The College Journalist's Dilemma: Hated by the Cool Kids
When you're a kid, spreading the details of the misdeeds of others far and wide gets you branded a snitch and ruins your social life. But when you grow up, doing the same thing gets you branded a "journalist," and gets you invited to boring parties! So you can see the dilemma faced by the "college journalist:" old enough to be a reporter, young enough to still be hated by everyone, for snitching.
Welcome to the life of Daniel Gross, editor of Towson University's newspaper, The Towerlight. He got a big scoop about R.A.'s being forced to resign, for drinking. Naming names and all! Then a *mysterious person or persons* went and stole all 3,000 copies of the paper. And on top of that, everyone's mad at Daniel for being such an intrepid reporter:
Gross said the backlash from university officials and fellow students [at the story] was furious. Many said the Towerlight had unnecessarily embarrassed the students by printing private information. Gross said several students told him he was "on everybody's hate list."
It's the dilemma of the college journalist: you can get props from your fellow students, or you can get props from the type of people that read Romenesko, but not both. That's why most college newspapers suck—because the people reading Romenesko probably aren't going to come down to your dorm and sleep with you.
Nobody said journalism was easy. You have our sympathies, Daniel Gross. If you can wait it out until graduation, maybe you can get a real media job so you can hang out with a bunch of other self-loathing masochists. Until then, take heart in the fact that you've provided the world with an amusing college newspaper scandal—and the world (meaning online content repurposing factories) needs that.
