David Spett

I’m thrilled to announce that North by Northwestern, a member of the student journalism network I oversee, just took home the Society of Professional Journalists’ prize for best student magazine in the country.

NBN initially won more than a half-dozen awards in SPJ’s regional competition, including best magazine article, best online feature and best online commentary in its region. Now the magazine has won big at the national level as well.

For more information, see SPJ’s press release announcing all the award winners. Also check out the full (and lengthy) list of NBN’s awards since their founding in 2006. Congratulations, North by Northwestern — we’re so proud of your accomplishments!

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

After running an op-ed by Peter Funt that decries the downfall of high school journalism classes, the Boston Globe turned to Campus Progress for some responses. Several of our web magazine’s current and former writers joined me in commenting.

From Emily Rutherford, a CP.org staff writer: “When I recollect the very low quality of my own high-school paper, I can’t help but think that it wouldn’t be a great tragedy if the school no longer had the funds to print copies.”

From Ned Resnikoff, a former CP.org staff writer: “I can’t bring myself to mourn the passing of journalism classes from the high school curriculum.”

From Matt Zeitlin, another former CP staff writer: “I don’t think we should care whether or not future freshmen will have trouble ‘succeeding in college journalism courses’—we should worry about whether or not they have the opportunities to do journalism.”

And a contrarian take from yours truly: “The skills — interpersonal, management, technological and ethical — taught through journalism (and journalism courses) are useful to innumerable situations in life. Journalism is a uniquely efficient, effective way to teach young people to handle conflicting interests, meet deadlines, manage a staff, and hold their school and local officials’ feet to the fire.”

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

Michael Tracey, editor of our sponsored publication the TCNJ Perspective, joined me in this month’s Student Press Law Center podcast to discuss the benefits and pitfalls of nonprofit journalism, particularly at the college level.

Give it a listen:

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by Katie Andriulli

(Flickr/Jonathan D. Blundell)

The Perspective, a Campus Progress-supported publication at the College of New Jersey, interviewed Governor Mike Huckabee recently when he visited campus. In the interview, Huckabee discusses many controversial topics, including health care reform and the recent travails of RNC Chairman Michael Steele. But Huckabee’s comments on gay marriage, wherein he likens it to incest and polygamy, have proved to be the most incendiary:

“You don’t go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal,” he said of same-sex marriage. “That would be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let’s go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them.”

Unsurprisingly, Huckabee is now trying to distance himself from the comments, issuing a response claiming that the student reporter “grossly distorted” their conversation, and even going so far as to say that he hopes the reporter will “find a career other than journalism.” He also calls for a public release of the interview tapes. So, like good journalists do, the paper issued their own response containing the taped interview which clearly shows that the reporter represented the conversation truthfully.

Looks like it’s TCNJ Perspective 1 – Huckabee 0.

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

One of our grantees at Northwestern University is traveling to Washington to question two top Obama aides during a live webcast tomorrow morning.

Online magazine North by Northwestern (NBN) beat out student publications from across the country in a Huffington Post competition to come up with the best question for Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes.

Dozens of questions were submitted in the initial round of the contest. HuffPo then selected the 13 best – four of which were from student media groups we sponsor – and encouraged the public to vote on the best one. Nearly 150,000 votes later, a question from North by Northwestern – about increasing minority enrollment in higher education – was crowned the winner.

North by Northwestern’s editor, Amanda Litman, will be traveling to Washington to join the webcast with Duncan and Barnes. She’ll ask her publication’s winning question – “How does the White House plan to encourage minority students in high school to pursue higher education?” – as well as a few of the other student submissions.

Major props to North by Northwestern for its victory — and also to the TCNJ Perspective for the questions it submitted to the competition.

View the winning question:

View the three runner-up questions from our network:

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

A Mar. 28 column in American University’s student newspaper, The Eagle, has sparked controversy and incited anger beyond AU’s campus by arguing that a woman who consumes alcohol and walks with a man back to his room is implicitly consenting to sex.

As you might expect, students on campus responded quickly. Our sponsored magazine at AU, American Way of Life (AWOL), wrote:

The response from the university community against [columnist Alex] Knepper and the Eagle was swift and unforgiving; Eagle newspaper stands were vandalized, some labeled with signs reading “NO ROOM FOR RAPE APOLOGISTS.” Various parties from the Women’s Initiative to Student Government representatives immediately decried Knepper’s statement as offensive and appalling [...] The comments section on the online verison of Knepper’s column was eventually frozen after death threats and personal attacks overtook any sane dialogue that had been occurring.

But AWOL points out that critics outside the university might not be aware of the bigger picture here: In fact, the problem at The Eagleisn’t simply related to this one column.

