Support Student Journalists
The Deadline Club supports collegiate journalists covering campus protests
The Deadline Club echoes the Society of Professional Journalists and other media organizations’ call for college administration and law enforcement to not impede college journalists reporting on the protests.
Student journalists have been covering their campuses from the very beginning, helping keep the public informed. They should be afforded the same respect and rights as other established media outlets.
Our club is keenly aware how today’s journalism students in the classroom can quickly become tomorrow’s reporters covering the scene.
Liset Cruz was a Columbia University journalism student when she was a recipient of a Deadline Club scholarship last year. This past week she’s been reporting on the protests for the New York Times.
We urge campus administrators to be supportive of student journalists covering these events.
Please read the open letter below. Click here for a PDF version of the letter.
Cesar R. Bustamante Jr.
Deadline Club President
and the Deadline Club Board of Governors
An open letter to college administrators:
We represent national media associations and press rights watchdogs that support collegiate journalists. We have watched events unfold on various media platforms regarding protests that are spreading across the country. We have seen students brutalized, faculty and staff threatened, and student journalists restricted from fulfilling their duties as recorders of history.
We are calling on each of you to respect and protect the rights of student journalists and their advisers as they document unrest on campus. We are calling on each of you to be mindful of their First Amendment rights and their responsibilities to their community. We are calling on each of you to afford them the same respect afforded other media outlets.
Right now, the nation is turning to student journalists – people who know and live in these communities – for accurate and timely information. They are raising hard questions, verifying reports and supporting each other. What they are doing is essential to our democracy and embodies the values institutions like yours aim to instill in each and every student.
We are horrified and dismayed to see student journalists and their advisers physically attacked, intimidated by police, and unfairly restricted in their access to their own buildings. Each of them is exercising the lessons imparted to them in their classes and student media operations. This maltreatment cannot continue.
When we think of time, manner and place restrictions, that should not include forcefully preventing the student press from providing vital information to their communities and the greater public. It does not include threatening arrest of their faculty and staff advisers. It does not include student journalists being locked out from their facilities.
We call on you to not just respect their rights as journalists, but to also wholeheartedly support them in their responsibility. They are the future of this industry and this country. Let them do their work in recording the present.
Thank you.
College Media Association
Associated Collegiate Press
Society of Professional Journalists
Student Press Law Center
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression