On Nov. 26, 2008, a former student died in a campus apartment. At first, no one knew how or why. So FAU locked down the campus and banned professional media.
One staffer at the University Press lived in the building. She snapped this photo from her window. It shows the body being wheeled out by the medical examiner's office.
When the photo was posted to the UP website, I got a call from a vacationing Terry Mena. He's the associate dean for Student Affairs and was, at the time, my boss.
Mena said his boss, dean Corey King, was ordering me not to cover this story until Student Affairs could meet with "students who required counseling." I passed on his request – I didn't consider it an order because it's not a legal one – to UP editor Michele Boyet.
Michele not only disagreed, she gave some of the UP's unused images to the SunSentinel, a Top 100 daily in our area. The SunSentinel ran an online gallery and gave the UP credit. (Michele later became an assistant homepage producer there.)
Mena called me again – we spoke three times that day – and said King deemed the photos "in bad taste." He wanted them taken down. I said the students had made their decision. I also volunteered this interesting bit of information: The staff had learned the name of the deceased but chose not to publish it until the family was notified.
"I think that's in very good taste," I told Mena.
That evening, Mena emailed me...
It's news, but it needs to be covered from a responsible and ethical journalistic standpoint. Upon my return to the office, we will continue to discuss the process of covering stories.
I told Mena I didn't think there was anything to discuss, because the students covered the story responsibly and ethically. Yet we met.
This meeting wasn't in Mena's office. It was in the Media Relations conference room with FAU spokeswoman Kristine Gobbo. Mena began by speaking for King again. (I wonder why King never expressed his feelings about student media to student media.)
Try following this: Mena said King wanted Gobbo to declare that the UP could not give photos to outside media without FAU's permission. Kristine raised her palms and said she wanted nothing to do with that.
"This is between you guys," she said.
And that was that. Or so I thought. When Mena hired Marti Harvey as student media director back in January, she asked me about "my policy" for the UP giving or selling photos to off-campus media. I said my policy was simple: It's up to the editor.
Marti shook her head. "No, but we'll talk about it later," she said. I was fired before that happened. Now I think I understand:
Marti believes the students have the right to publish whatever they want in the UP – subject to intense pressure from administration, of course – but FAU has the authority to control what happens with the students' work after that.
So another battle looms. Stay tuned.
MONDAY: Karla Bowsher gets what she deserves.
