'The Daily'

When I was a graduate student in Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, one of my work-study tasks at Fisk Hall was to work with undergrads who staffed The Daily Northwestern.

They didn’t require much guidance from me. Then, as now, these were very bright young women and men, aspiring to professional careers someday as correspondents and editors, and it was fun interacting with them in the Daily newsroom.

By that time, I had been on staff at The Tennessean in Nashville through my own college years, and I’d meanwhile been editor of our student newspaper at MTSU. The fall before I arrived on Medill’s Evanston campus, I’d also been The Tennessean’s Washington correspondent.

I am thinking of that cold winter on the Lake Michigan shore now, because I’ve been reading the news of a student journalism fracas this week up at NU. It’s reminding me how important journalism training is for any new generation - and for students to receive the wisdom of elders.

Here’s what happened: The current student editor and undergrad reporters for the Daily stirred an important controversy with their coverage of a campus visit by the controversial former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Read the New York Times report here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/business/media/northwestern-university-newspaper.html

Now, granted I was nowhere close, but from all I’ve read the student journalists did a good job covering the Sessions event and the immediate reaction to it. They not only reported what Mr. Sessions had to say, but went the extra mile and sought out what students in the crowd thought of it all, including their comments on the behavior of activists who protested. 

Then the complaints began. Other students objected to the Daily’s conduct, saying it was improper to seek out and quote the comments of bystanders. And then, oddly, the student editor apologized, publishing his mea culpa.

Criticism of newspapers and reporting is nothing new. The best journalists have always required thick skin and broad shoulders. I’d say this student editor was a little quick on the trigger saying he was sorry.

Then yesterday the Dean of the Medill School, Charles Whitaker, weighed in with this https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/news/2019/statement-from-dean-whitaker.html The dean made a learning moment of a tense situation.

Why is any of this relevant to us down here in Tennessee?

Because it’s reminding me how valuable formal journalism training, combined with street experience, is these days – and how vital it always is, in the process, to have seasoned faculty advisers lending good perspective and instilling good confidence along the way. (In my own grad school time at Medill, we were blessed with an outstanding faculty; they included, among many others, our Dean Sig Mickelson, the former CBS News president who had hired Walter Cronkite, and Professor John Bartlow Martin, the biographer of Adlai Stevenson - and who probably had the most direct influence on me and what I would do later).

In all our communities we need boldness in news coverage today, not timidity. When reporters truly err, there should always be a prompt correction and apology as needed. But that did not happen in this instance on the lakeshore. Nor did it need to.

No one need ever apologize when a good job is properly done.