The editorial board of The Olaf Messenger chose to dedicate a portion of this week’s issue of the newspaper to the topic of freedom of the press on college campuses. This decision was made as a direct result of our own struggle with unfair restrictions on our newspaper.
Throughout this academic year, we have struggled to report on campus issues in a fair and unrestricted manner. Since October 2023, St. Olaf College’s Marketing and Communications Office (MarCom) has been placing increasingly inappropriate restrictions on our ability to interview College staff and faculty. Our attempts to address this issue privately have not been successful. Therefore, we are choosing to publicly express our concerns out of hope that the St. Olaf community will support us in advocating for student press freedom.
In October 2023, The Messenger’s news editors scheduled a meeting with St. Olaf’s new Director of Public Relations, who informed them that MarCom wanted to work more closely with The Messenger. She said that our reporters would have to email her every time we wanted to interview a member of the College’s staff or faculty, asking for MarCom to schedule an interview. Our editors did not follow this policy when interviewing faculty, because we viewed it as a violation of academic freedom. However, they began to contact MarCom every time an Olaf Messenger reporter wanted to speak with a staff member.
This new policy struck us as unusual and sudden. In all of the years that our current staff have worked at the paper, we have not experienced this level of involvement from the College’s public relations (PR) team.
Just weeks before the new rule was announced, The Messenger interviewed President Susan Rundell Singer in the President’s House with no involvement from MarCom representatives and received no pushback from College administration. Similarly, The Messenger interviewed Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre without alerting MarCom, and faced no criticism for doing so. In the 2023 spring semester, journalists from the Messenger published two news articles that would go on to win the Minnesota Newspaper Association’s “College Better Newspaper Contest” first and third place awards for Hard News. This suggests that The Messenger is a credible and responsible source, one that was not in need of hand-holding from PR professionals. However, we continued to obey the policy.
Our concerns grew more serious at the beginning of the spring 2024 semester. When we emailed MarCom to request interviews, they began to ask for us to send the interview questions in advance. Except in very sensitive situations, this is a practice that professional journalists view as a serious breach of journalistic ethics.
On multiple occasions, MarCom insisted upon having email interviews and acted as a middleman between us and our sources, not allowing us to speak with them directly. Again, professional journalists view this practice as a breach of ethics because we would have no way of verifying if quotes have been edited. Ethically, we would not be able to publish quotes that were obtained in such a way.
A MarCom representative also began to sit in on all interviews with staff and did not announce that or explain why they were doing this.
When I requested an interview with Public Safety for a story that I was working on, MarCom told me that I could speak with Assistant Director of Public Safety Zita Toth Gaddis. When I got to the interview, I was surprised to find that Director of Public Safety Derek Kruse was also there, along with a MarCom representative, who spoke frequently. It felt at times like she was directing the meeting, and not me. I was also unprepared to speak with both Kruse and MarCom, and this changed the tone of our interview. It felt inappropriate and disrespectful for MarCom to change the group of people who would be present for the interview without prior notice or explanation.
When two of our reporters interviewed St. Olaf College Chief Financial Officer Mike Berthelsen for a story about the proposed Bon Appétit takeover of the Pause, they were similarly surprised to find a MarCom representative in attendance at the meeting. Our audio recordings of this interview suggest that Dodge had prepared with Berthelsen before the interview. Executive Editor Caroline Geer ʼ24 details this experience in her Letter from the Editor.
While we accepted this situation as understandable given the sensitive nature of the Pause story, we were concerned when MarCom became involved with every story we wrote, no matter how important. That week, and in the following weeks, a MarCom representative sat in on every interview with staff. The presence of MarCom representatives in interviews inherently changes the tone and content of those interviews, which is the reason for our concern.
These problems are ongoing. Recently, one of our reporters emailed Derek Kruse with a request to schedule an interview so that she could have a conversation with him about potential changes to Public Safety’s policies. When Kruse, who is usually very responsive and willing to work with The Messenger, did not reply to our reporter’s email, she contacted MarCom. On May 1, MarCom responded to her email with a paragraph-long “statement on behalf of Director of Public Safety Derek Kruse.”
Our news editor responded that we cannot publish a statement if we are unable to verify that it was unedited and actually written by Kruse, and asked again for permission to interview a representative of Public Safety to discuss several serious questions that we have for them. She received this as a response: “We have no more to add outside the statement provided on behalf of Director Kruse. You are welcome to use it in your reporting.” In the past, The Messenger has been able to have honest and open conversations with Public Safety, helping to increase transparency. Now, we are being prevented from doing so.
In March, we scheduled a meeting with MarCom in order to discuss our concerns with their increased involvement in our work. In this meeting, MarCom told us that MarCom simply wanted to treat The Messenger like any other media organization. Per the College’s website, the Media Relations Policy states that “Marketing and Communications serves as the primary point of contact between media organizations and the college.” The policy currently says nothing about student media, specifically.
When The Messenger contacted the PR Director and the Director of Marketing and Communications asking for an updated, more detailed policy that might finally explain the rule changes that we’ve been experiencing, we received an official statement on the student media policy.
MarCom wrote that “St. Olaf has a long-standing policy of providing the Olaf Messenger [sic] with the same access, information, data, and resources as all other independent news organizations that approach the college for a story or expert opinion. In return, the college holds the Mess [sic] to the same journalistic standards as any media outlet” and said that “All of this is in keeping with how most organizations work with journalists, and this practice has been in place at St. Olaf for years.”
This final phrase is factually incorrect — The Messenger’s email and audio records, going back four years, show that our journalists have been given the opportunity to speak directly with faculty and staff, unlike other media organizations.
However, according to our former editors, there was one recent instance in which MarCom asked Messenger reporters to go through them before speaking to sources. It was in 2016, after The Messenger covered a story that was highly critical of St. Olaf’s administration — it focused on Title IX violations on campus and accusations that the College had not properly handled a student’s allegation that she was raped on campus.
This fact serves as a reminder that MarCom involvement in student journalism means that the College’s marketing goals can easily interfere with the ability of St. Olaf’s oldest and only student-run news source to report on campus events in an unbiased and free manner.
While St. Olaf is a private institution, and employers have the legal right to limit their staff’s ability to speak to the press about their jobs, the ethical implications of doing so in these circumstances must be called into question. As the other stories in this issue of The Messenger show, student journalism is an essential means of providing important information to campus communities. Student journalism is seen as an important check on colleges, both private and public. This institution has often espoused its commitment to free speech. St. Olaf is willing to boast about the Institute for Freedom and Community and about its new statement of academic freedom of principles. Why, then, is this college willing to restrict student press freedom?
Additionally, The Messenger is the primary means by which St. Olaf students are able to study journalism. Our newspaper is, fundamentally, an academic organization, and when the College places restrictions on our ability to report on news stories, it places restrictions on our ability to learn how to succeed in our potential future profession. How are we supposed to do investigative journalism after we graduate if marketing administrators tell us that, if we want to do “investigative journalism” here, we need only to talk to the school’s PR director to find sources?
Our story is one part of the larger issue of student press freedom. Our coverage in the news section shows that other colleges have faced very similar restrictions. Many, though, have been able to fight these restrictions through coming forward with their stories. We are arguing for a better policy of student media engagement with MarCom, and a steadfast commitment to press freedom on this campus. In the future, the freedom of St. Olaf’s only student newspaper must be respected.
