Campus hacks

I’m not going to beat around the bush. I know that sometimes student media hacks people off (pardon the puns). Whether it’s our incessant poll-taking at election time or desperate need to flood campus with 4,000 copies of each edition we print, I know that occasionally people just have enough of student newspapers, student television, student radio, magazines, satire…

The News of the World also wound a lot of people up in its 168 years, and the very nature of media means most articles are going to annoy somebody for some reason. Tabloid press has a particular challenge that it faces when it comes to providing readerships with the stories they want to read, at the expense of some people’s support. It doesn’t take students of a top-10 university to realise, however, that hacking into people’s phones is unacceptable, much less when it’s the phones of missing children or grieving families. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s wrong, it’s indefensible and it’s simply intolerable.

“What does this have to do with students, though?” I hear you ask. Quite simply, at an institution like York these lines that are so obvious in wider media become a lot more blurred in our microcosm. Whether it’s balancing the relationship between writing a news story and at the same time protecting a friend (Rebekah Brooks and David Cameron, anybody?), or using something you found out through private means to further your public newspaper, the boundaries in a university setting are much harder to establish, yet often much more strongly regulated. Unlike the News of the World, every edition is vetted by the Students’ Union (you could call them our very own small-scale PCC) for welfare and legal implications, but much like the PCC, the Union sees the finished product, not the methods we used to find and write our articles. Unlike the PCC, they get a chance to veto.

That’s not to say that there are practices like phone-hacking happening within YUM, but there are always going to be situations when journalists, of any description, have to go around the rules to find things out. Occasionally, of course, claims can also be made that aren’t justified, in order to try and prevent stories going through the system.

Privacy is a fundamental right and should absolutely be protected, something which student media needs to ensure is the case at all times. Earlier this year, Vision stumbled across a story which concerned a member of the University. That person claimed breach of privacy, and, regrettably, we backed off. We felt it was a great story, we felt it was worthy of sharing with the student population, and something the student population deserved to know about, but we also understood that the methods required to confirm what we thought to be true could be damaging. We held the story back for potential use in the future if other details came to light, and moved on. It was a difficult decision to make – we had a fantastic story that was guaranteed front-page news, but we chose to pull it; it’s not something newspapers like to do very often.

This doesn’t mean that media shouldn’t report. We are as free a press as we can be, but in a claustrophobic environment like York it’s important to remember that sometimes the media can overstep the mark, providing we don’t have some form of hypersensitivity. Hearing what has happened with the survivors and widowed of 7/7, and the family of Milly Dowler has the capacity to blow other situations out of proportion. You spy something on a sabb’s desk, or notice two BNOCs getting close in Salvation? Probably worth exploring. Just because it happens outside of office hours doesn’t mean it’s something that has no place in the newspaper, providing it really is relevant and ethically found. This year we’ve reported on death threats in accommodation blocks, Lancastrian students partying (and gobbling, apparently) during Roses, sports matches that have gone awry, sit-ins, protests, ‘Sex Soc’ orgies, horses escaping and charging around the University and an alarming number of break-ins in student housing off-campus. We have done our utmost to give you what you want to read and these stories were discovered through word-of-mouth, surveys, freedom of information requests – not illegal or unethical means. Tabloid journalism can and should be all about these things, but the way we go about finding those stories is absolutely paramount.

What the News of the World can teach us all in the student media biz is to try and maintain our integrity at all times. You may not always like the stories we produce, you may not always appreciate the way we present them, but as long as we’re in charge, you should never be able to complain about how we sourced them. And if you can, then as a senior editorial, as far as I’m concerned, we’re probably not deserving of our jobs.