I am the editor of The Baker Orange newspaper.
Keyword: newspaper.
A newspaper, which is a media source reporting news and informing the public.
That word newspaper is usually pretty self-explanatory, but some may feel this word has a different meaning when applied to university newspapers, like the Orange.
That being said, here is a disclaimer. The purpose of this column is not to shed light on certain people, or to complain. If I couldn’t take criticism, I’d be in the wrong business.
This column is a clarification and an explanation about what we do on a weekly basis.
The job of everyone on this staff is to report the news.
As much as people may want to think otherwise, the Orange is not a public relations source. Our job is not to make Baker University look good. Those people work in the marketing department in Constant Hall.
Our job is not to make Baker look bad either. Our job is to report the news.
And really, Baker shouldn’t want its student media to turn into a PR firm. The purpose of the media is to report the news fairly and without bias, and if students were expected to produce only pro-Baker content, they would not survive in media after college.
That said, I can assure readers that the Orange has not shown Baker in an unjust, negative light. We report the facts, and the rest of the staff and I work as hard as we can to make sure this happens. People on this campus are doing positive, newsworthy projects that deserve recognition, and we are here to report on it.
However, teams lose games, faculty and staff members are fired and members of the Baker community get into trouble and make mistakes, and it is our job to report that also.
It’s about facts. If a team loses by 20 points, or a student is suspended, that’s what needs to be reported. It is unethical for the Orange to make a loss sound like a win, no matter how much it may please members of the university, because that is not reporting the facts.
Students should not be held to different standards than those in the professional world, otherwise how would they learn?
We also try to avoid bias at all cost, having strict rules on conflicts of interest and the choice of reporter on each story, and I hold high expectations and standards in terms of the quality of work that goes into this newspaper.
While Constant Hall has Baker’s marketing covered, in Pulliam Hall, we will continue to report the news.
