I sat down to write this Editorial this week and honestly didn’t know what to write about. But realizing that made me remember days in the Stute office where former editors would express something similar — they didn’t know what to write about or comment on. Of course now I can relate, as I’m sitting here with a couple ideas floating around in my head but unable to pinpoint a main idea.
Being that this will be my last Editorial of the semester, and the fact that I’m struggling to figure out what to write about, I thought I would simply take time to reflect on this unusual semester The Stute has experienced.
For one, we had no print paper this semester (carrying over from the end of last semester when we stopped printing mid-March). If I’m not mistaken, this was the first time in Stute history that we were producing content without print issues. We became the newspaper without a newspaper which proved to be immensely challenging but at the same time gave us valuable opportunities to rethink our production process.
We started this semester trying out a completely new online-only publishing schedule. Normally we publish on our website and print an issue every Friday, but without the limits of print this semester, we tried publishing content on our website twice a week instead of once. This proved to not be the greatest schedule to say the least, and eventually we went back to weekly Friday publishing online. But at least we tried, and this online-only world we’ve been living in for the past several months gave us the opportunity to try something new.
This semester we also experienced an Opinion piece initiate a lot of backlash and disapproval among readers. At the time, I wasn’t Editor in Chief but wished desperately to publicly comment on the situation. Yes, I could have submitted an Op-Ed or Letter to the Editor (just like you can, too!), but at the time I didn’t feel comfortable making such a big statement. Not to mention I didn’t even know where to begin in terms of organizing my thoughts.
What I can say is this: after having time to reflect on what happened, I wish we had done things differently. I wish we had better prepared for backlash and discussed as an organization what the piece might initiate and how we would respond. But it’s extremely hard to make a decision you are confident in when there are people coming at you from all directions telling you different things: take the piece down, don’t take the piece down, remove the writer’s privileges, get better editors, resign from your position, and so on. And it’s even more difficult to make a decision when you yourself don’t know what the ethical thing to do is or who is really in the wrong. And at the time our Editor in Chief wasn’t able to respond quickly, but we never ignored anyone or brushed comments off as if they meant nothing to us. We simply did not know what to do and were ill prepared, and if you think we handled things poorly, I invite you to come join our organization and actually give us constructive criticism on how we can improve. And that doesn’t mean leaving a comment on an Instagram post.
Since then I’ve been learning a lot about ethical journalism and am now confident in how I’ll respond to future instances of backlash that we will inevitably experience. One of my favorite books I’ve read that touched on ethics in journalism was The Elements of Journalism, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. There’s a line in the book that states, “People increasingly see the press as part of an ‘other world’ from which they feel alienated, rather than as a public surrogate acting on their behalf.” I have to agree with this statement. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel that that many members of the Stevens community don’t trust us as a news organization. There’s a feeling of separation between students and The Stute, which is extremely frustrating to me because The Stute is comprised of students.
Unless you’re involved in The Stute, you might not understand just how much it takes to produce content. It cannot be done by just one person; we have about 25 active members who write, edit, take photos, come up with article ideas, post on social media, keep up with news, maintain our website, and so much more. Even then, we still need more help. There are an insane amount of steps it takes to produce content, and it’s much more complicated than simply writing an article and publishing it. And on top of all this, everybody working to keep The Stute alive is also a student, like I’ve said, with plenty of other assignments to do.
Contrary to what some readers see us as, we’re not nameless beings hiding behind computer screens wanting to stir up drama or create negativity of some sort. We’re here to serve readers and inform. We’re here to present truth and tell stories. We’re here to document Stevens history. And all while doing that we’re the exact same as you; we’re students who are learning and can admit we’re going to make mistakes.
All that I ask is for readers to have some empathy towards us. It takes so much work to do what we do at The Stute. This semester tested us, but I’m so proud of everyone who played a role in keeping The Stute alive while we had no print issue and no office to do the job in. It’s incredible to be a part of a group of people who volunteer their time to make The Stute great. Thank you for reading, and as always, we’ll be back next semester.
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