Almost always, the editors return to campus quite humbled. After all, they've just witnessed their professional peers assemble an entire newspaper in 15 minutes – while their own sprawling meetings can take an hour and involve 10-minute tangents about sex and beer.
So yesterday, we drove to The Post to watch how it covers the news. Except this time, we were the news.
By coincidence, The Post was working on a follow-up story about FAU's battle with its own student newspaper. This story.
The Post editors discussed it in their meeting. I was relieved to learn FAU officials aren't speaking to any media and not just ignoring the UP. Because after Monday's blast of honesty from student media director Marti Harvey – in which she wrote on The Post website, "Mr. Koretzky teaches students the National Enquirer method of journalism and FAU has put up with it for 12 years" – no one has been able to get another word out of Marti or Student Affairs.
EIC Karla Bowsher has certainly tried. But Marti won't talk to Karla on the record unless the interviews are set up through Media Relations. And neither will her boss, associate dean Terry Mena. Sadly, that process takes at least three days.
Neither The Post nor the UP could track down Student Affairs vice president Charles Brown this week. (And it looks like the SunSentinel, knowing better, didn't even try.) Instead, Brown issued a statement yesterday that read...
FAU is very excited about the future of student media. Reorganization of the current structure will allow for advanced training as students prepare to enter the field of journalism. ... I continuously meet with our student organizations in an effort to keep them apprised of the work going on in Student Affairs and throughout the university. I look forward to continuing that practice.
Whoever Brown is meeting with "continuously," it's not the UP. Or as Karla told me...
When I read that statement, I rolled my eyes. I've been at the UP for 18 months now, and in that time, Dr. Brown has never once apprised us of so much as the weather. In fact, he didn't even know who I was when he approached me at the May 26 Board of Trustees meeting. "Hi! Are you a reporter?!" he asked me enthusiastically. When I introduced myself as the editor-in-chief, his face dropped and he ended the conversation as quickly as possible.
Speaking of awkward situations, today Marti attends her first UP staff meeting since her caustic comments in The Post.
While driving to The Post yesterday and eating with the editors afterward at the pub across the street, I realized they're less offended by Marti's insult than the lie it revealed – that my firing was simply a "restructuring of student media" and had nothing to do with the content of the paper.
Nothing pisses off a college student more than a lying adult. This week alone, the UP staff has caught both Brown and Marti fibbing. So here's my forecast for this afternoon's meeting: Steaming with a 90-percent chance of indignation.
MONDAY: Just when I started to think FAU understood the law...
