The job of the media

This week has been exceptionally chaotic at the Stute. As usual, regardless of midterms, classes, and other commitments, we’re cranking out our 10-page newspaper filled with content for the Stevens community. At least we have candy and coffee at the office, because I know that I need sugar to survive my 12 hour shift at the office.

We aren’t procrastinators! Okay, maybe a little. There’s just so much work to do, and juggling it with our regular lives is huge. We have to come up with article ideas, find people who are willing to write articles out of the goodness of their hearts, corral them into writing in a 48-hour turnaround time, edit every single article for grammar, and, if we have the time, try to find a subject matter expert to fact check the article. Only after we have articles can we design the pages for the articles in the print issue. All of this happens between Tuesday and Thursday at midnight.

I was having a conversation with an alum on Wednesday about how much the Stute has changed since his time at Stevens. At first, I disagreed because the office is just as, if not more chaotic on a weekly basis. But he said something along the lines of how the articles we write now “would not fly” back during his time (5 to 6 years ago) and how he loved our shift to more investigative, “real” news articles. Not that all articles “fly,” because they definitely don’t, but it made me realize that we’re definitely just bolder now. Less afraid of taking risks. Willing to sacrifice our personal reputations in order to fulfill what we see as our purpose: speaking truthfully about the Stevens experience and delivering the realest content to the Stevens community. Writing things that are real and require research definitely adds a lot to our workload.

We’re trying our best, despite obvious roadblocks. Besides the fact that it’s been two months without office computers, a major problem that we are facing these days is that people are either too busy to talk to us or have been instructed not to talk to us. We’ve been working on the first one by sending people questions several days in advance (whenever possible). But the second one is out of our hands and what really sets us back in the newsroom.

Last week, there were two articles where we just wanted a “feel good” kind of quote where we asked people working for Stevens to just say something nice about the events they were attending. That’s it! Just something like, “This event is great for x, y, z reasons,” and we would publish that, verbatim. In both instances, the folks wanted to provide us with a quote, but said that they were not allowed to comment without getting approval from their supervisor, which wouldn’t be possible until the next day.

It’s frustrating and borderline suffocating. Every time we try to write an article, like 10 people are copied just to keep an eye on us. Or, we get asked to hold off on writing an article long enough that it no longer becomes relevant to write about. That’s the price we have to pay for trying to be a real newspaper, I guess. I have been told the reason why people don’t want to talk to us is that they’re worried about being misrepresented and that we’re going to write something bad about them. My theory is that Stevens has a specific vision and PR package, and they can’t stand kids like us trying to snoop around and dig up stories that they’d prefer we never find out about.

As students, we just want to bring attention to what’s really happening at Stevens so other students feel comforted in their experiences rather than feeling alone. But those who work for Stevens probably fear this. If more students catch wind of the things happening to each other, then they’ll realize they are not alone in their experiences and that things need to change. That just makes more work for them, so obviously the Stute is the problem.

The Stute isn’t the SGA. I realized that in the past few years we have become a platform for students to advocate for the changes they want to see. It does make me happy to see the newspaper I work so hard on being used to its full potential. However, it’s not our job to change the student experience or work collaboratively with anyone to make Stevens a “better place.” I’ll leave the SGA to pick itself up in due time and work for the changes they want to see.

At the end of the day, I believe the job of the media is to hold governing bodies accountable for the things they do, as well as what they don’t do, and that is exactly what we’re trying to do here at the Stute.