We received a perceptive comment from a reader noting that we might be missing the point of this blog if we don’t comment on the process of developing our stories and describe how the big decisions are made. I think the note was right on. The design of this blog was to take last year’s news editor’s blog (almost solely dedicated to posts about process, and pretty successful in that regard) and expand that model with a broader scope (journalism in general) with more contributors (the entire managing board). So far we haven’t come through with enough posts on how we arrive at our final product. This is something we’ve already been discussing lately - blogging is a difficult endeavor, even Josh’s popular attempt became tedious once the semester spiraled into “Ahmadineamania” - but we will definitely try harder. Thanks for the feedback! (incidentally, check out this NYTimes piece featuring a Wal-Mart blog…it speaks to both an interesting media project by an American corporation and the difficulties of blogging authentically without sounding like pr)
On that note, I’ve been meaning to write about how we covered the plagiarism at Teachers College. Notice the title of this post uses specific language - “TC Plagiarism,” as opposed to “Constantine,” “Noose Victim,” or anything else that may get bandied about in other media outlets or almost certainly the blogosphere. As we saw it, the story here was that a Teachers College professor had allegedly committed plagiarism, copying without accreditation the work of a fellow faculty member and two students. Many newspapers and blogs played up the noose incident of October (it catches their readers’ eye, I guess), some even throwing in loose allusions to the possibility that Prof. Constantine placed the noose on her own door. When we first got wind of the story, we knew we had to be very careful about the information we received, where we got it, and how we reported on it.