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The article is frankly fascinating.  Three things I learned:

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1) These “nighttime crawlers” like to travel: “Bedbugs are extreme hitchhikers. They are the best hitchhikers in the bug world.”

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2) One step to spot a potential infestation involves “looking for small streaks of excrement around the bed frame and mattress.” Hmm.

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3) Bed bugs are a government issue: “In late 2010, members of the national Legislature met in Washington, DC for the First Congressional Bed Bug Forum. The federal government set aside $50 million at the forum to combat the spread of bedbugs, intended to last through 2013. . . . Other states have attempted to control the spread of the insects since the forum. The Ohio Department of Health created an Ohio Bed Bug Workgroup that made recommendations to the Ohio Governor and Legislature in early 2011.”

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Bottom line: It’s time to “sink your teeth” into your schools’ “nighttime crawlers.”

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Questions for a Related Report

What’s the bed bug situation in your campus dorms and students’ off-campus residences?  What is the school’s MO for staving off potential infestations?  How does the campus health center intervene?  What do staffers there recommend re: spotting and treating bed bug bites and subsequent skin conditions?  Do any students have bed bug horror stories or actual scars?  In a larger sense, what are the steps taken by your school to keep buildings clean and up to code?  How much is spent on extermination and janitorial maintenance?  And what are the most common creepy crawlies affecting campus hotspots?  In an academic sense, do any science classes study these types of things?  Any professors conduct related research?  And is there a local or state-level governmental agency looking into the apparent bed bug pandemic?

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Multimedia Options

1) If relevant, post a photo slideshow of the spots bed bugs and similar creatures have infested on your campus.  According to the Northern Light, the bugs enjoy not only bedding but also couches “curtains, laundry, picture frames, and even books.”  A pest control guy: “We found bedbugs in Bibles twice now.”  2) A video report shadowing an exterminator or pest control crew while on the job on campus.  Ten minutes ago, I would have declared this lame, but then I read Teresa Kennedy’s piece.  The breakout star is a pest control company owner– he’s candid, (possibly unintentionally) funny, and very passionate about his job!

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Offbeat Option

A series of memes displaying the reactions of bed bugs to various places they inhabit on campus, aimed at satirizing well-known school ephemera, stereotypes, current events, and gossip.  Too much? :o

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By the way, think bed bugs are not newsworthy enough for a front-page feature?  Below is a sampling of related reports just pulled from a quick Google News search:

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Yet, as The New York Times reported yesterday, this Disney-ish story arc was actually a farce.  He had already been removed from Rhodes consideration due to the sexual assault trouble, something the school apparently hid even as it continued publicizing his heroic image.  Apparently, Daily News editors also knew about the sexual assault situation and decided to not report it.

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In an email posted this morning on Romenesko that truly raised my eyebrows, Daily News opinion editor Alex Klein wrote:

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As current Science and Technology editor Eli Markham told me, the News’ editor-in-chief, Max de la Bruyere, decided to sit on the story in mid-November. . . . Multiple current and past members of the newspaper’s managing board, all deeply involved in the day-to-day work of the paper, have confirmed that the News has had the story for over two months. In fact, the Times story that broke last night featured reporting from last year’s editor-in-chief, Vivian Yee. She too approached the paper with a tip-off, but its editors chose not to follow the story. The paper even knew that the sexual assault claim had lost [Witt] an offer to join the Boston Consulting Group after graduation. Even then, they wrote nothing. For reasons personal, social, or political — who can ever tell on a college campus? — the News’ management chose to ignore the bombshell, protecting [Witt's] reputation.

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There has been no comment from Daily News leadership about Klein’s email.  The paper has now run a pair of pieces about the Times report on Witt.  There is undoubtedly more to this story.  Stay tuned…

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For example, in an Occupy Movement-inspired tale, the Prophet reported on student ire about allegedly unfair “magic distribution.”  As the lede noted, “In a surprising turn of events at the normally apathetic university, a small number of students have taken issue with the high concentration of magic on campus and have staged a protest just inside the front gates. ‘It’s completely unfair that 99 percent of the country’s magic is possessed by 1 percent of the population,’ protest organizer Dimitri Galleon said.”

