The Town Hall

I'm sorry for the delay in posting this: last night was a particularly busy one in the office and this morning, I overslept.

As noted in Bwog and in Spec, last night was the Town Hall.

First, a note on objectivity. In one of our weekly diversity meetings where we were discussing the meeting, somebody raised the point that if this were another prominent or large student group talking about diversity, we would cover the Town Hall, and that, by that logic, it would make sense for us to cover it. Further, there was reason to believe that students who didn't make it to the event would be interested in what happened, as would alumni, faculty, and other members of the University community. So we decided to do a story.

That said, for purposes of objectivity, we obviously couldn't be involved in it. So I put the story up on our internal list and hoped that somebody would take it--I didn't want to choose the writer for fear of being accused of bias. I asked Jacob, one of our deputy campus news editors, to do the final reads, and that was that. I was, in fact, quoted in the story, but my quotes were all that I knew about the article until I saw it online after it had been published at about 5 a.m. Same goes for Erin, John, and Amanda. For that matter, nobody on the Managing Board with the possible exception of our production editor saw the story before it went to print.

Now, as for the event itself. Much hay has already been made about Jimmy's quote "I was struck people feel so strongly about being misquoted." At the risk of being mocked, I'm going to say something similar. I wasn't surprised at the fact that people were upset about getting misquoted--heck, when I'm misquoted, I get mad as hell. Facts, words are important--I wouldn't be in this job if I thought otherwise--and you should get mad about it. (You should also, as I have said several times in the past few days, tell us about it so we can evaluate whether a correction is warranted.)

What surprised me--and, while I haven't spoken to him since the quote, what I think Jimmy was trying to get at--is how much people said we did misquote people, how many facts we published that were incorrect, how much we fundamentally misunderstood the stories we. write. It was a comment raised by probably two-thirds of the people who spoke at the event. In one form or another, most non-Spec people who were in attendance did not trust us to report accurately on them and did not believe what they read in the paper. And while I, like every person who has ever worked for or read Spectator, have heard grumblings, mutterings, and the occasional rant from people that the Spec is a worthless rag that can't get anything right, I was surprised at how prevalent the perception seemed to be.

What I had never heard were the points that Keondra and Aliyah made that people don't want to be quoted in Spec because they don't trust us. It knocked me back how much distrust of the paper there was in the room, and that was important for me to hear. If you can't trust Spec, there's no reason for you to read it, there's no reason for you to talk to its reporters, and there's really no reason for you to write for it--especially if you think, as Six raised, that your editors will change your meaning.

There were a lot of points brought up last night, all of which deserve our attention. If students don't know who they're supposed to talk to on Spec, as one member of the Muslim Students Association charged, that's something that needs to be addressed. If students feel as though we don't care about them, that's something that needs to be addressed. There were a number of strong points that were made, and while I can't say what they will be--mostly because we haven't had a formal debriefing yet--we're going to be making some changes in response to them.

But the biggest thing that I'm going to take from the night is this idea of accuracy and that it's not where it needs to be.

P.S. I know I'm behind on comments and I do plan to get to them, but I wanted to make sure that whoever the commenter on the last post was didn't actually mean that the blog is trying to "reduce transparency." Perhaps "reduce opacity" or "increase transparency?" Because if it's the other thing, I've got a problem.


UPDATE: 3/22/07, 8:45 P.M. The editor in chief of The Eye responded to the Town Hall in today's issue of the magazine.