When you venture someplace you haven’t been before—especially when you do so without a full set of supplies—only a lucky few find the right path on their first try. Such is the case with our recent article on matters at the Faculty of Architecture, the criticisms of which you can see in two letters to your right.
These letters are important to clarify the matter at hand, but they are even more interesting when you start to examine the root causes of why we may not have gotten things quite right. The natural assumption made by anyone who is concerned about how they are represented in the media is either that the reporter did not do enough research or the editor cut the story to make it more interesting, thereby eliminating the nuances of a complex issue. Sometimes this is the case. But more often than not, the problem comes from something deeper, something we here at the Varsity butt our heads up against every day.
That problem is best seen in a survey of working journalists recently conducted by several Simon Fraser University professors. In it, they found that a whopping 86 per cent felt the biggest factor that shaped their coverage was lack of resources. A full sixty per cent of those surveyed say they ran into this problem “often or very often.” By resources, what is meant is the time to pursue an article and the space to write about it thoroughly.
Not surprisingly, these resource limitations are even more acute at a student newspaper like ours. While newspapers serving cities of 55,000 operate on multi-million dollar budgets, we squeak by on a tiny percentage of that amount. Compared to other student services like the student government (which receives more than $20 per year per student) or Hart House (which receives more than $100 per student) we squeak by on $1.25 per student and whatever we can get from advertising. This is not to speak ill of SAC or Hart House, only to say from what it takes to sustain other student services, you can imagine how hard it is to publish 55 issues of a newspaper per year with this limited resource base.
The only proper way to cover this, one of the largest campuses in North America, is to employ more people from more programs to cover the faculties. What’s also needed are resources to print papers that are large enough to include the full details of that coverage—so we don’t have to edit dramatically as we did with this one article in order to make it fit. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to do this. In fact, even maintaining our existing operations has been increasingly difficult in the slowing economy of the last two years.
Does this sound like an excuse? It’s really meant as an explanation. We do some things very well, including staying on top of educational affairs, providing a space for students to debate ideas, covering our campus teams and science on campus and providing training on a campus with no formal journalism school.
This year we’ve tried to push that even further and cover the workings of individual faculties and programs. And we’ve found it very, very hard to keep it all together. This goes especially for many of our associate editors, who, like you, are in school most of the time, but also have to file one story per week, and do so only for tiny honoraria at the end of the year.
We’d like to have the time to thoroughly cover every faculty, just as we would like to have the page counts so we can publicize the wide variety of student events on campus. But we can’t. And it frustrates all of us here to no end.
None of this is to dismiss the thoughtful and detailed criticisms outlined to the right. We just want to say that when mistakes are made—and yes, we admit we’re not infallible—it is usually not because we are being bad journalists, but simply because we don’t have the time and resources needed to be the best journalists we can.
We’d like to find long term solutions to this problem, though, not just continue to provide short term explanations, and anyone with thoughts on this matter is thoroughly encouraged to toss their two cents our way.
