Extra, extra: A year of stories from across UW student newspapers – The Daily Cardinal

The Cardinal spoke to nine UW System student newspapers about balancing their lives as reporters and students.

For the staff of The Racquet Press, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s student newspaper, the surprise firing of former Chancellor Joe Gow in December for a pornographic OnlyFans channel put a pause on winter break and marked a return to reporting.

The paper’s management group chat was “blowing up” when staffers heard about the news through a tip off, Executive Editor Isabel Piarulli said. Piarulli was at a Chicago restaurant when the news dropped.

“I was at dinner, on my phone editing [a writer’s] article and then taking interviews with Fox and NBC,” Piarulli told The Daily Cardinal.

The resulting stories constituted a pivotal moment in The Racquet Press’ work over the last year and another instance when student journalists across the UW System brought new perspectives to major news events, like protests around the Israel-Hamas war or university budget cuts.

“If something big is going on — if neo-Nazis are on campus — how do you highlight what’s going on?” Parker Olsen, managing editor of UW-Whitewater’s Royal Purple, told the Cardinal. “[How do you] make sure people understand what the campus is doing to react to that?”

Student newspapers have the job of contextualizing campus events for fellow students and community members, Maddie Kasper, editor-in-chief of UW-Eau Claire’s The Spectator, said. And because many student reporters live on campus, their immersion in university life “leads to better coverage of what’s actually happening on that campus,” she noted.

Many balance multiple jobs and packed course loads while facing chronic staffing shortages. But across the UW System, student journalists spoke highly of where their work could take a struggling journalism industry in the future.

“At the end of the day, we’re 20 and we’re trying to basically take on what feels like the entire world,” Anya Kelley, editor-in-chief of UW-Oshkosh’s The Advance-Titan, said. “Student media is pioneering the next big thing for journalism. You can’t really quantify how important it is.”

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Student interest has been a boon for The Fourth Estate, a UW-Green Bay student newspaper experiencing a “revival” period, according to faculty advisor and UW-Green Bay communications professor Joseph Yoo. The paper currently takes the form of a repeatable three-credit course, though its organizers hope to gain financial independence in the future.

The learned experience of Joshua Buntin and Lauren Knisbeck, two students who had been with the paper in the spring semester, led them to take up the management role. With a rapidly growing staff, the editors had time to focus on defining the paper’s identity.

The Fourth Estate currently focuses on longform magazine-style pieces, particularly investigations or campus profiles that go more in-depth than what many of UW-Green Bay’s journalism classes offer, Knisbeck said. In-depth articles have made writers focus more on the pitching process and finding stories that could fill out a longer investigation, she said.

Buntin and Knisbeck highlighted a story The Fourth Estate wrote about a revived UW-Green Bay student radio station as one of their favorites.

“I thought it was really interesting, especially because with The Fourth Estate work, we’re another revival on campus,” Knisbeck said. “It’s like, ‘okay, what’s going on with the media revival, and what’s the history here?’”

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Source: Extra, extra: A year of stories from across UW student newspapers – The Daily Cardinal