Covering Your Campus

Book excerpt: Newsrooms--and campus newsrooms are no exception--are chaotic, fast-paced, and lively. That's why we love them. But reporting news is an important business, and everyone involved in that business needs some guidance and structure. Covering Your Campus provides the advice, rules, guidelines, and encouragement that every campus newspaper staff needs, without talking down to students or telling them what to do. The reporters and editors of campus newspapers aren't yet professional journalists, but courts have determined that student journalists share the rights and responsibilities of professionals, just as much as campus newspapers are genuine community publications. Laying down the foundation for a healthy publication, Covering Your Campus further helps guide students toward making their newspapers and websites even more indispensable to their campus community life. Its aim, which it shares with the student journalists it addresses, is to make the news, opinions, and entertainment offered in student publications reliable and highly esteemed.