11.30.2005
A Stink At PU?
Drugs! Theft! Ostracism!
So what’s really going on at Plattsburgh University? Since the college boasts both an award-winning student newspaper and an active journalism program, one would think the answer would be easy to find.
The story on the street – not necessarily the best way to get your news – is that the last issue of the student newspaper, the one published before the Thanksgiving break, was stolen. Every last copy. Why? Censorship or cover-up, take your pick. That issue supposedly had content unfavorable to the Student Association and so persons unknown decided that no one should read it.
This all leads back to an incident involving someone in the SA who reported that a few of his peers were allegedly taking illegal substances while they were attending an inter-campus meeting downstate. This student stirred up a ruckus, being labeled as either a hero or a snitch. He’s experienced criticism and rejection by some students and certain faculty members, even though he thought he was doing the right thing.
This dust-up was front page news for the student newspaper, but we only learned about it by chance, not directly from the paper. The trouble is, despite being an award-winning publication, for the last couple of years the student newspaper hasn’t been delivered to any locations downtown. At one time you could drop by the bookstore or the pizza place and grab a copy. Now the paper is only distributed on campus, even though non-students do read it – if it is available to them.
We wanted to gather some facts but we’re not going all the way into the campus to pick up a copy – especially if copies are not available due to theft.
Of course, since PU touts its journalism major, we expected that information would be available at the student newspaper website. Guess what. Between Googling and searching the PU site, we couldn’t find any viable online presence. The closest results at the PU site were pages devoted to PR puff pieces bragging how the student newspaper won another “All American” award from the Associated Collegiate Press. A couple of other sites had listings of college papers online, including a link to PU’s. But after clicking on that link, the inevitable “HTTP 404 – Not Found” would pop up. (Don’t accuse us of not doing our research.)
So it seems at one time there was an online presence. What happened? Did someone hijack the site’s content? And, more important, why isn’t the site back up? Even cheap penny saver weeklies maintain their sites.
One wonders what PU is teaching its journalism majors. Maybe the budding journalists are studying in meticulous detail how Guttenberg cranked out a bible centuries ago instead of learning how to update an actual website or blog. Maybe students are trained to regard their newspaper as a cultic house organ, avoiding any distribution off campus in either cyber- or meat- space.
In the meantime, we’re forced to get PU-related news from the street. We might luck out and meet an award-winning “All American” rumormonger.
# posted by Stan Spire @ 1:59 AM 
