Every week the student staff of the Lutrinae meets around a large conference table and kicks around story ideas, looking at event schedules, and talking about what we’re hearing around campus.
A few weeks ago some of our staffers reported hearing about students having problems with mold. It seemed to be a newsworthy and important issue to investigate, so we set to work.
When reporting we seek to identify those affected by certain issues, the decision makers and the experts in the field. We did an online call out seeking to speak to students dealing with mold problems and things didn’t go ideally.
Only two students agreed to speak with us, but neither interview wielded relevant or verifiable information. We strive to be timely in our reporting and it seemed unlikely we would be able to find another student who was dealing with mold. We decided to publish in hopes the explanation of why there is a problem with mold and what to do about it would best serve our readers.
While we all would have preferred to have your experiences reflected in the original article, that’s difficult to do without people going on the record to share their challenges. I believe our reporters created a responsible piece of journalism that addressed the problem at hand.