In the spirit of
democratic truth-telling that I hope this website embodies, I
think that a description of my experiences at the Michigan Daily is in
order before I discuss the more theoretical considerations of what I
think needs to be changed in Part 4.
My freshman year I became very active, very quickly. I dove into the political scene quickly, becoming involved with the Students' Rights Commission of the Michigan Student Assembly, College Democrats, and the campus chapter of the ACLU. I also joined the Michigan Daily Editorial Board, writing dozens of editorials my freshman year. While the Daily requests editorial board members who are involved with an issue through organizational commitments sit out some discussions and votes, political participation is otherwise tolerated. Editorial board members have included students active in a number of political organizations including BAMN and SOLE, and my editors knew about my activities.
In Winter term my freshman year I decided to run for a seat on the Michigan Student Government to become more involved with my students rights work - we were active in formulating suggested amendments to the code of student conduct, and doing education work with students about their rights dealing with Ann Arbor and University police officers. After I won the election, I left the editorial board according to the newspaper's informal policy. After a year and a half on the assembly, I left after accomplishing much and helping orient students who wanted to succeed me. Also, frankly, I was sick of dealing with the administration of Matt Nolan and Jessica Cash who would go on to work on the Posthumus for Governor Campaign. After I had resigned in December 2001, I had mentioned to friends I was interested in returning to the Daily, perhaps even try out news. Friends of mine lobbied on my behalf, and I was offered the opportunity to work as the crime beat reporter Winter 2002.
Fresh from the much more democratic editorial staff, I had made the rare switch from editorial to news the semester before after an outgoing editor and chief - whom I liked to think, recognized my independent, investigative streak, heavily lobbied on my behalf behind the scenes. I worked for a semester on the crime beat, during which peeping toms and criminals seemed to run rampant across campus. The Department of Public Safety issued a record (in my recent, short memory of the U-M) of crime alerts, and I quickly found myself interviewing a scared freshman who had survived armed mugging in her own residence hall room, talking to victims of peeping tom incidents, traipsing down to the courthouse to document the seemingly limitless number of assaults, sexual assaults, and other crimes perpetrated by members of the varsity football team, and finally covering Hash Bash, and the Naked Mile, which occurred with quick succession just as my courses were coming to the close.
During my time on the news staff, I resigned my
minor position in the College Democrats, and withdrew from my activities
with the ACLU. I made it clear to my editors that if they thought I was
doing anything that constituted a conflict of interest to let me know.
Suffice it to say, they never had to.
My beat partner proved helpful, but his duties on the crime beat often expanded because of his willingness to drop anything to do an editor's bidding, causing him to make the newspaper his life, something I couldn't commit to. For the fall semester I was allowed to create my own in-dept, investigative beat. However, I increasingly felt myself isolated among a staff who did what they were told, and seemed little interested in investigating the discrimination lawsuits against the University, FOIA battles, heroin and cocaine use in Ann Arbor, and secret societies I filled my time documenting. My previous investigative efforts - which revealed for the first time the University's secret participation in a nationwide alcohol prevention study (we were the guinea pigs in the study), that the University's dining services were limiting their options of fresh fruits and vegetables to save money, and covering a controversy where a dance was cancelled at a fraternity-owned building after Michigamua complained they had paid for the exclusive use of the building. Each of these stories I pursued on my own, and in none did any editor seem to think they were more important than obituaries, or routine stories covering speakers on campus (which I wrote as well). In almost all cases, I had to drastically cut short my work to fit what the insisted the space allowed, and often found these stories buried on the third page, behind fluff stories few people I know would be interested in.
I can hear my detractors now: you just weren't patient enough, newspapers have limited space, maybe they weren't as important as you thought they were, etc, etc. All of that may be true, but I had one unassailable piece of evidence on my side: a student of university history, I knew the daily, while mediocre for much of its history, had had moments of greatness - especially in the 1960s, 1970s, and even up until the late 1980s - and I knew that at those times, writers had been interested in breaking stories that effected many students, and competed with the Ann Arbor News to break important stories. Some editors I had didn't even bother to read the Ann Arbor News. One story I wrote, at the encouragement of one of the better editors, did end up in a slightly modified form in the Ann Arbor News. Following up on an anonymous tip the newspaper had received, I discovered that dozens of boxes of sensitive admissions materials stood stacked in an unlocked hallway in the Student Activities Building. Yet few of my fellow reporters, and fewer of my editors, seemed to realize that was exactly the type of story that mattered. They were too busy "putting out a newspaper" to really care what went in it.
Thus the story reaches the point I described in
the introduction: the boycott against the paper begins, and I am fired,
re-hired, and then resign under duress.
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