College newsrooms shift focus amid coronavirus pandemic concerns
By Elizabeth Smith and Courtenay Stallings
Pepperdine University
“This is big.” That was the reaction of Graphic News Editor James Moore when Pepperdine University announced seven weeks ago the suspension of its international program in Shanghai, China, as COVID-19 spread across Asia. Over the next six weeks, as the virus spread across the world, the university eventually suspended all seven of its international programs and closed the Malibu campus, moving to all-remote instruction. James was right— it was big.
Over the past few weeks, university presidents have announced campus closures in rapid succession. While these closures pose unprecedented challenges for classrooms and campuses, they are uncharted territory for student newsrooms, too.
Lest you have tuned out the noise, the book is highly critical of the Trump administration’s approach to the First Amendment. No matter what side of the political spectrum on which you fall, though, this book can truly educate you about this unique time in First Amendment orthodoxy.
For many years, I have used Richard Jewell’s prodigious litigation to teach about republication liability in libel cases (one who repeats a defamatory falsehood can be held liable to the same extent as the original speaker). In doing so, though, I did not address, or in fact think much about, the human impact of the error – on the wrongfully named individual, on the journalists, or on the source. In “The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle,” authors Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen provide a powerful, in-depth and highly personal account of what happens to a human being when the FBI and subsequently the news media erroneously name him as a suspect in a high profile crime. As Salwen said during a recent phone interview, “whether you are in the FBI, or the media, or the news consuming public,” this book reminds you that “there is a human being on the other side.” 
Here’s what it’s all about: In 2010, former Alaska Governor and Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC, published an online map with crosshairs over congressional districts of some Democrats, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. In January 2011, a gunman opened fire at a political event in Tucson, Arizona, killing six and wounding 13, including Giffords. The gunman who shot Giffords pled guilty; there was no evidence that he had seen the SarahPAC map. Several years later, another U.S. Representative was injured when a gunman fired at a congressional baseball practice in Virginia. The night of that attack, which injured U.S. Representative Steve Scalise, the New York Times published an editorial on its website titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” tying the two shootings to the SarahPAC map. The June 14, 2017 New York Times editorial asked:
Written by Katina Paron, who has worked in different capacities as a student journalism educator, and illustrated by Javier Guelfi, a cartoonist, illustrator and graphic designer, the book is clever and engaging. Although the book is not brand new – it was released in October 2018 – it is worth taking a look at, if you haven’t already done so.
Audible, the Amazon.com audiobook company that bills itself as “the world’s largest seller and producer of audiobooks and other spoken-word entertainment,” introduced a new feature in July 2019 that displays the text of a book while it is read. The feature, called Audible Captions, allows listeners “to follow along with a few lines of machine-generated text as they listen to the audio performance,” according to Audible’s website. “We developed this technology,” Audible’s website states, “because we believe our culture, particularly in under-resourced environments, is at risk of losing a significant portion of the next generation of book readers. We have heard from so many teachers and educators that they want to find new ways to improve literacy rates and inspire students to pick up a book and read.”
So is communication between editors-in-chief and the top brass of their colleges and universities.
The co-editors-in-chief of the college newspaper that I advise are women. Last year’s editor-in-chief was a woman. In fact, in my nine years as the paper’s faculty adviser, the vast majority of the editors have been women. They have been talented and confident and unafraid to use the skills they are honing on campus at their summer internships or, after they graduate, in the workplace. Yet, are college newspapers, which, according to anecdotal evidence, are often largely staffed and led by female students, reflective of the workplace these students will enter upon graduation? What awaits these passionate young female journalists? Can they rise to the same level that they have achieved on campus, where running the student newspaper makes them campus leaders?