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Sometimes, the university doesn't like what The News has to say, and it's their right to tell us. But those aren't errors, so we don't print a correction. That's journalism. 1/ https://twitter.com/chwolfson/status/1273320470549594118
I was at The News for all four years of undergrad. I've just graduated, am no longer involved and can speak out. I never wanted to as a staffer because I worried about jeopardizing the relationship with media relations and impacting future students. 2/
But the truth is that @Northeastern media relations has made it all too clear how much they value experiential education for everyone but the student journalists at their own institution, and the lengths they will go to make it difficult for us to do our jobs. 3/
Right now, @HuntNewsNU is more important than ever. No other news source is paying attention as much as they are to the university's reopening, anti-racism measures on campus, safety standards, and more. It's just The News. 4/
Sometimes, we never get a response from NU on a story, and then they get angry when the story is published without a comment. In order to appease them, sometimes we add an update with their comment in it, a normal journalism practice. But this is NOT a correction. 5/
In this Globe article, it links to a particular article from November 2019 where we added a comment after publication. What it doesn't say is that when we emailed NU for comment, the media relations person didn't read the study that is the focus of the article, told us so... 6/
...bluntly, and then called the study "ridiculous." That was our comment. That's all we got. No problem, so we published! Then, all of a sudden, we were blasted with anger from that media person, who said the study was incorrect, there are women of color in leadership... 7/
...positions at NU, and why didn't we just look at some photos of senior administrators to count the number of POCs in leadership. Let me just repeat that. A media relations person at NU, rather than give us the info we had asked for (number of WOCs & POCs in leadership) 8/
Instead told us to use website photos to racially profile senior administrators and come up with the number ourselves. Maybe if that media relations person had read the study before saying anything and given us actual substantive comments, we could have avoided that headache. 9/
All of this is to say that the Northeastern media relations office is Trumpian beyond belief. Private institutions like Northeastern don't always have the same constitutional obligations to press freedom as public institutions do, and that makes this a moral issue. 10/
Morally, Northeastern administrators devalue their own students. Morally, they believe that saying rude and degrading things over email when we publish stuff they don't like is "teaching," not harassment. 11/
As journos, we know this is what PR offices are. We've trained for it. But I won't stand by while NU's PR office pretends they were just "teaching" us. No. They're trying to protect the university's false image rather than fixing the problems we've spent years reporting on. 12/
I love @NUjournalism. Faculty have been outraged, angry, passionate on our behalf when we bring up these issues. I found my home there, became a kickass journo there. I hope NU knows that they're losing valuable alums because they value $$ over students. & that's that. 13/
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