sealhall74 wrote: ↑Wed Feb 21, 2018 10:10 am
ST_Lawson wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2018 6:17 pm
sealhall74 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2018 3:01 pm
ST, do band members get academic credit for participating in marching and pep bands? Do athletes get academic credit for participating in ncaa athletics? I hope staff members of the Courier also get some form of academic credit but I will be asking about it.
Marching Band - 1 credit hour
Pep Band - 1 credit hour
Athletes - 0, as far as I know, but depending on the sport and level of involvement will have some or all of their tuition paid for from scholarships
Courier - 0 academic credits as near as I can tell. There is no mention of the Courier in the Broadcasting & Journalism course catalog.
From what I can tell, there is a lot of variability out there regarding if and how athletes get academic credits for sports participation. Some biggies like Nebraska and Ohio State look like they do. I think you need to strive for a level playing field. If band members get credit, then so too should those from the student newspaper who show up to take pictures or report on the event. Students pay $0.97/credit hour to have a student newspaper. They deserve better than what they have, although I have not seen the printed edition so maybe it is better. Go to the "Staff" section of the online edition and you see zero, zip, zilch, nada. With all of the online news sources out there on the internet today, that is one of the filter mechanisms I use to determine credibility. Is there a little bio there about the author? Picture to match a name with a face? What is/was their major in college? ...
And just to be clear, I was reporting the info as far as I know, not necessarily what I think it should be.
Personally, I think that working on the Courier should be a repeatable independent study "course" that is available to sophomores and older and anyone with 2+ years (4+ semesters) experience working on the paper/taking the course is eligible to be an editor/proofreader/fact checker. It counts as credit towards a journalism degree and is graded every semester based on writing, layout, accuracy, etc. If done right, it could be essentially like a mini-internship.
I think that having more of a structure in place, having students get credit (and get graded), and having students pay tuition money to participate would go a long way towards improving the quality of the paper.
Apparently, the reason that the Courier is not very closely tied to the university goes back to the '60s and '70s and the Vietnam War. There's an article that was in last summer's alumni magazine talking about the situation back then.
You can read it starting at page 22 here:
http://wiu.edu/alumni/pdfs/WesternMagaz ... er2017.pdf
But the "meat" of the reasoning is stated a couple of paragraphs in:
"That “liberal approach” eventually led the Courier to be kicked off campus, and to the creation of a more conservative newspaper, the Western Catalyst. The Catalyst, run by former Courier editor Rick Alm, and later by John Maguire ‘73, reported the “straightforward” news the journalism faculty and administration agreed represented Western."
So, the Courier was too liberal at the time, got kicked off campus, and never really got fully absorbed back into the journalism department.