This Student Press Law Center article was published Jan. 22. The Student Pub Board met Friday and decided to take a step backward and not vote on anything decided in the committees because certain board members wanted to "wait and see what the provost said about the O'Collegain's lack of an adviser."

According to the College of Arts and Sciences, the O'Collegian is to get an adviser soon, but that remains to be seen, as an adviser was supposed to be put in place by the beginning of the spring 2008 semester.

The O'Collegian staff has been functioning with an absent adviser and help from the journalism school's faculty for about five years and has never had issues because of this.

So what does all of this mean? The staff has wasted an entire year on the Pub Board and is essentially back to square one.

This will be updated as events unfold. Until then, we'll keep fighting the good fight.

Thank you for your support.

-BSchmidt

Assistant Design Editor
The Daily O'Collegian

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Panel: O'Collegian editor in chief should oversee ocolly.com
New committee appointed to suggest specific changes to bylaws that govern student paper

© 2008 Student Press Law Center


OKLAHOMA — A committee appointed by Oklahoma State University's Board of Student Publications recommended Friday that the editor in chief of the student newspaper, The Daily O'Collegian, have the authority to hire the student editor in charge of the Web site that bears the paper's nickname, ocolly.com.

The move brings the board a step closer to ending a dispute that last semester led to print staffers withholding O'Collegian content from the Web site. The controversy began when General Manager Fritz Wirt allowed a student to write a blog for ocolly.com over the objections of the O'Collegian's then-editor in chief, Jenny Redden.

Redden, a former Student Press Law Center intern, said she had fired the student from the O'Collegian. She objected to Wirt, a non-student, making hiring decisions for the student paper's Web site. But Wirt, who helped launch the Web site more than a decade earlier, said ocolly.com had never been under the editor in chief's authority.

In November, after the publications board declined to explicitly grant Redden that authority, O'Collegian editors stopped providing articles to the Web site. A new editorial board, led by Editor in Chief Rhiannon Mako, voted to resume working with ocolly.com at the beginning of this semester, citing progress by a committee appointed by the publications board to review the situation.

That committee voted 4-1 on Friday to recommend that the editor in chief be in charge of hiring the O'Collegian's Web editor, said journalism assistant professor Ray Murray, who served on the panel. A competing proposal, supported by Wirt and the director of Oklahoma State's journalism program, Tom Weir, would have called for the publications board to appoint the Web editor in the same way it hires the O'Collegian editor in chief.

The editor in chief has too many other responsibilities to effectively oversee ocolly.com and help it develop "in a creative and innovative way," Weir said.

But critics, including Mako and Murray, said that plan essentially would have split the O'Collegian and ocolly.com into separate publications, despite the fact that the Web site draws almost all its content from the newspaper.

Murray said he was "quite happy" with the committee's recommendation, although the publications board itself did not adopt the suggestion Friday. Instead a new committee — including Murray, Wirt and Weir — will recommend specific changes to the publications board's constitution and bylaws. The group must distribute its suggestions to board members by Feb. 1 in order for the board to act at its Feb. 15 meeting.

By Michael Beder, SPLC staff writer