The Detroit News has a deep dive on the tension between the administration and student newspaper at Northern Michigan University, which The College Fix previously covered.
It started with the paper requesting the school’s contract with Starbucks, but it’s gotten much more serious, with faculty and administrators regularly complaining to student editors about their coverage with what sound like veiled threats to ruin their reputations or cut the paper’s funding.
Apparently administrators aren’t used to dealing with the professional media:
During the hullabaloo over Starbucks — Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz is an alumnus — the paper further tweaked the company by running a student taste test won by another coffee brand served at the school.
“The previous paper had cupcake stories,” said Brice Burge, 26, a senior who writes a blog about the school and Marquette. “They’re pushing the right buttons. They’re doing a good job.”
The aggressive coverage sometimes dips into sensationalism, such as a September story that referred to a spending account controlled by the student government as a “slush fund.”
The paper has a new adviser who’s not a pushover for a change:
[Cheryl] Reed, 48, is a former investigative reporter who quit as editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times in 2008 after the paper rewrote her staff’s endorsements in the two presidential primaries. …
When an administrator objected to a reporter trying to interview the suspended school hockey coach by going to his home, Reed criticized the complainant’s lack of journalism knowledge.
“I don’t know how to impress upon you, a lay person, that this is what is expected in the real world beyond the gentle confines of NMU,” she wrote in a January email to Alan McEvoy, head of the Sociology and Anthropology Department.
Advice for administrators: Don’t mention the paper’s funding source or its writers’ future prospects when you complain about coverage, which you have every right to do.
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