Thursday, October 04, 2007

October Story of the Month

October's Story of the Month: The Daily Helmsman's coverage of the killing of University of Memphis football player Taylor Bradford.

Bradford, a defensive lineman for the University of Memphis Tigers, was shot to death in his car on the Memphis campus Sunday night. The Helmsman had journalists on the scene almost immediately.

The staff did a top-notch job of covering the story -- so good, in fact that several professional news organizations attributed information to the student newspaper. The Helmsman was the first media organization to identify Bradford and it kept up its coverage of the story all through the week. You can read some of the stories here and here.

Mediaverse, an online trade publication that covers the Memphis media, has an interesting interview this week with Editor-in-Chief Trey Heath and Managing Editor Nevin Batiwalla.

Other notable Story of the Month entries:
The Northeastern at Northeastern State University put out a special edition last month to report the Student Senate's "no confidence" vote of the acting university president. "We covered the story, ran back to the newsroom and rushed to send the paper to print that night," writes Editor Dale Denwalt II. The paper publishes weekly and its Web site only has PDFs of the print edition. (The editors showed enterprise in publishing a special edition, but a live Web site would have solved the problem.) Check out The Northeastern's special Sept. 27 edition.

The Miami Hurricane, the twice-weekly paper at the University of Miami, put together a nice package on college roommates with a story on a roommate-matching system the university may put into place next year and a "Roommates from Hell" sidebar. Nice work!
Send your Story of the Month submissions to collegenewspaper@gmail.com.

We'd love to hear more from editors and reporters involved in the Taylor Bradford story. Post a comment here.

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