The University Media Board (UMB), which is comprised of students and faculty/staff members and oversees key operational aspects of the Carolinian student newspaper and Coraddi student literary magazine, has two vacancies to be filled. The UMB is seeking an English or communcations faculty member with work and/or teaching experience in the field of journalism to fill one vacancy and a student, preferably an English or communications major to fill the other. The UMB meets on a monthly basis. Its primary function is to select executive editors and administer budgets for the UNCG's print media outlet.
What is the University Media Board? Is it new, or have they always been selecting executive editors and making budgets? Can the Carolinian claim to be an "independent voice" if their budget is mandated by the UMB?
PS: Why do I feel like the only one who would like a satisfactory explanation on what happened to the Carolinian? (Believe me, I don't need names and statistics to be satisfied. It's just that all I'm getting right now is hearsay and speculation.) Why do I feel like everything's so hush-hush, like there's a gag-order out on all involved? Why do I feel like the only one suprised at the lack of coverage this is getting from the UNCG blogosphere? Doesn't the responsibility of "media watchdog" fall into blogger territory?
1 comment:
Hey - I'm Joe Killian and I've been with the paper for four years. I've just been asked back after a rocky semester to resume managing editor duties - and maybe I can answer some of these questionsf or you. Tried posting here yesterday but couldn't, for some reason.
The long and short:
The story of what's been going on at The Carolinian hasn't really been that hush-hush. By my count the News and Record has published four seperate stories about the whole thing - the last two weeks ago. You might check their archives - though i believe they're pay to view these days. Can probably get the whole thing through the Jackson
Library's Infotrac system. As for the
blogosphere - I've written about it a bit on my blog, but that's Friends-Only for now. There have been questions and answers on the UNCG community livejournal, which can be found at
www.livejournal.com/users/uncg_community. A group of UNCG College Republicans running a partisan "news" blog called The Spartan News
also put together a story about it - which was actually surprisingly accurate - a first for them. They have a mad-on for The Carolinian as a corrupt liberal influence on the entire campus, so I was surprised how level the reporting was - once it was trimmed down from its original seven-page version. That item can be found at www.thespartannews.com.
The reader's digest version is this - and this will all be gone into in much more detail in my column and a news story from an uninvolved staffer in the first new issue of the Carolinian, which we expect to produce this month:
The University Media Board is the board that allocates student
fee dollars (not government, tax or University money) to student media such as WUAG, The Coraddi and The Carolinian. This money is divided more or less evenly every year, according to operational need and pays for the printing of The Carolinian. All of the money to pay staffers and run the office comes from Advertising dollars generated by students.
Though I don't agree with the practice and I've found it's a terribly flawed system, this group also selects the Executive Editor of The Carolinian. Though theway they operate varies, the Executive Editor of The Carolinian is not in charge of the content of the paper - that falls to the editorial board of the paper, which is composed of the paper's section editors and its managing editor. The Executive Editor is a liason between the media board and the editorial board, the paper's representative at Univeristy functions and manadatory affiliation days and sits on the media board itself as a voting member - as do the heads of each of the University's student media groups.
No one has been more skeptical of and antagonistic toward the idea and the reality of the media board than me. Two years ago, working with the Student Press Law Center, I lead the staff in
negotiating with the University to bring more students and faculty onto the board and to exorcise PR people and administrators from the board. When the SPLC told NPR that they planned to bring suit against the school unless the board was reconstituted to our satisfaction and clauses added to its charter removing any ability of the board to ask content questions or make decisions about the funding of the paper based on content, the school capitulated. Since that time we've been immune from content questions about The Carolinian and there has never been and will never be any prior review of The Carolinian's content. We are provided with the money to print through money contributed by the student body itself as administered by the board completely seperate from content and its members (including the Carolinian's Executive Editor) are not empowered to review or change content at the Carolinian. Its student editors run every detail.
The Carolinian was recently shut down because of a number of poor business practices that lead to an investigation of our last Executive Editor. She was accused of wild spending that put us over budget and of misappropriating advertising commissions and revenues for herself. Proof brought forward by the Carolinian's editorial board lead to an investigation into the business practices of The Carolinian - the only aspect of the paper the UMB is empowered to investigate and on which
they are allowed to act. The former executive editor, infuriated at her staff's having turned her over the UMB, fired every student editor of The Carolinian and its business manager - a decision the University
Media Board overturned before it turned an eye toward her poor decision making. A very lengthy investigation of the Carolinian's books found that the Executive Editor had, through
mismanagement of funds, overspending and questionable business practices run the paper into the red and left it not enough money to
pay its monthly payroll or run its offices. The exective editor resigned her position at the completion of the investigation and an
iterim Exec Editor has been put in place while the board accepts candidates for the position. Each Executive Editor is appointed for
one year before having to re-apply for the position.
All of this may not completely explain whether the Carolinian is truly an "independent student paper." Is it financially independent of
the University, without any financial ties to the student body or affiliation with the school, like UNC's Daily Tarheel? No. But we're
also a school without a journalism department and no one to leave endowments to the paper to keep it running without the printing money from student fees each year. Our content and operation is indeed
independent - from both the Univeristy and the UMB. No one is empowered to run the details of The Carolinian or decide its content beyond its student editors and the staffers who provide that content.
It's that independence that's referred to in the "Independent Student Newspaper" beneath the Carolinian flag. Is that enough to make the
paper truly independent? Well, like everything else about a good paper, that's for the readers to decide themselves. I've been with the paper for four years and can honestly say that we're more independent
now than we've ever been - but I'd like to see more independence, and think that's where the paper's headed.
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