College Shorts

Author: Jaime Fuller

Online student paper fights administration

The chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists at Quinnipiac University was threatened with dissolution this week because of their involvement with an independent online newspaper. The online paper, the Quad News, which is staffed by many former members of the official University newspaper, the Quinnipiac Chronicle, is being challenged because it is not an officially sanctioned student organization. The "official warning" to the group was communicated in a letter to SPJ President Jaclyn Hirsch, also the managing editor of the Quad News, on September 8.

The only administration response has been a one-sentence statement from Vice President for Public Affairs Lynn Bushnell.

"The letter," she wrote, "speaks for itself."The Quad News was created in response to the administration's tight editorial control on the Quinnipiac Chronicle and has grown a considerable following. One day last week, the paper's website got 2,000 hits, more than any single day of hits in the Chronicle's site's history.

Although the students are disgruntled with the actions of the administration, they seem more resigned than shocked.

"It sounds like typical Quinnipiac," said John, a junior history major, who did not give his last name. "They want to dress everything up and put a bow on it. Quinnipiac is all about appearance."

Although the students aren't shocked by the newspaper's imperilment, outside experts looking in think this is a serious breach of the students' rights.

"I have not heard of any case in which a chapter of SPJ was threatened," said Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a school for journalism located in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"It is like something out of an authoritarian government, something I would expect to see in Singapore, not in Connecticut."

- Yale Daily News

Boston pair pioneer internship website

Lauren Grunstein and Stephanie Gurtman, two juniors from Boston University College of Communications, have begun their foray into business with their innovative new website Internshipratings.com. Grunstein and Gurtman hope their work will translate into a tool that will make students' decisions concerning internships much easier.

The site asks students to rate their internship on a scale from one to five coffee cups, which goes along nicely with the website's maxim, "Is it worth the coffee?" The site also gives students the opportunity to offer comments about their experiences.

Now that classes have resumed, the website has accumulated a lot of ratings from students getting back from their summer internships. Now the pair of entrepreneurs are focusing on growth; they have been attending many networking and public relations conferences and are running a booth at CollegeFest 2008 at the Hynes Convention Center on Sept. 27 and 28.

"It's hard to know where the site will take us, but it's definitely a long-term project," Grunstein said. "There's a lot of potential for growth."

Initial student response seems to be positive, and hopefully students will be able to refine their internship search based on what they find on the site.

"College students should definitely take advantage of any internship help sites," said Caty Bennet of Boston University. "Sometimes we can get stuck in really unfortunate summer internships."

- Daily Free Press