles usually generate — none on most stories, and three or four on the busiest — and you begin to get a sense of the investment readers, or at least a small but devoted subset of readers, have in the story.
The Cavalier Daily would benefit in several ways from engaging its readers more deeply. While comments sections can be a petri dish of pettiness and nastiness, they can also host vibrant debate — and who said there’s anything wrong with the occasional petty or nasty remark? In the digital age, newspapers ought to explore as many ways as possible to engage their readers, lest those readers, under-stimulated, turn to easier and intellectually cheaper and less honest outlets.
With more engaged readers, The Cavalier Daily might also have an easier time increasing the number of guest columns it runs (something I discussed in last week’s column), and it would become the essential player in all campus discourse that it must be if it wants to attract the best reporters and editors on Grounds and to prepare those reporters to know their beats intimately so no other news outlets will scoop them.
But covering stories like the ASU scandal that get readers talking isn’t just pandering to the reader — these stories tap into the lifeblood of the University. Commenters on the ASU story argued about details of the story: Cao’s potential motivations, justifications for his supposed neglect in responding to emails, and so on.
When students’ lives revolve so deeply around these minutiae, the stories matter. They form the intrigue of college life — details that are granular and epic at once. These stories are good reminders that the details and relationships that motivate the players in any such leadership scandal are the stuff of the great human dramas — think King Lear or Richard III.
So The Cavalier Daily is to be commended for its coverage of the ASU’s latest controversy, and it should continue to pursue stories that tap into the pulse of the University and get people talking about the issues that shape their lives on Grounds.
Julia Fisher is the Public Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com or on Twitter at @CDPublicEditor.
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