I was happy last week to see an update on a FERPA case that’s been unfolding for several years:

The University of Maryland has finally released the names of students it has found guilty of sexual assault in the past 10 years. It was reluctant to do so, citing the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, but said it would do so after state Attorney General Doug Gansler rejected that argument last year.

Three years after journalism students first made their request, the public finally knows: Only four students have been found guilty. Four. In 10 years. According to the school’s Clery statistics for 2007-09 (the only three years I could easily find on the school’s website), 21, 17 and 10 forcible sex offenses were reported each year, respectively. With 48 reported sex offenses in three years, it’s hard to imagine that in 10 years only four students have been found guilty.

Of those four:

only one of the students found guilty was expelled, and the other three were suspended for a year and forced to meet certain requirements, such as staying away from the victim and writing reflective essays. (The Diamondback)

It’s easy of course to see why the university tried to hide behind FERPA, a law that was intended to to protect the privacy of student education records. The number of students found guilty of sexual assault seems unbelievably low compared with the number reported to the school. It calls into question how seriously the university investigates students accused of sexual assault, as well as how seriously it punishes those they find guilty.

University of Maryland students should be asking their administrators some very tough questions right now, and hopefully they will make it clear that the University has a responsibility to investigate sexual assaults on campus and punish those found guilty. Reports of on-campus sexual assaults should be as publicly available as those detailing similar crimes occurring off-campus.

As bleak as the numbers are, at least they are public now. That’s the good news. The bad news, of course, is that many, many campuses have disclosure policies similar to how Maryland’s was prior to Gansler’s directive. At UNC, my past requests for names of students found guilty by the Honor Court of sexual assault were denied because of FERPA (despite UNC’s FERPA training for professors that says this information will be released upon request). To this I echo the recent words of North Carolina state judge Howard Manning: ”FERPA does not provide a student with an invisible cloak so that the student can remain hidden from public view.”

Reports of sexual assaults on campus are not educational records, and we shouldn’t tolerate it when universities insist they are. If we truly want to address sexual assault on college campuses — a topic of much recent discussion given the Title IX complaint filed against Yale and Saturday’s Wall Street Journal column that argued in favor of shutting down all fraternities — we need to start with detailed reporting about how universities address reports of assault.

That kind of reporting is only possible if universities are forced to be open instead of allowed to hide behind FERPA. So, a plea: We only know about the situation at the University of Maryland because student journalists kept pressuring the University, fighting it all the way up to the state attorney general’s office. Journalists, and particularly campus publications, have a watchdog responsibility to fight back when universities refuse to release information on sexual assaults because of FERPA, and they should give ‘em hell until every college is open with how they deal with assaults.

Updated to add information about UNC-Chapel Hill’s stated policy on disclosing the names of individuals found guilty of sexual assault through the campus Honor Court. Thanks Kevin Schwartz and Erica Perel for pointing that out.

Today is the three-year anniversary of UNC student body president Eve Carson‘s death, and Friday I asked readers on Twitter to share their memories of her or how she influenced them using the hashtag #EveToday. The response has been overwhelming, with an outpouring of Tweets all day long that is still continuing. I compiled the Tweets using Storify so that people could read through the dozens of messages at once. It struck me as I did so how much social media has changed the way we communicate even in the three years since she was killed.

In March 2008, I was still two months away from joining Twitter. I posted no updates about her death on Facebook, shared no links to any of the many stories I wrote about her death and only RSVP’d to a memorial service held a few weeks later. The Daily Tar Heel wasn’t on Twitter or Facebook either but let readers to submit messages to a Memorial Wall. In 2008 and in 2011 we tailored our approach to where our audience was, which is what we should be doing. Asking for #EveToday-style Tweets in 2008 would have yielded us few, if any responses. Our audience simply wasn’t on Twitter then, or even in 2009. Even last year I’m not sure if we would have gotten quite the reaction we did today. People are simply much more comfortable with social media and using it throughout their life.

I welcome this evolution. I remember feeling very cut-off from the rest of the UNC community when we all department for Spring Break days after she was killed. There was no easy way for us to mourn together. Reading through the Tweets today was comforting, an instant reminder that out there, hundreds more felt just like me – saddened by her death and inspired by her life.

In the past week, an as-yet-unidentified man has been entering unlocked homes in Chapel Hill and stroking the legs of women while they sleep. This is of course unwelcome and jarring news, particularly for those in the quiet college town that surrounds UNC, where three years ago this week the student body president was kidnapped and brutally killed (her door was also unlocked). The Daily Tar Heel has been on the story since the first incident last Friday, and since then I’ve mulled how I could use our social media accounts to make students aware of the potential threat.

