Can college newspapers change the world? TCW writer Matt Brandenburgh thinks not but discusses why they're a necessary media outlet anyway. 

This past Friday, my school's student newspaper held its annual end-of-year banquet. After two semesters of working at the paper as a member of the editorial board, the function was a fun way to close off the year with good company and good speeches (including the publisher's uncomfortable but keen remark that, for its student staff, the newspaper had served as a training ground, a laboratory, and a dating service). 

Yet the occasion also gave me cause for reflection. In my experience, both inside and outside the organization, what is the function of a college newspaper? Moreover, are college newspapers really even newspapers?

If you had asked me this a year ago, I would have been inclined to say no. To begin with, the kinds of stories that my paper featured were ones that I often didn't care about--sports, minor campus events and the like were often front page material. There was the obligatory sex column, offering advice ranging from practical (should guys still hold doors for girls?) to borderline outrageous (one student sought advice on how to communicate to his girlfriend his displeasure with discovering a hair on her nipple delilcately) information. I doubted that our campus generated enough news to merit a daily eight-page paper and found that most of what the paper did cover did not concern me. I was also skeptical as to whether twenty-year-old college students-- people like me-- could provide serious, factual reporting by uncovering scandals and confronting serious problems on campus. On the up side, however, the daily crossword and Sudoku puzzles could always be counted on to help pass the time in class.

This view is not uncommon on my campus. But a year of working at the paper has shown me that the campus newspaper here is in fact a serious endeavor, and the work it does is important.

Dan Rather recently spoke to a group of journalism students at Rowan University about the importance of simply recognizing "what news is." Based on his fifty years of experience in news reporting-- on events like the Vietnam War, Watergate, and more-- Rather offered this stark definition of news: "What is important for people to know, that somebody somewhere doesn't want them to know, is news. Almost everything else is advertising."

Based on this illuminating definition, my college's paper has in fact been an effective gatherer and disseminator of news on campus both this year and in years past. Recently, for example, it uncovered a pattern within the administration of letting professors who repeatedly sexually harass students off the hook lightly. It has raised questions about the discernible trend of hiring fewer professors while increasing the size of the student body substantially over the last decade. Stories in the paper are often sources of embarrassment to the administration and often result in policy and procedural changes.

In my two semesters of working at the paper from a rather incidental inside perspective, I have also observed how seriously the editors take their commitment to providing factual and unbiased reporting and how closely they listen to criticism. Mistakes in journalism are ultimately inevitable, but the newspaper adopts practices that seek to minimize them or catch them before they are printed, which is the most that any media outlet can do.

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