Campus news outlets produce authoritative knowledge. They publish regularly, have an editing process and employ dozens of student journalists. Most readers believe they can learn and confirm facts by reading campus news.
But what is the process that creates authoritative knowledge? How do campus publications choose, report and edit news events?
I critiqued The Quad in my Nov. 2 op-ed, calling for a more deliberate editing process for news blogs. This week, I interviewed Tufts Daily Editor-in-Chief Giovanni Russonello and Daniel Rosen, his counterpart at the Observer, about the editing process for written publications. (Michael Hawley, editor-in-chief of the Primary Source, did not respond to my e-mail.) I will outline the Observer's process next week. I hope this series of op-ed will shed light on what is often considered a black box of authoritative knowledge.
The Daily is divided into several sections that appear in print, including News, Features, Arts, Op-Ed and Sports. Above this group is the managing board: two managing editors and the editor-in-chief. Each section has an executive editor who leads the process of choosing story ideas, assigning them to writers and editing the finished articles. The process varies slightly for each section, but I will focus on News.
Russonello said the News department has a number of editors and assistant editors, usually around 10 total. Each has one or two beats, or topics they follow closely, including the police department, student government, the diversity office and other higher educational institutions, to name a few.
The whole department meets on Sunday nights to discuss ideas from each beat and other events happening on campus. On Monday, the executive editor sends an e-mail assigning the stories for the week; the section has a plan for news coverage for each day of the week on Monday, although one to three articles each day could be different from that plan to reflect newsworthy stories that arise midweek. The executive editor leads this process, with help and advice from the managing board.
Articles for News come in when they have been finished, hopefully by noon the day before they are published but often later. The article then goes through six reads before it goes to print. An assistant editor makes grammatical changes and checks basic facts, followed by a full editor who makes similar changes and adjusts the article to the Daily's style. Then the executive editor reads all the articles in his or her section, followed by a member of the managing board.
The layout team assembles the section around 10 or 11 p.m. A copy editor reads the entire section, and a managing board member enters the changes. A second, more senior, copy editor looks at the final pages before the whole issue is sent to the printer, usually around 2 a.m.
Russonello said this process has not changed significantly since he started working for the Daily in fall 2006, except for one improvement he implemented as executive news editor in spring 2008. He noticed that assistant editors would make major changes to articles early in the process, changes that more senior editors would edit further. In effect, this would present a new article at each stage of the editing process, and so he limited assistant editors' ability to make major changes to articles.
Russonello said the fact-checking process is rigorous. When he edits, he highlights and confirms every fact, either with a Tufts Web site or another publication, but never Wikipedia.com. In many cases, editors will contact sources quoted in articles to confirm facts.
The detailed editing process at the Daily impresses me. Getting more people involved in the process is challenging, but the Daily handles it well in a way that trains future editors and benefits from everyone's contributions. It is a very professional process.
I was, however, surprised to hear the Daily considers another publication to be an appropriate source for fact checking. Without knowing the other publication's process, how does the Daily know the report is accurate? What if two publications confirm reports by citing each other in a circular reference? If there is no other way to confirm a fact, a conventional way of citing it is to cite the news source it came from. I challenge the Daily to confirm facts as close to the source as possible.
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Duncan Pickard is a senior majoring in history. He is the Public Editor of the Media Advocacy Board and his opinions are strictly his own. He can be reached at tuftspubliceditor@gmail.com or through his blog at www.tuftsroundtable.org/publiceditor.