I wanted to raise awareness without being alarmist, preach safety tips without being smarmy (or reminding students of their parents) and reach as many people as possible. Wednesday, day 6, I started brainstorming hashtags with other editors. The incidents have reminded folks of Antoine Dodson and his infamous “hide your wife, hide your kids” interview. We somewhat seriously considered making reference to that, in part to build off of what students were already tweeting and in part because we felt the viral video’s fame could help grab students’ attention to this issue. At the same time, we didn’t want to make light of the very real threat the victims had faced. We settled on #lockthedoor, snappy yet relevant, given that the intruder entered through unlocked doors each time. I’ve curated Tweets using Storify to show how I used the account throughout the day:

I typically use the @dailytarheel account to share links and respond to individuals. Rarely is it used to Tweet frequently on a single topic in a single day, but I decided this issue was important enough to dominate the feed for most of the day. But because of that, I tried to take a joke, hoping students would appreciate it and perhaps tuck away some of the useful advice as well. Any complaints about the hashtag so far are about equal to the amount of complaints we might generally get about anything. I’m not too worried that we’re offending followers, but it’s something I’ll be watching.

The intruder is still at-large, but I like to think that this campaign helped raise awareness at least a little bit today. From our analytics I know Twitter was a top referrer to our stories online, and the hashtag was trending in Chapel Hill at one point. I plan to continue with it until they catch someone, or until the incidents stop. Ideally, we’ll hear good news soon. What do you think? I would love to hear suggestions for ways we could make this reach and resonate with more students.

The latest in the months-long saga at N.C. State University’s student paper, the Technician, is a harsh editorial written by student editors calling out the school’s student media board:

Technician hasn’t faltered and fallen due to a lack of effort or passion from the students who run it, but because the umbrella which was supposed to provide it with a gentle hand has become Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fabled albatross, dragging it down, tearing students away and weakening the staff.

The editorial also seeks signatures on a petition to replace the current advising staff.

I’ve been closely following the plight of the Technician ever since hearing that former Editor Ty Johnson had been forced to step down. I truly sympathize with the staff’s requests for more editorial freedom. I know I am among the more fortunate student journalists to be able to work for a student paper that is entirely financially and editorially independent from the University, and I appreciate the difference that makes in our ability to report on campus.

But while I sympathize 100 percent with the Technician staff’s desire for independence, I’m still waiting for the staff to step up and lead the paper in the direction they say they want it to see it go. And so far, I haven’t seen too much of that (with the exception of this thoughtful set of recommendations from the committee led by former Editor Saja Hindi). If you really want change, don’t wait for it to come from the University or the student media board. Don’t just declare an act of sedition. Declare revolution.

Instead of editorializing about how you want more control, show what you’d do with it. Stop asking for permission and ask for forgiveness when you’re finished. Put out the kind of paper and website you think the Technician should, and don’t worry about what the advisers will say. What I’d emphasize:

• Narrow the focus to what you can do best. Think about what your readers are interested in, and stop doing things just because that’s-the-way-its-always-been-done. I’d focus on breaking news, student groups,sports and commentary. Make sure there’s a great campus calendar online.
• Social media. There’s not any interaction on the Technician’s Facebook page or Twitter account. Fix that. Appoint someone in charge of those accounts and reaching out to readers. Try Flickr and asking readers to submit photos. Answer reader questions on Formspring. Try Tumblr. Most importantly, make it a two-way conversation between staff and readers.
• Link, link, link. Point your readers to where they can find more information. Better still, use Publish2 to curate links to news elsewhere.
• Seek student bloggers to fill in what you can’t cover. UNC has a rich community of student and community bloggers, and I’m sure the same is true of N.C. State. Make it easy for them to submit guest posts, and create incentives for doing so.
• Ditch College Publisher. Build a WordPress site over the summer. Check out the Edit Flow workflow fromCoPress to help manage multiple users. Come back in the fall and go web-first. Do your writing and editing in the CMS. Publish as soon as possible.

And if all else fails, quit the Technician. For a $10 domain name, a cheap web hosting plan and a free WordPress theme, a group of students could easily band together to start their own online-only news organization with just the money they’d spend on beer in one night. Look at Onward State and NYU Local for inspiration. Breaking off and forming an independent online-only publication wouldn’t be easy, but it is the ultimate way to gain the editorial freedom the staff seeks.

