In case ourcoverage of the Hoya’s delayed independence (not to mention their news story, editorial and letter from the editor) left you confused about the Media Board’s logic, Vox has some of the memos that show the Media Board’s reasoning behind their sanctions.
First, we have the memo Director of Student Programs Erika Cohen-Derr sent on behalf of the Media Board to the leadership of the Hoya on April 22 announcing their sanctions:
According to emails obtained by the Voice, in mid-April the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action filed a complaint with Media Board, the funding board that oversees student media, over the Hoya’s April Fools Issue. On April 22, Media Board issued sanctions, including a one year delay of the Hoya’s planned independence.
The Hoya appealed Media Board’s ruling, citing their unwillingness to remain tied to the University, but their appeal was denied on June 16, documents show. A three person appeals board composed of Father Christopher Steck, S.J., GUSA President Calen Angert (MSB ‘11), and Faculty Senate President Wayne Davis decided that Media Board had acted within their rights and that the ruling should not be overturned.
The Voice will have more information in our Friday issue.
The Hoya’s Independence movement has been in the works for almost five years now. In that time, that lovable bi-weekly rag has been doted on by corporate sponsors and potentially denied use of its own name by the University.
However, it seems like their efforts for Hoyapendence may be nearing fruition. In last Wednesday’s GUSA Senate meeting, one Senator remarked that The Hoya’s independence will relieve the Media Board of its greatest source of income, and largest expenditure.
In a conversation yesterday, Senator Matt Wagner (SFS `11) said that when the six University Funding Board meet on Feb. 11 to allot money to the six funding boards (of which the Media Board is one, and SAC, of Sophia Behnia fame, is another), the typically unobstrusive Media Board will take more time than usual to present its funding requests to the University:
“The Media Board is usually not even looked at for a lot of time because its requests are usually the same every year. But this time with the Hoya not being a big part of the picture, the picture—I assume the picture is going to be very different as their requests will not be the same.”
The suspense is almost unbearable, but in the meantime, you can join The Georgetown Heckler’s Jack Stuef in his solemn remembrance of the “Save the Hoya” movement.
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?
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, a weekly newsmagazine at Georgetown University. Opinions expressed in posts are those of their author alone unless otherwise stated.
Entries (RSS)