Minutes after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, it was all over the internet, and it was immediately clear that this was going to have nationwide ramifications. Yet the Campus Times has never published a news article on what exactly happened. Likewise, we have not covered other large-scale news such as the attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi or the assassinations of Melissa Hortman and her husband. This is not because the events themselves aren’t newsworthy, but because events occurring on a national scale are not within the scope of our news coverage.
With the exception of the rare pressing campus news, we publish weekly on Sundays, and the vast majority of our coverage is directly and explicitly relevant to Rochester or the University community. Even if we decided to put out an article about Kirk, Pelosi, or Hortman, what would a Campus Times article detailing the facts have provided for our readers? The short answer is nothing. Our readers most likely receive live updates from their national news source of choice, and therefore don’t need a weekly paper to do so.
On the other hand, we have published, and will continue to publish opinion pieces from students on their perspectives of major current events. These provide our readers with the viewpoints of their fellow students on a topic that has been forced into the limelight by current events, and showcase points that our readership might not gain elsewhere. Our priority as a campus newspaper has always been providing our readers with content that has value. How do we determine what “value” is?
First, there’s a distinction to be drawn between news outlets that operate at different levels of the community, covering events ranging in global, national, regional, and local levels. As necessitated, they hone in on topics of differing scale — the New York Times will focus on different issues than the San Francisco Chronicle, which will focus on different issues than the Rochester Beacon.
As the University newspaper, we have a responsibility — driven by our proximity to the University campuses and internal composition of student writers connected to its community — to cover news related to and impacting the University. With this status and expectation in mind, we devote a majority of the paper to covering campus-related news, bringing attention to issues that impact the University campus and community directly.
Most events on the University’s campuses are frankly of little interest to the broader public, with exceptions for major speakers or other occurrences with widespread interest. Our readers likely know that we tend to focus on events that are imminently important to the student, faculty, and non-faculty populations at UR, and those events tend to be on the University’s River or Eastman campuses. What happens within the UR’s borders is of interest to members of our community, and outside of the CT, other local news outlets have few resources to stay informed about specific happenings on campus. Thus, we cover these “smaller” events to keep the local news alive. No one else will cover these overshadowed events, so we make it our mission to.
Our more subjective sections such as opinions and culture are much less restricted in scope. When given the opportunity to write on anything at all, writers understandably gravitate towards known subjects of interest, whether longstanding passions or recent hot topics with a steady stream of commentary and externally available context. These tend to be national or global trends: One may wish to cover the newest Taylor Swift album because they love to love her, or because they love to hate her. Articles such as these are often swayed by the public commentary that surrounds the social media swarm that accompanies famous artists’ release dates, tour dates, and any sort of public appearances.
Politics tends to occupy a similar space: trends of news move with trends of social interest and the specific events that happen to pique it. The more exposed a topic is to national news, conversations with peers, and the seemingly endless depth of a social media scroll, the more difficult it becomes for a writer to bounce off of these ideas and share a perspective of their own. When it comes to opinions on “headlining news,” whether it be political, cultural, or reaching out into any broader scope of public interest, we seek to publish articles that promote this conversation at a local level.
The Campus Times will not republish the same headlines most students have already seen in major news outlets and across social media. Instead, our role and responsibility to the University community is to collect and disseminate campus information, and to provide a platform to student voices. We choose to report on University facilities, campus events, and similar local news over major national headlines — and that’s by design.
