Breaking the habit

You just know it’s going to be one of those days, when mid-morning you find out that your reporter overslept and missed the biggest story of the year.

I’m not going into details – story pending, of course – but this reporter (allegedly) overslept and definitely missed the one-time-only interview given by a Certain Woman on a Certain Topic. Let’s just say, when this story breaks, it’s going to be big. And we missed it.

So what to do now? Do my editor and I go grovel in front of the Woman’s desk? Apologise for the obscene unprofessionalism, tell her the guy is on crack and we’ll deal with it? Probably. All to keep good relations of course, and with the hope she’ll keep sending good stories our way.

This brings me to my point of the post: how do you deal with unprofessionalism in student media?  This is my fourth year at Activate, having signed up for the Features and sub-editing teams in my first year, when I was still all bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Convinced I was going to change the world with That One Story.

Since my first-year, I have been nothing but professional. I attended meetings regularly, organised and planned interviews ahead of time, proof-read stories a thousand times, handed them in in time, and accepted criticism where criticism was due. I quickly moved up the ranks – becoming Features editor in my second year, and deputy editor in my third year.

The people we have at the moment lack the somewhat freakish drive I had in my youth. Stories are late, incomplete, biased, and frankly – awful. People seemed to have stopped caring. And as a student media leader, what can I do? Whack them over the heads (gently) with a rolled up newspaper? See, you can’t hit them too hard because that would be Assault and the Dean of Students would have you out in a minute. You can give them a warning, hold a disciplinary hearing – but Activate works on volunteers alone, and so one mention of any disciplinary action and they scarper, never to be seen or heard from again.

So what do you do? Dangle the threat of The Real World over their heads? Try and convince them that when they actually enter the Real World they can’t hand in stories a week late, without proper research and with minimal comments? Well, you can try, but they all seem to look at you and go: “So?”

It comes down to this. Although Rhodes tries to be an institute “Where leaders learn”, nobody seems to be willing to learn. The majority of people seem to cruise through on a case of beer a weekend and a quick Google search forming the basis of their 1000 word feature. And yes, I generalise. I know this.

And it’s left to four or five of us each paste-up weekend (two subbies, my editor and myself) to clean up the content and correct things that simply pressing F7 in Microsoft Word would fix.

Where Leaders Learn. Unfortunately it’s only the leaders who are learning. The rest are content to simply cruise.