In November 2009, the paper editorialized that students’ tuition shouldn’t go toward the campus’ women’s center because the center benefits a “special subgroup.”And in an earlier column, Knepper argued that the women’s center was merely a front group for feminist activists on campus.

AWOL concludes: “This latest controversy over Knepper’s disavowal of the existence of date rape seems to be the logical trajectory of several articles’ worth of increasingly provocative content.”

[AWOL: Why is The Eagle so hostile to feminists?]

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) just named one of our brand-new grantees, North by Northwestern at NU, the Best Student Magazine in its region (Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky). SPJ was so wowed that they decided not to award a second or third place finisher.

That’s not all: North by Northwestern also took 2nd place in the Independent Online Student Publication category; 1st place in the Non-Fiction Magazine Article category for this story on so-called “expiration dating”; 2nd place in the same category for a story on suburban slumlords; 1st place in the Online Feature Reporting category for an interactive graphic on university presidents’ inauguration speeches; 1st place in the Online Opinion & Commentary category for columns by Sourav Bhowmick; and 3rd place in the Editorial Cartooning category for cartoons by Matthew Leib.

Talk about cleaning up! In the next round of SPJ’s competition, the stakes get higher: North by Northwestern will compete for national prizes against winners from other regions.

Major congratulations to the magazine’s editors and staff for their great work.

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

Campus Progress’ sponsored publication at The College of New Jersey, the TCNJ Perspective, got noticed by a prominent New Jersey politics blog for its story on Newark Mayor Cory Booker charging the state school $10,000 for a recent speaking engagement.

The Perspective wrote that the honorarium seemed suspicious:

Is it customary for sitting elected officials to accept such large payments for speaking engagements at colleges? Not for Cory Booker, at least. Just one day prior to his TCNJ appearance, the Newark mayor delivered a strikingly similar lecture at neighboring Rider University. That engagement fee? $0.00.

The Perspective’s staffers couldn’t reach Booker’s office for comment. Commenters on the site are saying the money must have gone to Booker’s nonprofit, Newark Now! and that the Rider appearance was for a campaign event.

This is an interesting issue, but I doubt Booker pocketed the money (or that The College of New Jersey would let him). He’s been scandal-free for so long, and that would be quite a scandal.

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

You heard that right: If you think Twitter is for old people while Facebook is for the young’ns, think again.

A Pew report released last month — just noticed yesterday by the indispensable @NiemanLab — found the median age of a Twitter user to be 31, while the median age of a Facebook user is now 33. Back in May 2008, Facebook’s median age was 26.

Credit: Pew Research Center Publications

Since we are a youth organization that’s always thinking about the best ways to reach our demographic, this shift has big implications for Campus Progress. We use pages and, occasionally, ads to reach young people on Facebook. On Twitter, we’ve got an account as well as lists that categorize our members by the program and department they’re involved in.

Of course, we’ve all seen Twitter accounts belonging to users who signed up only to use the service infrequently or abandon it altogether. (Research indicates that a huge proportion of Twitter users are barely active.) When conducting its survey, Pew asked subjects if they ever use Twitter, but not how often they use it. The real question needs to be: What’s the median age of activeTwitter users compared to to active Facebook users.

I haven’t seen anyone try to quantify Facebook users’ level of activity — leave a comment if you know of such a study — but my totally un-scientific sense is that there tends to be less deviation among Facebook users: Almost everyone I know checks it at least once a day.

So maybe we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions just yet about which service is “better” for reaching young people. If age were all that mattered, MySpace, with a median user age of 26, would be the unquestionable choice for reaching our audience.

As my friend and former professor Eszter Hargittai has written, there are substantial differences in the way people use social networking not just based on their age, but also based on their socioeconomic status, ethnicity and religion. Campaigns and organizations like ours that want to attract a broad audience need to utilize a variety of outreach tactics and social media tools, not just one or two.

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

The editor at large of one of our sponsored publications was arrested in late September for chalking on campus sidewalks at the University of Arizona.

The editor, Evan Lisull, was charged with a class one misdemeanor carrying a maximum sentence of six months in jail and a $2,500 fine. He was ultimately able to avoid jail time.

Lisull wrote “chalk is speech” and “freedom of expression” on campus sidewalks. He was expressing opposition to the arrest of his friend, Jacob Miller, a graduate student at UA who chalked during a protest of UA’s budget cuts.

Lisull is editor at large of the CP-sponsored Kosmopolitan Online at Kalamazoo College. He’s written a regular column for UA’s school newspaper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat, and he edits his own blog on campus issues at DesertLamp.com.

See more at the National Student News Service and the Arizona Daily Wildcat.

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)