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My favorite snippet is an editor’s note on the bottom left of the front page announcing the retirement of the Prophet‘s previous editor-in-chief due to a “traumatic incident with a fire-breathing hellcat in the Forbidden Forest.” :)

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In her Inside Higher Ed essay, Melanie Fullick charges news media with inefficient, often superficial reporting on relevant issues such as school rankings, technology’s impact on education, the value and characteristics of international students and faculty, and the various “solutions” offered as panaceas to supposedly ailing higher learning institutions.

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My take: Among their many award-winning, innovative reports, student media are frequently guilty of this as well.  In my view, it’s not laziness.  It’s a disease. :)  I’ve dubbed it the SOS SASS– the Same Old Stories, Semester After Semester, Syndrome.

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There are simply some stories that on a scroll through the archives of any student media outlet pop up again and again and again, sometimes with a fresh spin (although many times, not so much), but always with the same core issue or topic intact.

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A few examples:

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Student Fees

(Being Raised, Some Concerns)

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New Staff Hire

(Smiley, Eager to Pitch In)

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Campus Parking

(Tough to Grab a Spot)

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Why are we covering the same stories over and over and over?  I understand student readers graduate and staff turnover at campus media is high and knowledge of past issues is not a priority and that some stories deserve repeated reporting and editorializing.  But something needs to be done to break out of writing yet again about the debate club’s regional tournament appearance or the annual sorority Easter egg hunt.

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What can we learn from our student press predecessors? What is the value of yellowed student newspaper issues or now-archived Web pages displaying past student media efforts?  A flip through these print-and-Web treasure troves can provide a history lesson about how and how much things have changed at your school and also, more importantly, in my opinion . . . what things have stayed the same.

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And so, along with ensuring all issues of a student press outlet are archived and available online or in the newsroom or campus library, I contend that all student staffs should consider mining those archives for story ideas, seeing what’s been covered and how it’s been covered.

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The potential for present content is tremendous.  Timelines of important issues, more direct compare-contrasts, This Day in School History siders, and strengthened arguments galore.  For example, it’s one thing to complain about the university shuttle service at present.  It’s quite another to quote a mid-nineties article in the same student publication making the same plea for better campus-area transport that has apparently continued to fall on deaf ears.

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The basic question at the debate’s core: Should students be allowed to work for multiple, possibly competing campus media at the same time?

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The reason behind the debate: The editor-in-chief of J-School Buzz, the hyperlocal news site covering Mizzou’s j-school, recently resigned due to a conflict of interest related to her work on The Columbia Missourian, a local daily staffed by professionals, profs, and Mizzou students.

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A Missourian policy, fairly recently updated, notes, “Work for other local media by Missourian paid staff or students in staff classes (reporting, copy editing, design, photography, photo editing, graphics, etc.) is prohibited. Local media include daily and weekly newspapers and related websites in our circulation area, campus newspapers and competing broadcast outlets.

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In a post about the resignation, J-School Buzz founder David Teeghman describes the policy as antiquated in a modern media environment boasting many, many outlets– especially ones that offer students the potential for picking up different skills.

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In his words, “[The EIC who resigned] would have learned a few things as JSB’s editor-in-chief that she will never learn at the Missourian. She won’t learn much there about analytics, what content generates traffic and buzz, the difference between stories an audience ‘wants’ and ‘needs,’ how to run a popular news blog, how to respond to critical commenters and tweeters you know personally, how to keep a site running when it gets a rush of unexpected traffic, and so on.”

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While his post makes the Missourian seem like the bad guy, the comments section clarifies and fights back on numerous points– arguing that Missourian staffers DO learn the skills Teeghman says they won’t and that STUDENTS were actually the group most in favor of enacting strict conflict of interest policies.

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My take: Conflicts of interest are often unavoidable in collegemediatopia.  Some of the classics: the student working in the school’s PR office while wanting to report for the newspaper; the student joining a frat while wanting to write about an event that involves Greek organizations; the history major who finds herself editing a story involving a dust-up between history profs and the administration; and the student keeping an indy Tumblr blog while writing for the school magazine on similar issues.

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Each potential conflict must be addressed on its merits.  And while most policies and idealists have their hearts in the right place, the truth is always murkier and in need of wiggle room.  Teeghman is correct in the overall implication that independent student media tend to get short shrift in conflict-of-interest fights when pitted against long-established, school-affiliated behemoths.  But in this instance, I don’t personally see any Orwellian plot to keep J-School Buzz down.  Let the debate continue!

