The Essential Tension

If you worked for a professional news organization and missed your deadlines, your boss could easily fire you. The company would hire someone more reliable, and the product would keep flowing as if nothing had happened.

That situation does not exist at Horizons. As long as you choose not to withdraw from the Publications class and don’t act in a consistently disruptive manner, you can be a staff member as long as you like.

The incentives to produce news content in the professional world are also much different. You are paid to write (or record video, or take pictures). If you fail to do your job at one institution, that reputation is liable to follow you through the next stage of your career. There can be a direct causal connection between your reporting and your ability to feed your family.

We try to substitute some of those incentives in the Publications class. If you fail to meet deadlines, your course grades will suffer.

For years, we have also had a policy that allows the paper to print a blank space where the delinquent reporter’s article should have appeared with the message, “This space courtesy of so-and-so.” The idea is that the threat of being shamed in front of the entire college community will motivate students to treat deadlines seriously and follow through with their assignments.

The threat, however, is mostly an empty one. We receive overdue submissions every semester, especially for the first issue of the paper. Yet I’ve never seen the blank space materialize.

It can be frustrating to listen to the same excuses over and over for late work. We have a policy for granting extensions, and are generally fairly liberal about granting extra time if a student asks beforehand and offers a plausible reason. A few students avail themselves of this avenue, but far too many simply assume that they can ignore the deadline and their stories will still be printed.

The truth is that those students are to some extent correct. An essential tension exists between enforcing deadlines and needing enough content to print a robust newspaper.

During the writing process for the first issue, Professor Karyn Smith, Editor-in-Chief Dave Weidenfeller and I shifted deadlines for drafts and other material several times after it became apparent that too few articles would make it into the final product otherwise.

We have admonished the class. Entreated the class. Encouraged the class.

In the end, though, we have to have a minimum amount of content to proceed. Even if every student gets a failing grade for a late story, whether to include the article in Horizons is an independent decision made with the overriding goal of the paper’s survival in mind.

Karyn worried aloud a few times about whether there would be a paper. When she voiced this concern, I reassured her that this procrastination happens at the beginning of every semester, and the paper still gets printed. Eventually enough people do the work. The rest lose out until the next round.

There is a silver lining: as the semester wears on, fewer students neglect the deadlines, making them easier to enforce. The confusion dissipates to some degree, and by the end, many of the people who initially complained of how difficult the process was are eager to contribute. That’s how we end up with Pub II students and editors, some of whom stay on long after they no longer have the incentive of grades to prod them.