Great news for those of us who worry about the increasing tendency of college administrations to throw the excuse of FERPA at every public records request: The University of Maryland will now have to release the names of those who violate the school’s code for sexual assault after the state’s Attorney General ruled that releasing the names of convicted offenders doesn’t violate the educational privacy law.

This is great news for all journalists, but especially college newspapers. FERPA — the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act — was meant to protect student academic records. But college administrators have used the gray area of the law to deny access to a range of records that were never intended to be restricted.

The Daily Tar Heel has fought against the misuse of FERPA for years, notably by challenging a 1996 decision to restrict DTH reporters from attending the disciplinary proceedings against two students accused of stealing copies of a conservative on-campus magazine. More recently, we’ve been denied access to petitions collected by student body president candidates with the argument that providing the names of students signers would violate their FERPA rights (I’d link, but the paper’s archives from the 2008-09 school year aren’t online). We’ve also been denied access to e-mails between the parents of a student shot by police earlier this year and the chancellor, again in the name of FERPA.

While any misuse of FERPA is cause for alarm, the situation in the Diamondback article touches on one of the most important reason why significant FERPA reform is needed. Student honor and disciplinary courts wield an enormous amount of power, with the ability to suspend and expel students for actions that now are often shrouded in secrecy. There is a reason that criminal courts operate publicly: Anyone accused of a crime should be granted an opportunity to confront their accusers, something that can’t be ensured if courts are sealed from observers in the name of FERPA.

FERPA resources

• The Reporter’s Guide to FERPA, compiled by Sonny Albarado for the Society of Professional Journalists
• Have a FERPA horror story? E-mail DTH General Manager Kevin Schwartz, who is collecting tales of FERPA misuse to mount a campaign for reform.

I’m really happy to announce what will be my last job at The Daily Tar Heel: community manager. As online managing editor I helped create this role, and I’m excited to see it continue and play a part in shaping it. We’ve made so many strides this year under Emily Stephenson’s leadership, and I only hope to continue in that vein.

My title is officially community manager, but I most identify with the notion of a community host similar to how Steve Buttry has described the role. Here’s how I described the role in my application:

Ideally, the community manager would realize that there’s actually very little about the community that can be managed; instead, she needs to be able to participate and know how to get the most out of each interaction. The community manager needs to be a personable and recognizable figure in the community, such that people know who to contact with concerns and ideas. She also needs to be trusted by the community. The community manager must recognize that she needs to build a relationship with the community before she can accomplish her goals. We can’t just swoop in and ask readers to share things with us — there needs to be a relationship from the beginning that encourages openness. For the DTH, the community manager needs to be someone who can relay concerns back to the newsroom and make its mission more transparent to readers.

I have my own ideas for what I can do with the role, and I’m excited to get started. For those who are old hats at this job, any advice?

I had planned to write about The Daily Tar Heel’s experience covering Election Night, but State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick describes it so well, and the night was really hers:

The night was the embodiment of the expression “fly by the seat of your pants.” But somehow we managed to make every deadline of the night and finish the entire paper half an hour early.

And not only was the paper product superb, but we broke new ground for the paper with our election blogging. We had more than 160 posts in about 20 hours. We had reporters riding along  in the shuttles  that UNC Young Democrats ran to the polls, sitting outside polling sites, chatting up students in line at Alpine Bagel, scanning news sites and checking in at local boards of elections throughout the day. We had audio and video posts. We mobilized a staff of about 100 to deliver news to UNC students that, for the most part, they couldn’t get anywhere else.

I couldn’t have been prouder of our blog. It was one of those things no one knew how it would turn out, and it had the potential to be a colossal flop. I think it’s greatest achievement was that it involved as many editors and staff as it did in producing a strictly online product. And it’s one they were proud of, not something that was going online because there wasn’t room in the paper.

I think the challenges newspapers face in getting support for new technologies are best overcome by jumping headfirst. Hardly any of the reporters knew what they were doing that day when they started out. Few of the editors had any idea how it would turn out. But ultimately it all came together.

There were lots of things that, if we did it again, we’d know to do better. There were lots of things we weren’t doing then, knew we should be but still were limited by staff and resources. But for what we sought to do – tell the story of Orange County of Election Day – I think we succeeded.