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Since Storify is not yet synced with WordPress.com sites (yes, it says it is, but it is actually not), I’ve also included a screenshot rundown here.

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Last Saturday night, the managing editor of Onward State at Penn State University resigned suddenly.  The resignation came hours after the online student news outlet mistakenly reported that former PSU head football coach Joe Paterno had died from lung cancer.  While his death became sadly true roughly 12 hours later, it was not accurate when Onward State first confirmed it.  The erroneous scoop spread rapidly across the news media and social media landscapes and its subsequent retraction led to a lot of anger, cringing, head-scratching, and a quest to understand what went wrong and how we can learn from it.

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A USA TODAY College column I posted on Sunday provides a solid all-in-one-place basic breakdown of the mistaken scoop, its quick spread, its subsequent retraction, the consequences, and the public and press reaction.

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Jeff Sonderman’s excellent round-up of tweets and story links is a visual guide through the initial moments of the scoop, where it spread, and how it was debunked and then retracted.

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The resignation letter posted by Onward State managing editor Devon Edwards in many ways has become the seminal document of the saga– a symbol of the consequences brought on by faulty reporting and a confession of how overwhelmed the student media outlet was by the realization that its content was of interest to the general public and professional press.

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Interestingly, along with the expected anger, Edwards earned a lot of kudos for the upfront way in which he addressed the mistake, a testament to the power of candor and actual remorse and to the larger recognition that, hey, at some point all of us screw up.  I was personally really moved by the kindness many professional journalists extended to Edwards and OS.

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The two links above share the most candid, comprehensive explanations we are likely to get of what went wrong behind-the-scenes that night at Onward State.

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The two links above provide what I personally think are the most important lessons to take away from the incident.

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Meanwhile, these additional links above struck me personally as tone-deaf or just-plain wrong.  While the first piece makes some good points about the motivations behind the larger media’s rush to publish, it has nothing to do with what actually prompted Onward State to report on Paterno.  As staffers have stated publicly, the screw-up happened because of a hoax email and a bad reporter, not any desire for glory.  The second piece is odd.  Apparently a single mistake– even of great magnitude– negates the fact that Onward State is cutting edge within college media?  I might be biased (I’m quoted in one of the articles the piece cites from a few years back) but from my perspective media screw up all the time.  This post seems to imply that all the previous talk about its innovating is dumb because look how sucky it actually is.  It was one error!  One we will all learn from…

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In her new book, Homesickness: An American History, Weber State University distinguished history professor Susan Matt traces the evolution of this longing sentiment from America’s earliest days.

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In the Q&A below, Matt discusses some surprising truths about homesickness, its relation to college students and young adults and its status in the era of Skype, texts and tweets. 

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To start, what does your book specifically explore, and what inspired you to tackle the subject?

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The book examines how homesickness has changed over the last four centuries. Homesickness was once considered an illness that could affect people of all ages and could even kill them. Today, however, it is generally seen as a passing, temporary phase that children at camp and students at college experience and then get over. I wanted to understand why this change occurred and how earlier generations had dealt with the pain that comes from moving away from family and friends.

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What led me to tackle the subject was my own experience with mobility. I wasn’t homesick in college,  but when I moved away from the Midwest, first for grad school and then for jobs, I found it much more difficult than I expected.  I wondered if I was the only one to feel this way. Our culture always portrays moving on as easy — think of all the stories about pioneers and Western settlement — and we seem not to dwell on the sadness that often comes with leaving home.

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Since most of us have felt it at some point in our lives, we all probably think we fully understand the concept of homesickness. What is something about it that might surprise us or that we might not know?

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Until fairly recently, physicians used the word ‘nostalgia’ to describe acute cases of homesickness, and considered it a dangerous and often deadly disease. They were convinced it could cause fevers, heart palpitations, skin problems, diarrhea and sometimes even death. During the Civil War, the U.S. Surgeon General concluded that 74 Union soldiers had died of nostalgia and that over 5,000 more were so seriously ill with the condition that they came to a doctor’s attention. To prevent more men from dying of it, doctors and army officials often sent soldiers home, since this was the only known cure for homesickness.

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Has homesickness historically been linked mainly to young people going to school or starting out on their own?

