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Dear Twitter Mob, College Journalists Are Supposed to Make Mistakes
Professionals attacking the Daily Northwestern should remember their mistakes as amateur reporters — I do
It began with a protest.
Outside a Northwestern University event earlier this month featuring former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, students showed up chanting and waving signs. The college newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, sent staffers to cover the event because that’s what college papers do. Stuff happens on a campus that is newsworthy. Student reporters go cover it.
The resulting article that came out of that protest starts off fine. It gives details of the event and explains why protesters showed up. The article starts to break down, however, when students are quoted in the story, with some only identified as “a student protester” or “one student protester.” One of the first rules of journalism is to get the real names of people; anonymity in news stories is usually reserved for crime victims or whistleblowers.
Days after the article was published, the editors followed up with a remarkable mea culpa, apologizing for running pictures of the protesters — who were photographed in public — and posting them to social media. The editorial reports that protesters said the…
