Out of the Loop

One thing I wish we could do a better job of at the Missourian is to communicate the mood and the emotions of certain topics on articles that were potentially contentious when they were first written. I think when many of the reporters go to meetings, they can be hesitant to write when someone is talking furiously or angrily. I was a bit reticent (perhaps a bit to my detriment) the first one or two times I went to cover meetings or take quotes from authoritative vantage points on higher ed last year.

I say this because with the unique position we're put in in this newsroom, you don't always have the best handle on things when unexpected events crop up, no matter how hard you try.

Take, for example, the Compete Missouri story I wrote for Friday's paper. I've gone to numerous faculty and MU faculty council meetings pecking for story ideas this semester. Never once did I hear this plan come up, or even any consternation. And one of the meetings was devoted to the FY 2009 budget and operations.

So when this petition came about calling for a special meeting regarding the university's fiscal future, I was taken aback.I frantically searched through the archives looking for stories and found a couple of articles written last summer. None of them, however, gave the indication that there was smoldering ire to be found, ready to explode if prodded.

When I finally got a hold of faculty members to discuss the petition late Thursday afternoon — no one called me before, say, 4:40 — I felt like I was being prepared for a battle to the death armed with just a toy water pistol. Their anger exploded over the phone, not at me, but at the situation, and what they believed were serious missteps by MU higher-ups in the formation of the Compete Missouri plan. Nothing I had read before or seen at other faculty meetings could have prepared me for their anger.

No doubt, it made for good quotes and a colorful article, but it also left me unprepared to give the MU administration a chance to respond. All I could go on before talking to these professors was what had been previously said, and that was all docile. Only when the faculty members began to spell out their concerns in our interviews did I get an idea of what I could be asking Chancellor Deaton, Provost Foster, or the like. Granted, everything worked out — I was able to get some university statements by making a couple calls late at night and piecing together some previous statements from Deaton. 

But it's just one of those situations where you lament that you somehow could have known what this would turn into. I'm sure an extended, unbroken period of time on a beat would have solved this particular problem. As it stands, I think the article needed to be written as it was, with a little more flavor to capture the anger, which is what has driven this special meeting slated for Thursday. The whole situation just caught be a little off-guard, and it made me kind of frustrated.

Shells are done for me — I'm currently sifting through all the green stories this semester to see what archived content we can add to bulk up the site at launch, whenever that will be. I'm still hoping to get a longer story together on Columbia College's growth outside of Columbia, but other work on the beat (like the story above) and the remaining pieces of shells work here and there and the work in the other four classes I'm doing. Yikes. It won't be the end of the world if it gets shelved for independent work in the fall, but I'd have liked to have written a story on it. Where does the time go when other pressing needs must be met?