I trend a bit old school in my views of media ethics and reporting. I’m registered to vote without party preference, and I’ve never once put a campaign sign in my yard or donated to a candidate or ballot measure. Generally, I believe anything that so much as creates the appearance of a conflict of interest isn’t worth doing, and I try to navigate my personal and professional lives accordingly.
I have said repeatedly in these pages, however, that there are a couple of biases I will gladly own: I am pro-reform and pro-transparency. I strongly believe systems, organizations, laws and most things humans have created can and should be improved, and at times let that bias guide my reporting. I also strongly believe public agencies should operate transparently to the greatest extent possible, and we at the Journal have not hesitated to call them out or take them to court when we feel they are failing to meet their obligations under the law, which we view as the absolute minimum standard. I believe sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant.
It’s now become apparent I need to add a third bias to my list: I am unabashedly pro-journalism. This might seem a no-brainer, but it’s a bias that has come into stark relief for me in recent months as I contemplated whether to take on a semester-long job as a lecturer at Cal Poly Humboldt to co-teach a one-unit investigative reporting class with a former colleague.
There is simply no getting around the fact that accepting a pre-tax salary of $1,104 for a semester’s work at CPH — an institution I cover — creates the appearance of a conflict. Reporters generally shouldn’t be on the payrolls of entities they cover. I recognize that, so I feel the need to explain both my choice and the terms of my employment at CPH.
I’ll start with my love of journalism. While in retrospect I had been crushing on journalism since the days I noticed the folded up paper that lived in my father’s back pocket and grew to fight him over the sports section, it wasn’t until I showed up at Humboldt State University in the fall of 2002 intent on becoming a high school English teacher and happened to take an introduction to mass communication course that I began to view the relationship in more serious terms. The courtship then blossomed during a semester spent writing for the university’s student newspaper, The Lumberjack, and I then committed fully a short time later while taking an investigative reporting class from Marcy Burstiner (a former Journal columnist) and interning in the Lifestyles section at the Times-Standard. Nearly 20 years later, my love of this work has endured.
With all that said, the institution that is now Cal Poly Humboldt holds a unique place in my heart. Subjectively, it’s the reason my partner and I made our lives here, and it’s the place I learned to love — and do — this thing called journalism. Objectively, it’s an economic and cultural driver for the county, a vitally important piece of our collective future, for better or worse. In my almost two decades of reporting on the North Coast, I’ve covered the university through budget cuts and no-confidence votes, enrollment spikes and declines, protests and controversy. I don’t feel I’ve ever allowed my personal feelings for the place, and my experiences there, to impact my reporting.
Since graduating, I’ve also stayed linked in with the university’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communications. I’ve regularly gone to campus to visit former mentors, to speak to classes or just to pick up the university’s two student newspapers.
A few years ago, I learned the university was no longer offering the investigative reporting course that Burstiner taught before her retirement. I viewed this as a huge loss. In my mind, investigative reporting isn’t just a career niche but a journalistic outlook and skill set that is foundational to all good reporting, no matter the topic.
It’s something I would talk about with Matt Drange, a fellow alum with whom I worked briefly at the Times-Standard and who is now a Bay Area-based senior correspondent at Business Insider. We’d wistfully discuss the impact Burstiner’s course had on our careers and lament that current students weren’t being exposed to the same material.
Those conversations ultimately led to one between Drange, myself and department Chair Kirby Moss, who agreed to let us co-teach a scaled down, one-unit introduction to investigative journalism workshop this spring. We held our first class Jan. 23.
Loosely modeled after Burstiner’s course, the class will teach students the craft and skills of investigative reporting through a class project we hope to publish at the end of the semester. (For those questioning whether I could possibly maintain a critical eye on the university while teaching there, I’ll add that Burstiner’s class projects included the 2016 Journal cover story “Homeless State University,” offering the community its first in-depth look at the experiences of houseless students on campus.) Drange and I are excited and grateful for the chance to work with aspiring journalists, believing a new generation of dogged reporters is of vital importance to our communities and our nation.
But I made this teaching commitment knowing I could not step away from covering Cal Poly Humboldt. While a perfect world might allow me to simply recuse myself from reporting on the university for a while, the reality of life at the Journal is that we have only two staff positions dedicated solely to news coverage, so stepping away is not a viable option.
The reality is I strongly believe Humboldt County needs fair, accurate and critical reporting on Cal Poly Humboldt, especially in this time of transition for the university. And I also strongly believe the university needs to teach investigative reporting. I’ve come to believe the only way to achieve both is to do both.
This is a semester-long commitment after which the university is under no obligation to bring me back. My obligation is to do the best I can to help students to meet course objectives and to follow university policies. The position places no limitations on my duties with North Coast Journal, Inc.
As such, here’s my pledge to the community: I will continue to cover the university the same way I always have — without fear or favor. And I will do my best to teach a class of journalism students what it means to be an investigative reporter and how to do it well, hoping the class will give them the same professional spark and appreciation of transparency it once gave me, and that one day I’ll be reading their in-depth coverage of vital issues in Humboldt, and just maybe that coverage will lead to reform.
This article appears in Enter the Papaya Lounge.
