Hey, everybody.
Week two is under our collective belt. Embrace the cold — it’s not done yet, if the weather tellers can be trusted. And though it was a short week, there was no dearth of news.
The most significant topic was undoubtedly Student Senate, with allegations of its members stealing newspapers emerging and a dramatic general body meeting Wednesday.
The New Political published an article on its website Tuesday sharing information from Student Trustee Keith Wilbur and Student Senate President Anna Morton about Post newspapers that were stolen last spring.
Post editors discussed the article and concluded that we should do our own reporting before deciding what, if anything, we would publish ourselves. Reporters contacted those sources who were quoted in the article and even those who were not, including Ohio University Police Chief Andrew Powers and the six lower-level Senate members who were named as part of the theft.
It’s a good thing we did. Several of those members who were named without being contacted by The New Political vehemently refuted they took any part in the crime. Additionally, after speaking with Wilbur and Morton, we could find no evidence to support the allegations.
It is, of course, easy for us to play Monday morning quarterback after one of our competitors published the article. It is not my intention to critique The New Political’s work, but rather to offer some transparency into the line of thinking behind our decisions.
We received some questions about the article that briefly profiled each of the Student Senate vice presidential candidates. Associate Dean of Students Patricia McSteen emailed me about the article, which ran in Tuesday’s edition of The Post, asking why there were no photos of the two female candidates but headshots of each of their male peers.
We asked the candidates if they were able to come into the newsroom to take a quick photo. By press time, we didn’t have photos of everyone. I made the choice to run the photos we had rather than nixing the lot.
Turns out, however, we had a photo on file of Mary Kate Gallagher and somehow missed it. Perhaps we need some sleep. Mea culpa.
The misstep was more than a simple blunder, as McSteen succinctly points out.
“What your readers see is just as influential as what they read,” McSteen wrote.
She is, of course, quite right.
Email Ryan at rc348710@ohiou.edu.