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Until the 20th century, people of all ages admitted to suffering from homesickness. Young people heading off to work or to school often experienced it, but so did pioneers, gold miners and immigrants, and they talked about it quite openly. Gradually, however, psychological theories about the emotion shifted and many came to believe it was primarily a condition of youth. Psychologists often describe it as something kids and adolescents go through at summer camp and at college and then get over. In reality, I think many adults continue to struggle with the emotion long after college, but there is a code of silence about it and people keep the feeling to themselves.

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To read the rest of the piece, check out my USA TODAY College “Campus Beat” column.  Click here or on the screenshot below.

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Below are 10 early observations about the roughly two-month-old JimRomenesko.com:

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1) Romenesko is blogging with a vibrancy and candor that was missing from his latter days at Poynter (when, frankly, he had all but disappeared).  He seems to be inserting more of his personal voice into posts, including periodic giggly headlines and other dollops of dry wit.  While occasionally veering too much toward informality, the writing overall is indicative of a man who is clearly enjoying what he is doing.  My guess: That enjoyment is being shared by readers like me.

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2) Reader interaction is up, up, UP.  He is basing numerous posts on interesting reader emails, inserting lots of site and Facebook comments in ‘reaction’ posts, and including lots of tweets and other web chatter from the newsy masses.  The result is a site seemingly more attuned to the news media sentiments of the moment.

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3) Romenesko is fast becoming a social media machine.  He tweets, posts and interacts on Facebook, and has made Vadim Lavrusik a happy man by utilizing Facebook comments on all posts along with regular site comments.  (His Google+ presence is barebones at best.)  One of my favorite regular posts is the daily links rundown of what he’s tweeted but not blogged about.

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4) He also appears to be morphing into a weekend blogger.  While not yet establishing a reliable rhythm to his Saturday and Sunday routine (some weekends it’s been very light or basically nonexistent while others it has been quite steady), he does seem to be slowly embracing the 24/7/365 blogging mentality.  If nothing else, it is one more way to gain an edge over his previous employer/current competition.

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5) The site is fun to look at!  Romenesko has begun featuring images in earnest– a mix of logos, screenshots, headshots, Creative Commons standbys, and primary docs.  It adds liveliness to the scroll-and-browse proceedings.  Only slightly disconcerting observation: unattributed headshots are popping up evermore as of late.

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6) His value is evermore as a primary source.  His email-for-a-reaction-MO was entrenched at Poynter, but he is definitely reaching out much more regularly to the individuals and outlets he blogs about– and receiving subsequent responses at a surprisingly high rate.  And it might simply be circumstantial, but the responses have been more interesting!

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7) Ads are beginning to appear.  Some scream bush-league, interspersed with a few biggies such as AT&T.  Bottom-line curiosity: Is he making any money at all, or anything close to what he was pulling in at Poynter?  Doubtful, but of course he’s still in the scrappy insurgency phase.

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8) Three things I personally don’t like: the headlines pushed to the side; the muted mellow blah gold/mauve headline and hyperlink color; and the lack of posts available for scrolling on each page (Poynter’s MediaWire doubles Romenesko’s posts-per-page count).  These are all minor complaints.

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9) There is still an inside-the-castle-walls feel to the whole shebang at times, based on what he writes about and who he sources.  (Apparently the “new Romenesko” will “cast a pretty wide net . . . [that includes] community media, ethnic media, overseas media, blogs and online publications.”)  But Romenesko is noticeably writing more about student media and journalism education issues.  I do recommend expanding the reach to more of the blogosphere and social media realm.

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10) The site’s tagline states boldly: “A Blog About Media and Other Things I’m Interested In.”  I have yet to determine what else he is interested in. :)  At this point, everything he’s blogged about is focused squarely on all-things media.

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Lingering Question) Prior to the Poynter plagiarism-charge craziness, Romenesko had stated he was planning to move on from daily journalism news aggregating.  Is that still the short-term or long-term plan???

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Related

A Strange, Sad Day in Journalism: Romenesko’s Resignation

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Amid a few technical bugs, administrative worries about “workplace friction,” and related concerns about the lack of context the numbers provide, Sun Star editor-in-chief Heather Bryant told The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner “she views the [database] effort as a success.  Although the data is a matter of public record, tracking down the information without such a tool would be tough without a significant amount of time and effort. The database, she said, helps bridge that gap.  ‘In this case, public doesn’t necessarily mean accessible,’ Bryant said.”

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Related

Salary Database Most Popular Part of Student Paper’s Site

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