Opinion Editor Tyler Fleming is the only candidate running to be the 2017-18 editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel. He is a junior political science and history major from Randleman, and this is a short version of his platform.
The DTH’s editor selection committee will meet Saturday morning to ask him questions — if you are a member of the local community or a UNC student unaffiliated with the DTH who is interested in joining the committee, please let us know as soon as possible at bit.ly/ChooseTheEditor.
Student voice is worth fighting for.
The Daily Tar Heel has long been an amplifier for those wishing to speak out, educate or demand change. While we may not always agree on what is being said, hopefully, we can all agree on the need of a student-run media company. Given the current atmosphere of mistrust, it would be unfair for us to expect you to just trust our reporting — I want to show you we are worth trusting. I want the way this paper operates to be open. I want us to be in the community, not just reporting on it. This paper’s goal is to act as watchdogs of this community, but to do that, we first need to earn your attention and trust. One of the main reasons UNC and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro community are so wonderful is because there are a lot of eyes watching over our community. Sadly, we have seen local news organizations shrink and regress from the area.
This is leaving a big hole for the DTH to fill, and it is only one of the many challenges on the horizon for this 124-year-old organization. Transparency is the only way we can include you in our reporting process and make our reporting more accurate. We want to hold the community accountable, and we need you to hold us accountable. As an educational newspaper, every article you see is the product of a lot of work — all of which is done by student journalists. The beauty of the DTH is that you can be a first-time reporter and have an article run prominently online or in the paper the next day. Even our most seasoned reporters are still relatively new to the game. While this mission is what I love most about this paper, it does breed problems that we need to address before we can ever hope to fix them. All of us are prone to make mistakes, except our mistakes get published every day. I want to make our mistakes better known, and to make it easier for you to get in contact with reporters, staffers and the editor-in-chief.
If you reach out to the DTH with a question or concern, you should expect a prompt response. Secondly, we need to be more open to shortcomings that are not as explicit. It may not come as a surprise that the DTH has an institutional bias towards the left. We strive to be objective in our reporting, but we are human and often fall short. Which is okay — it would be naive to say true objectivity can ever actually be achieved. I just want to handle how we convey that bias to you. If we have a hard time acknowledging it before publishing, then we are not actually trying to be objective.
One problem also hurting our ability to be objective is a lack of difference within the DTH’s office. This newspaper’s staff is overwhelmingly monolithic. If reporting the news is based off perceptions of an event, our organization has strikingly similar viewpoints. Which is a disservice to you. This isn’t an issue easily fixed, as its origins are deeply rooted in the industry of historically white media outlets, but through calling attention to it, we can begin to fight against it.
The main area in which The Daily Tar Heel needs to be honest is on finances. The entire newspaper industry has taken a beating. Advertising sales are dropping, classified sections are almost extinct and online revenue streams are proving inefficient. I don’t claim to have the solution, but I am confident that given a staff of 200 students and a caring community, together we can figure out how to keep the DTH afloat. In addition to being honest about finances, I also want to open up the DTH further to donations — think PBS or NPR. Our content being free gives people easy access to it, but we need help. I want to give people who value our content a chance to help fund our reporting, and more importantly, fund the education of future reporters.
As we continuously look for a sustainable business model, we must also prepare for the future. For me, I don’t want to leave future student reporters with the same economic worries we currently have. While we cannot predict the future, saving money aggressively and keeping an eye on upcoming trends might save a future DTH staff a lot of hardship. Yes, there are many challenges for all of us as we are trying to understand what our roles are in a constantly changing world. Thankfully our greatest resource is in each other. Certainly The Daily Tar Heel’s greatest resource is the people who write the content and the people who read it. We are an institution in this town, just like Linda’s or Sutton’s, thanks to years of community support. It is time we invite you to be a partner in all that we do.
