James Madison Reporters Receive Judicial Charges for Doing Their Jobs?
Nicole Dales
Issue date: 10/28/09 Section: News
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JMU is about two hours away from our campus. Their student paper,The Breeze has been in print since 1922, comes out twice a week. The paper is produced on Mondays and Thursdays and is available across campus and online. Editor-in-Chief Tim Chapman, and Katie Hibson, a contributing news writer, received judicial board charges at the end of last week. From what I have been told, there was an incident regarding a "peeping tom" inside a residence hall, and The Breeze, as any campus newspaper would, showed up to cover the incident.
The "peeping tom" was found on Oct. 17 and the campus was notified by a "timely notice" email JMU sent on Oct.18. I do not know how things work at The Breeze, but here at The Rotunda, a contributing news writer signifies a writer who is not an actual staff member. Last semester, it was The Rotunda's policy that a writer must get five articles published before they became an official staff member.
If that were the case at The Breeze, then that would be unfortunate for Hibson. That would mean she just showed up and was like "Hey I will try and write an article," and went out with that eager energy and ended up getting slammed. Either way she ended up with the short end of the stick. Regardless of whether she was on the staff or not, she still has the charges against her. If she decided to try the story just for fun, that would be even worse.
Ok. I got off track. So anyway, Hibson gets word of the incident and decides to go over to Hillside Hall, where the incident took place. Hibson said she was invited into the residence hall and clearly identified herself as a reporter (props to her on that one). Resident Ariel Spagnolo invited her into the building and stayed within 15 feet of Hibson as she interviewed people. Hibson was asked to leave by the Resident Adviser (RA) Maria Lane, and Hibson did so promptly.
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