The DTH opens its doors tomorrow to about 150 journalism babies. Recruitment is over, we oriented them Saturday and tomorrow many of them will be working on their very first stories/photographs/graphics/pages/etc. I expect lots of questions along the lines of “How do I dial out on the phone?” “Where do I type my article?” and “What’s my deadline?”

All of the editors, who have been putting out the paper these last four weeks with a bare-bones staff left over from last year, are incredibly excited about this batch of new staff. As inexperienced as they are, they are manpower. 

But all of the editors are a little scared too – everyone feels a great sense of responsibility to these new staff. Last year we hired 185 new staff (we hire everyone…), but by the end of the semester, less than half remained. The DTH isn’t for everyone, and there’s a weeding out process. But we also lose a lot of talented folks that we end up wishing hadn’t weeded themselves out.

We hired a news adviser for the first time this year. We’re behind a lot of our peer-newspapers in hiring an adviser, and part of what we feel Erica can help us with is with retention. She’ll be meeting with every single new staff member at least once this semester formally, and is going to serve as a writing coach/internship-search-resource/calm voice. 

Erica is going to really help where new staffers fall in the cracks. It’s not that desk editors don’t want to be a resource, but sometimes they don’t have the time or the experience themselves to really serve as a help. And hopefully Erica can help our editors be better editors. She’s there for us, too.

Here are my goals for helping new staff transition to the DTH:

• I’m going to learn their names. All 100 and however many of them there are. As a freshman, there was nothing more exciting for me than when management called me by my name. Or said hi to me when they saw me outside the newsroom.
• I’m going to be patient when answering even the most seemingly obvious of questions.
• I’m going to explain every change I make when editing. I think editing should be a conversation. My best editors have always edited that way, and as a reporter, I think you learn better by talking it out. And I think I edit better this way, too.
• I’m going to make a big deal to them of getting their stories in the paper, especially on front or page three. I cut out every single article I wrote freshman year and taped them to my dorm wall. Seeing your name in print is a really big deal.
• I’m going to find something positive to say about something in everything they do.

I’m taking an online journalism class this semester with Ryan Thornburg, a DTH alum who was in charge of the Iraq war and 2004 election coverage on washingtonpost.com.

One of our ongoing assignments is to blog about a specific topic related to the elections in N.C. My plans are to follow student newspapers, mainly college, and how they’re covering the campaigns:

But in an election season that already has charged the youth vote, college newspapers would be remiss if they didn’t cover the campaigns. Already, papers have sent student journalists around N.C. to cover politico’s appearances, have snagged interviews with candidates for state office and have localized the party’s conventions in Denver and St. Paul, Minn. And when it comes to state elections, student papers might be a reader’s only source of information about the candidates. How they cover the elections matter. (N.C. Youth Vote, Sept. 4)

I’m really hoping that following this will help with our own election coverage at the DTH. State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick has so many ideas of what we can do and is blogging about the election for the paper, and our efforts are increasing daily as the election draws closer and closer.  I’m going to try for my class blog to be light on DTH news, mostly because I want to focus on what we can learn from what other papers are doing. I’m also particularly interested in how student papers are embracing technology to cover the election. At the MSCNE conference I went to this summer, papers outside of N.C. have big plans, and my fingers are crossed that we’ll see really innovative ideas here, too.

I’m taking an online journalism class this semester with Ryan Thornburg, a DTH alum who was in charge of the Iraq war and 2004 election coverage on washingtonpost.com.

One of our ongoing assignments is to blog about a specific topic related to the elections in N.C. My plans are to follow student newspapers, mainly college, and how they’re covering the campaigns:

But in an election season that already has charged the youth vote, college newspapers would be remiss if they didn’t cover the campaigns. Already, papers have sent student journalists around N.C. to cover politico’s appearances, have snagged interviews with candidates for state office and have localized the party’s conventions in Denver and St. Paul, Minn. And when it comes to state elections, student papers might be a reader’s only source of information about the candidates. How they cover the elections matter. (N.C. Youth Vote, Sept. 4)

I’m really hoping that following this will help with our own election coverage at the DTH. State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick has so many ideas of what we can do and is blogging about the election for the paper, and our efforts are increasing daily as the election draws closer and closer.  I’m going to try for my class blog to be light on DTH news, mostly because I want to focus on what we can learn from what other papers are doing. I’m also particularly interested in how student papers are embracing technology to cover the election. At the MSCNE conference I went to this summer, papers outside of N.C. have big plans, and my fingers are crossed that we’ll see really innovative ideas here, too.