By Emily Wunderlich
You might have noticed that the 50th anniversary of our newspaper briefly appeared on USF St. Petersburg’s home page last week.
On Oct. 28, the university’s marketing and communications department posted our lengthy story about the history of The Crow’s Nest that appeared on the front page of our print edition earlier that day. I gave them permission to do so, provided we were credited for our work.
But I didn’t give them permission to edit our story in any way. And that’s exactly what they did.
“We had to shorten it up a bit for our purposes,” said Matthew Cimitile, communications officer for the university, in an email after the story was live.
Cimitile did not mention exactly what was shortened, nor did he elaborate on what “our purposes” were. Since the university only publishes on the web and not in print, it never occurred to me that length would be an issue. (The story ran just above 2,000 words.)
In all, about 15 paragraphs of material that some on the Tampa campus might find unflattering were removed.
Gone were paragraphs that described the uncertain future that the St. Petersburg campus and The Crow’s Nest face when consolidation takes effect next July.
Gone were paragraphs that described what may have been the paper’s first editorial, on Dec. 1, 1971. It urged Tampa administrators to “stop treating this campus like an unwanted step-child.”
And gone were paragraphs that described what the paper called “the uneasy relationship between St. Petersburg and Judy Genshaft, who changed the leadership of the campus six times in her 19 years as USF system president.”
There’s no other explanation for the deletions. They weren’t a coincidence. They undermined the integrity of our work and our role as a campus watchdog for the last 50 years.
The events reported in our story happened as a matter of fact and were reported as such. To delete them is to imply they never happened. But they played a significant role in shaping our campus’ history.
If you take that away, what’s left to celebrate?
Many of us on staff — and our adviser, a former reporter and editor at the Tampa Bay Times — were shocked and insulted by the marketing department’s decision.
We demanded the university retract its publication of our story the following day.
It did.
But we received no apology or adequate explanation as to why omitting key facts in the campus’ history was warranted.
I advised Carrie O’Brion, the director of marketing and communications, that I was writing a column about this and asked if she wanted to respond. This is what she wrote in an email:
“We were very pleased to help commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Crow’s Nest, which is a significant milestone. We published to the university’s website the portions of the story that highlighted the history and the accomplishments of the newspaper.
“Since you objected to the content that was posted, we removed the story from our website, as you requested.”
We recognize that public relations is a lot different than journalism, but the basic ethical values should be the same. If the university wanted a more positive spin on campus history for the paper’s 50th anniversary, it should have written its own story.
The Crow’s Nest owns all work published in the paper, including stories, photos and graphics, unless otherwise stated. If we let another entity publish our work, we expect it to appear exactly as it did in our paper unless previously arranged.
Former news editor Anna Bryson interned at Creative Loafing while she worked for us. If we shared content between publications, we always credited the other and never made changes without asking first.
This semester, our visuals editor, Thomas Iacobucci, interns at WUSF Public Media. We’ve allowed them to use his photos — with credit to us — and they’ve never modified them.
We expect the same level of professionalism and transparency from our university’s marketing department.
To read the Crow’s Nest history story in full, visit https://crowsneststpete.com/2019/10/28/the-crows-nest-at-50-your-lookout-on-our-waterfront-campus/.
Nice letter, Emily. Keep after them. These pinheads obviously need scrutiny