First, I’d like to start off by giving a little background information on myself and why I started writing this blog. My name is Adam Jasie, I am a junior broadcast journalism major at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT and I hail from that great sandbar that hangs off the eastern end of Massachusetts: Cape Cod.  This blog is largely a class assignment for my reporting for the web class, but I do have hopes that the blog will grow beyond that and will hopefully continue once my class ends in December. 

For my blog topic, I chose to focus on, you guessed it, issues facing local CT college media outlets, specifically student-run newspapers.  Quinnipiac is a great place to start and over the next few days I will go further into the reasons why that is true. Anyone with a facebook account can read up on it here: “Facebook”.

But I do feel a brief overview in this first post is necessary and appropriate. Starting in the Fall semester of last year, the local Quinnipiac student newspaper, The Chronicle, began running into difficulties with the University administration due to topics and incidents they were reporting on around campus. As you would expect, the students cried foul on first amendment rights and the administration argued their case that because the newspaper was school-funded they were libel for anything the paper published.

By the end of last year Jason Braff, the editor-in-chief of the paper, and several others in the higher ranks at the paper decided enough was enough and created their own online paper, The QUAD, completely free of University funding or involvement.

In the next few days and weeks, I plan to go into the issue in further detail after interviewing and getting first hand opinions from those involved with the paper as well as looking at the issue of “censorship” in other student-run newspapers, as I feel it is a very important topic that speaks to a larger problem seen in today’s professional media outlets of corporate induced censorship.