The last word

Thank you for an excellent year, volunteers . . . and UMSU

Tessa Vanderhart, staff

I would like to begin this, my last editorial of the 2007-08 publishing year, with an earnest thank you. Our hundreds of volunteers, in particular, have made their mark on the Manitoban this year. Dozens of volunteer staff — those who contributed three or more articles or images to the paper — make or break the paper. This year, as always, their collective contributions made up the bulk of what has been published this year.

And among those volunteer staff, three in particular devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to the newspaper: our Volunteer of the Year Jesse Beach and runners-up Matt Abra and Trevor Bekolay.

This year has been extremely rewarding, and I am honoured to be returning for a second term as editor-in-chief of the Manitoban. I can say right now that our focus will be on drawing in even more volunteers and encouraging them to become more involved with the paper and, though it is cheesy, I hope that you, reader, will consider getting involved yourself.

Journalism — that is, going beyond simply putting words on the page but actively seeking out stories, reporting, checking facts, etc. — is not easy. That’s why many people — mainstream media employees included — don’t do it. The Winnipeg Free Press has been lucky enough, for example, to receive a large number of story tips from the U of M administration because the U of M administration was kind enough to hire a former Free Press reporter to its press department. That is excellent for the U of M, but it is not journalism.

A similar relationship existed at one time between the Manitoban and UMSU. Actually, before that happened, UMSU tried to shut us down . . . but that’s another story. In more recent memory, UMSU curried favour with the Manitoban in ways that were alternately devious and entirely ethically acceptable, everything from being friendly and approachable to, over the last few weeks, not returning many of our phone calls.

I’ll be the first to admit that the Manitoban has not always respected UMSU. Furthermore, I personally made an error in an article that I wrote about UMSU this year (I wrote that the health plan debt was $3 million instead of $300,000).

However, on April 2, two Manitoban staff were informed by UMSU executives that communications would be handled by communications co-ordinator Rob Marriot.

This cannot go unreported. While it is clear that I am not objective on the matter, I will endeavour to explain what I see as a ridiculous position in the most reasonable and good-intentioned way that I can. I hope that this does not negatively impact the current UMSU executive’s opinion of the Manitoban any further and acts instead only as an example of what not to do to incoming UMSU executives, councillors and staff.

I was shocked by this notification, particularly as, in preparing a story on the UMSU budget among other things, the Manitoban required a large number of specific, technical answers.

I immediately e-mailed UMSU president Garry Sran to inquire.

He responded: “I received your voice mail message. As you are aware, Rob Marriott is our communications co-ordinator. For all media inquires, please contact him and provide him any questions in writing. He will contact the appropriate spokesperson to respond via written response. This is due to numerous in-accuracies and misquotes this past year in the Manitoban.”

Of course I responded immediately to ask what those mistakes were. Five days later, on April 7, I received a list of errors, only one of which I had been previously alerted to (and printed a correction on). Most of the mistakes were typos, especially misspellings of “Gary” Sran, Amanda “Johnson” and “Kristen” Roos. I do sincerely wish that these typos had not made it into the newspaper; each one is a regrettable error. Each of these small mistakes, however, is equally as embarrassing to me as it is to UMSU, and that no one bothered to alert us to the mistake earlier so that we could have had more of a chance of stopping is quite odd.

I sent Sran another e-mail, asking for clarification about the apparently new policy of UMSU executives and staff no longer conducting interviews with the Manitoban. For years, the Manitoban has had full access to UMSU executives, councillors and even many staff members. The executive director, too, has acted as a resource on many UMSU-finance-related stories, helping Manitoban reporters to prevent the very inaccuracies that have been complained about.

I abhor this response. UMSU is here to serve the students and they are doing students a huge disservice by essentially saying that they no longer wish to communicate with the Manitoban.

We began, but were too busy to complete, a story on the approachability of UMSU executives. Preliminary results indicated that the UMSU executive is approachable and helpful. So why is this distrust necessary? Not only that, at the April 3 UMSU council meeting, executives and councillors took the opportunity to vent their frustrations with the Manitoban, very rudely in front of our news editor. Sran complained that an opinion article of his was not printed.

But with Sran’s article, as now, I have the last word. The article was simply not up to the Manitoban’s standards. Not to mention, UMSU gets a ton of coverage in the paper without a feel-good press response from Sran, on top of a free full-page ad each week, worth $500. Thankfully (though our autonomy agreement precludes political messages on the UMSU ad page), he managed to get it in there.

While writing this editorial, I received a phone call from Titus Gregory, policy analyst for the Kwantlen Students’ Association, informing me that he had just seen Sran at Kwantlen College in Vancouver, B.C. He was also there one month ago, flown by the CFS and on vacation from UMSU. I wonder whose money he is there on now.

I am not anti-UMSU. I am not anti-CFS. I think both organizations have huge potential and act entirely in what they see as the best interests of students.

But I maintain that the best way these organizations can promote their message is by working with the Manitoban to provide our readers with fair and balanced coverage. That means allowing us to question UMSU and continuing to speak with us afterwards. It means acting like any grown-up government and realizing that showing confidence to the media is the best way to indicate confidence in one’s administration.

And that is my last word. See you all next year!