On Friday, residents of the Nevils apartment complex received the following strange e-mail from one of the Resident Assistants:
Hey Everyone,
We have been notified about a pellet gun incident, going off from a Nevils apartment balcony, in the Courtyard on Wednesday night 1/23/08. Our East Campus Hall Director Natasha Pedroza is asking for anyone who has information to come forward. This incident concerns the safety of our East Campus community. Thank you for your time and cooperation!
Best,
[REDACTED]
I have no idea if anyone talked to Ms. Pedroza, but I would encourage anyone information to e-mail the Voice about it—anonymity guaranteed, friends! I hadn’t realized that East Campus had gotten so serious that people have been reduced to packing heat, but I guess that’s what the world is coming to.
Just imagine Ron sharpshooting from the perimeter while Patrick Ewing dominates the low post, and you’ll have some idea of how great the Hoyas were in the 80s. Or something…
You can check out all the old Sports Illustrated Hoyas covers here; this one might be the creepiest.
—Tim Fernholz, Contributing Editor
Former Hoya Editor-in-Chief Nick Timiraos (CAS ‘06), now a professional journalist, e-mails a comment on my take on the Hoya’s attempts to go independent:
The Hoya’s one-time deficit (I think it was in 2001, but you’d have to check) is actually the genesis for the independence push. Why? Two reasons: First, if The Hoya had been allowed to keep even a portion of its annual profits, the university wouldn’t have had to bail anybody out. The business would have been able to operate the way businesses normally do—saving a share of income to pay for a year in the red, brought on by, say, an advertising slump. (It’s how The Corp is able to operate even in years when it loses money). Second, that one-year loss should never have happened in the first place if the university (read: the media board) had been doing its job. The losses stemmed primarily from advertising checks that were never cashed by the ad manager (and I don’t know the story there, whether it was incompetence/negligence/a second semester senior who was lazy). The media board—the “publisher” of The Hoya—was asleep at the switch and never asked why checks weren’t being cashed. They simply didn’t notice. (So much for that tired old line that the university is some sort of “protector” of the newspaper.) Why didn’t the editors of the paper notice? I wish they had, but even that would have been difficult. Why? The university didn’t allow the newspaper to access its own bank statements (because of some red tape way that students could be allowed to log onto faculty access, the program where such accounts are kept). Yes, this sounds like a great way to run a business.
In sum, the university failed to prevent losses that never should have happened, and may have made them worse. They then used those losses as an excuse for punishing future staffs of the newspaper by denying them any use of their profits. I could go on, but I think the point is clear here—the university sees the newspaper as a “club,” when it really wants to be, and ought to be, a business.
This is a really roundabout way of saying that independence isn’t just about “cash money” as your post asserts, though I don’t dispute that it’s a key driver. It’s more simple: the staff will always care more about the newspaper than the university will.
Nick makes a good point about savings and the difficulties of accessing financial records, but I think it goes a little to far to blame the University for failing to ensure that Hoya staff did their jobs. That said, I think my argument about the Hoya’s motivations is still pretty strong. Nick says that the Hoya wants to be a business, but I’d say that a newspaper, especially a college newspaper, ought to want to be something different than that: a public trust and a voice for students. Not that the Hoya—or the Voice, for that matter—can’t be both a public trust and a business, but independence, at least at Georgetown, doesn’t seem to affect the former goal all that much.
Our friendly rivals at the Hoya seem interested in again renewing the fight for independence from the University, as this GWU Hatchet story reports. While the University’s decision to file for a trademark on the Hoya’s name is a new step, nothing else has changed since last year, when the University put the kibosh on the Hoya’s plans to flee University ownership by threatening legal action over the name. Voice writers, for reasons of journalistic principle and neighborly behavior, havesupported the Hoya’s efforts; I certainly do. But reading that article in the Hatchet, I thought it worthwhile to correct a misrepresentation by our more pedigreed newspaper brethren: Their desire to become independent doesn’t really have much to do with journalism, and it has everything do with cash money.
Georgetown administration doesn’t interfere or censor the journalism that students here do, at least not while I’ve been at the Voice—and we look critically at most everything that Georgetown administrators are up to. The only thing we are forbidden from doing, as the article notes, is publishing advertisements advocating condom manufacturers or pro-choice groups. But we can advocate for them in our self-created content as much as we like (something the Voice generally does). So while it would be nice to sell those ads, and in principle newspapers should be independent, don’t get the impression that our friends at the Hoya are sacrificing themselves on the altar of the first amendment.
Basically, they want their profits. On average, the Hoya’s budget is about $250,000. Before their last independence bid, one Hoya editor said they gave as much as $70,000 in profit back to the University, but that bid led to renegotiations about how much the University can take, which could now be as little as $16,000. The rest is spent by the Hoya on the various expenses of putting out their paper. The Voice’s annual budget is usually just under $50,000, and we expect to make about $27,000 of that in ad revenue; the rest will come from University grants (thanks, Media Board!). Other University media, including Ye Domesday Book, WGTB, GUTV, The Fire This time, etc…, also receive Media Board grants. The Hoya’s kick-back goes toward all of these grants, and the University provides the rest. (And, as the the University notes in the Hatchet story, it hasn’t always been this way—the University bailed the Hoya out of a deficit a few years ago).
