CoPress

Social media has the unique ability to turn interpersonal spats into broader points of public debate. A recent “Twitterfight” between the current editor of The Independent Florida Alligator and one of its former editors neatly served to demonstrate that point. The Alligator, it seems, is facing a crisis: Nobody wants to lead it in the spring semester.

I’m not a gossip columnist and I’ve no wish to rehash the gory details of their argument. What I am interested in is the distilled substance of the dispute: What can we, as college newsroom leaders, do to create an environment that attracts, retains and encourages student journalists to invest their time and energy into putting out a product? All the great ideas and all the hot new technology are for naught if we don’t have people willing to create content, because ultimately the content is what matters.

I come from a background of community college journalism, having spent a number of years on the editorial staff of The Advocate at Contra Costa College, a weekly broadsheet with a circulation of about 2,500. Though small, it is consistently recognized for excellence by the Associated Collegiate Press. (Most recently, my successor as editor-in-chief, Brett Abel, just had his year as editor honored with a 2008 ACP Pacemaker Award.)

We do this despite operating with virtually no ad revenue, a tiny departmental-funded budget, donated and hand-me-down computers and an entirely-unpaid staff with a relatively high turnover rate. If you work for The Advocate, you do it for the love of the game.

So what makes the difference? While there are some X-factors – like our goofy adviser – that just can’t be accounted for, I believe there is a method to The Advocate’s success that can be applied elsewhere.

• The newsroom is home. It’s kept open 60 to 70 hours a week, and staffers are encouraged to make it their social center. Come nuke your lunch in our microwave, do your homework in the layout area, chat it up with the editors. Editors share one narrow glass box office, and the door’s almost always open.
• Our newsroom is a silent reminder of a tradition of excellence. Its walls are lined with award plaques, photos of past staffers and pages from previous issues of The Advocate – “Terrorists attack U.S.,” “Aide survives shooting,” “Shock, anger, grief.” This isn’t just self-aggrandizement – the effect is to tell staffers, “You’re in a place that has done great journalism for a long time, and these are the real people who did it. You can be one of them.”
• Hierarchy is clear, but formality is at a minimum. If the editor-in-chief has to “pull rank,” there’s already something gone wrong.
• If someone wants and/or deserves an editor position, they get one. If a slot doesn’t exist, we’ll make one up. Usually, we have more editors than we have staff writers. This is a feature, not a bug.
• Editors write. They write a lot. If you’re an editor, you’re expected to write more than the staff writers. This goes for the editor-in-chief, too.
• We’re a newsy paper, and unapologetically so. That’s not to say we don’t run features – but the front page better be at least two-thirds news. The five front page stories from Nov. 19: College budget cuts, an anti-Prop. 8 protest, a major raid on a local gang, solar panel installations and the firing of the football coach.
• The Advocate has a Rodney Dangerfield complex toward its campus. To us, our college never gets the respect it deserves. The local daily ignores it, its PR department is dysfunctional and its status as the smallest campus of a three-college county district guarantees political weakness. This makes us fight that much harder. We believe deeply in our college’s value to its community.
• Our slogan is “The Weekly Student Voice of Contra Costa College.” But it’s more than a slogan. We believe, as a staff, that we are THE student voice – the only effective advocate for students at a campus with ineffectual student government (is that redundant?)
• We have rivalries and hatreds – aimed not at each other, but at the outside world. We openly despise and deride our local professional daily, while routinely scooping it. To lose out on a story to them is the ultimate failure. We read many other college newspapers – critiquing them, laughing at them, learning from them.
• The editor-in-chief is popularly elected by the staff at the end of the previous year, and anyone with at least one semester on the Editorial Board can run. I wasn’t ever on a staff that picked the wrong candidate – and I lost an election or two.
• Work hard but don’t forget to play hard. When we go to national conventions, we invite the whole Editorial Board. They’re treated as team-building exercises. We eat dinner together, go sightseeing together, party together, celebrate together. At state conventions, the entire staff is invited.
• Alumni relationships and connections are valued and nurtured. Though I’m now 2,300 miles from CCC, I chat frequently with current staff. Ex-staffers get a lifetime dead-tree subscription for free. There’s a Facebook group. It’s like the Mafia – once you’re in, you’re in for life.

Taken alone, none of these single pieces explains much of anything. But as parts of a whole, they contribute to a healthy, thriving newsroom culture that makes its staff feel important and valued, even though they’ll never see a dime of pay. We don’t feel like we’re cogs in a big, impersonal machine just “working for the weekend.” Instilled instead is the belief that we’re working for a cause greater than ourselves, that what The Advocate does – and by extension, what journalists do – has value far beyond money, and that we can forever be proud of what our newspaper has accomplished.

Far be it from me to think that I have all the answers – but if even one of my suggestions proves to be useful, then this frigid, snowy Saturday night and Sunday morning spent typing will not have been in vain.