The Rise and Fall of a Student Journalist

So, it looks as though I caused a bit of controversy on Saturday with my piece about NYU Local and the Washington Square News.

As of yet, nobody from WSN’s mentioned it to me. I expect it’s only a matter of time until someone does, because I can’t imagine the public proliferation of my thoughts on this subject sat too well with them.

So I write today as a matter of pre-emptive damage control, clarification, and an exercise in passive-aggressiveness. If anyone from WSN does bring my previous post up, I’ll simply direct them to this one, thus fulfilling two completely self-serving purposes: avoiding an awkward confrontation and increasing web traffic.

To begin with, I want to say that my previous post was not meant as an indictment on how well Rachel and Mary-Jane are currently running the paper. The web’s place in the media industry is not a subject either of them are unfamiliar with or unaware of. I happen to know this with a great deal of certainty for one reason: it’s a question on the Editor-in-Chief application, a position all three of us applied for last December.

Does that mean addressing this challenge is actually part of their game plan? I have no idea. But more to the point, I don’t claim to have any idea. My observations were based, for the most part, on my experience at WSN when I was an editor there, when NYU Local launched, and the subsequent semesters in which I maintained some level of regular involvement and affiliation with WSN.

Likewise, my remarks on the “rivalry” between NYU Local and WSN should not be interpreted as a representation of how things are now. I’m simply not around enough these days to accurately say if WSN’s attitude towards its online competitor is still as “vitriolic” (to borrow a phrase) as I’d implied. My observations were based on my experience when I was at WSN, although this “clarification” should not discredit that I still do, on occasion, read and hear remarks on both sides of the battlefield that make me wince.

Returning to the topic of WSN’s Internet savvyness, as a reader, I’d probably say that nine months into Rachel and Mary-Jane’s tenure, no, I’m not terribly impressed.

They are clearly making efforts — last semester, they had a “continuous news desk” to post breaking news updates as they occurred (again, where do you people come up with these stupid names?), they’ve re-designed the paper’s website, they now employ a wonderfully dedicated and talented Information and Technology director, and they Tweet like crazy. They’re getting there. It’s a shame they had to play catch up at all and that WSN, as an institution, wasted so much time with arrogance and complacency, but if Rachel and Mary-Jane are aware of that and are making efforts to correct their predecessors’ mistakes, they should be applauded for it. But they still have a long way to go.

(To his credit, Adam Playford did try to launch a WSN blog in his last semester. Although the consensus seems to be that it wasn’t a particularly successful experiment.)

In all fairness, what the editors can do is also hampered somewhat by a bureaucratic Board of Directors and (from what I hear), Board chairman/NYU professor Jay Rosen’s stubborn refusal to abandon outsourcing the website to mtvU’s CollegePublisher. (An allegation which should be hilariously ironic to anyone who’s familiar with Jay Rosen and his strong advocacy for the embrace of Internet journalism. Ha.)

So clarifications aside, why, then is critiquing WSN such a big deal that I had to clarify anything in the first place?

Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, not only has no one from WSN talked to me about it yet, but no one from WSN has commented on my previous post, either.

There’s a reason for that: WSN employs a long-standing “unspoken rule” of forbidding staff members from talking the paper. It’s like Fight Club, only nobody at WSN looks like Brad Pitt. (Sorry, Cosgrove.)

For instance, if you’re a staff writer, you’re not supposed to comment about your job or the newspaper. Unless it’s with your friends over Chick-fil-A at Weinstein or Insomnia Cookies in your dorm room. Nor can you comment about WSN on its own or other websites. Unless it’s Facebook or Twitter.

Now, conversations with your friends — we can safely assume — are private, and prohibiting such conversations would be not only a gross violation of personal freedoms, practically unenforceable. So that’s kind of a fallacious point, I grant you.

But broadcasting your thoughts over social media networks, which even WSN’s top editors often do, gets a little trickier. Particularly since, as I said, this policy isn’t actually laid out anywhere!

Personally, I don’t really have a problem with this policy, necessarily. I guess if I got myself really worked up about free speech rights and how letting writers and readers interact instead of erecting this sort of artificial ivory tower to separate the Publishers and the Consumers, I could get into it, but whatever. If you sign up to work for WSN, you sign up to abide by its policies. I can buy that.

The problem is, I barely work for WSN.

Yes, I’ve managed to keep the luxury of an @nyunews.com e-mail address and the privilege to include “Senior Staff Writer” in my signature, and I use the office fax machine every now and then, and it’s a nice, quiet place to eat lunch when you have to write a six-page essay on a Supreme Court case for John Sexton’s class (can you guess what I’m doing right now?).

But unlike “staff writers,” I don’t have a scheduled office shift, I’m never in the office during production, I don’t attend budget or pitch meetings, I’m not on any of the desk editors’ e-mail mailing lists, I only actually know one of the news editors’ names, and, in the last two semesters, I’ve barely even written 10 articles, if that.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy and appreciate the freedom I have to choose when to write and what to write, but let’s be honest: while I appreciate it, “Senior Staff Writer” is like those honorary, lifetime achievement awards they give out at the Oscars. It’s in reverence to my body of work and that I’ve paid my dues. At least, I like to think some of that someone reveres my work, but what do I know?

The truth is that my role at WSN has substantially diminished over the last year and a half, virtually to the point of noninvolvement altogether.

My career trajectory basically went from earning my editors’ praise, the administration’s respect, and covering nearly every major NYU story in the last three years, to finding out (at the office Christmas party, no less) that I was passed over for a promotion (to a job for which I was the only applicant).

Supposedly, Adam Playford even began passing along to his editors and successors such maxims as “don’t give him any important stories,” and “never hire him for anything beyond ‘News Editor.’”

My tenuous relationship with Adam isn’t the only reason I withdrew, though. That semester saw a very high turnover in staff, and most of the co-workers I had joined and rose through the ranks at WSN with were leaving to pursue other interests.

Adam did, in lieu of the Assistant Managing Editor position I had applied for offer me an unpaid Senior Staff Writer job. While the stipend had never been an incentive for me, I was at a point — in my personal life — where I needed an income, and the flexibility of writing if and when I felt like it was a more attractive option than committing myself to a glorified version of something I’d already done and for no added incentive, neither in pay scale or responsibility.

Because it was such a major part of my college experience for so long, WSN is obviously an organization that means very much to me. I wouldn’t have stuck by it through the difficult times, nor would I invest the time or effort to be concerned about its future (let alone write a 1,000+ word piece about those concerns) if it didn’t. I’ve learned a lot, not just about journalism and media, formed some of my best and closest relationships, and been afforded tremendous opportunities there that I otherwise would never have had. And, trite as it sounds, I’ll always be appreciative of that.

But to argue, now, that I’m such an embedded and integral staff member that to write critically of WSN is a transgression of the most egregious order is, to say the least, hyperbole. “Professional” publications, for instance, frequently employ ombudsmen for the explicit purpose of writing critically about their own publication.

While that’s certainly not my job at WSN (although maybe it should be), I would hope that WSN’s editors and staff can (for the reasons I’ve described above) look past their knee-jerk impulse to view my actions as somehow treasonous, and instead consider my criticisms on their own merit.

If they choose to pursue some kind of disciplinary action (although I can’t imagine what that’d be, not to be flip), I would think that’s a shame. Not because it’d be any skin off my back, really. It wouldn’t be. But because it’d be ignoring what I still contend are fair and reasonable criticisms in favor of a strict adherence to outdated traditions.