The Hoya wants to keep their money and devote it towards resources for their paper, which could include more and higher salaries for their staff, more cameras and computers, prettier paper, a larger travel budget—all the things that newspaper folk desire. It’s completely reasonable. But it isn’t a fight about censorship.
In fact, the only time I’ve heard about censorship issues on real news content at Georgetown concerned a story a Voice reporter uncovered about certain legacy students getting huge admissions preferences. The parents of the students threatened to sue the paper if it printed their names, and Georgetown told our editors they wouldn’t defend them in court. The story ran without the names, and was weaker for it. While this is certainly a bad break, and bad for journalism, here’s a question: Could an independent college newspaper have survived the legal battle successfully?
Whenever the staff discusses how much people want to know about what goes on behind the scenes at the paper, someone inevitably—and rightly—notes that no one cares about that kind of “inside baseball” info. But PBS has decided that some of its viewers must be interested in the backstory of a college paper and is airing “The Paper,” a documentary about Penn State’s Daily Collegian. From the short preview video, it seems to be a pretty accurate rendition of the day-to-day banality that only ends (for a little while) when we send the paper to the printers, down to the foul-mouthed martyr to the first amendment (doesn’t remind me of anyone) and the self-consciously serious debate over what makes it to the readers. It’s darkly humorous that the clip deals with gay bashing prompted by the Collegian’s decision to run a picture of gay couples engaged in some PDA—something both the Voice and the Hoya have dealt with right here at Georgetown. College papers everywhere face the same prejudices, apparently.
I’m not all about self-promotion (just mostly about it) but here’s a link to an article I wrote at Campus Progress, an online web-magazine for college progressives. The article is a response to a different and silly piece by a writer named Courtney Martin, who accuses our entire generation of not being angry and active enough about political issues. Needless to say, I disagreed. The relevant Georgetown factor is that my response grew out of a blog post I wrote here almost a year ago, and obviously my own first-hand knowledge of student activism comes from spending my time reporting on the work of our own variousactivistgroups. Anyways, a query: do you think college students, and Georgetown students, are doing enough to change the world? Or are we co-opted by the man?
God forbid we have a blog and not venture to link into the sprawling monstrosity that is Nick Denton’s world. Anyways, “Gridskipper” has published a not-so-bad guide to D.C.’s best pupusas, “El Salvador’s greatest export after MS-13 and Efren Ramirez.” I’ve never had a pupusa—apparently a corn meal patty stuffed with melted cheese and other goodies—myself, despite my love for D.C.’s Salvadorian influences. I’m just dedicated to Julia’s Empanadas, which are tasty and great, even—perhaps especially—at 2 a.m. But now I’m going to broaden my taste, and I suggest y’all do, too. And if you have any other ideas for fine D.C. foodstuffs the rest of us haven’t chowed down on yet, feel free to let us know in the comments.
— Tim Fernholz, Editor in Chief Flickr photo from user Tofu666
The Supreme Court announced today that it will consider a challenge to Washington, D.C.’s strict gun ban laws, marking the first time the Court will consider the basic meaning of the 2nd Amendment. We’re glad the court took up the case, but we hope they follow the rest of the advice in our recent editorial on the subject, which urges the Justices to uphold the ban. Given the rightward lean of the court, it’s hard to say if the justices will agree with our interpretation, but as the Times notes, “court-watchers who try to predict outcomes in advance do so at their peril.” Right.
The Voice has covered the controversy since the get-go last spring and into this fall’s decision by Mayor Adrian Fenty to appeal the case. No doubt we’ll keep you posted on this issue; look for Voice reporters to be in the court for oral arguments in the case, expected this spring.
With our 2-0 men’s b-ball team looking like no mean shakes on the court, it’s worth checking out this video ESPN made prior to the season. It’s mainly an interview with JT III, who doesn’t say anything ground breaking, but the practice footage of the team was interesting, especially for those of us who follow the team but don’t really know anything about basketball (that’s what I have a sports editor for—what’s a pick, again?).
It’s particularly galling, in light of our recent editorial on the subject, to see D.C. police apparently discounting a rape allegation from an intoxicated woman. Even worse was their response to a local do-gooder who brought a female officer to the scene to try to get the victim some aid—they handcuffed him and roughed him up a little before sending him on his way. The incident took place in Adams Morgan, a night-life district frequented by Georgetown students. The police district in question is investigating what happened that night, so we’ll see if any of the officers involved receive reprimands. Oh, and the police involved were part of Chief Cathy Lanier’s “All Hands on Deck” Intiative, which is supposed to “improve community policing.”
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, Georgetown University's preeminent newsmagazine since 1969. The opinions expressed in Vox Populi are those of their authors unless specifically stated.
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