What does a college media adviser do, anyway?
I’ve written the following primarily for the people involved with or affected by student media at the University of Vermont. But if that’s not you, you can read it, too. I won’t tell anyone. —CRE
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To casual observers, the college media adviser can seem a mysterious guy.
He sits in an office—at some colleges his desk is found in the student newsroom, radio station or TV station, at others in a professorial enclave, at still others in the brightly lit, occasionally overly peppy aisles of Student Life—and pores over the student paper, pen in hand, or tunes into the broadcast media he advises. He calls students into his office to have earnest conversations: sometimes happy, many times not. He makes animated phone calls and pounds out far too many e-mails.
What the hell is he up to in there?
Or, more to the point, people ask, as I was asked this week: What is it you DO, anyway?
From my point of view, this is a question always worth addressing.
At my last job, where I taught journalism and advised the student newspaper, some of my fellow teachers so firmly believed that I edited the paper that they regularly called me to complain about a certain word choice or misspelling in a headline. More than one of them introduced me to others as the “editor” of the campus paper.
But that’s not what I did. Or do.
Rather, I advise and I teach. That’s it. I help out with the occasional administrative brouhaha. But mostly I spend my time pushing from the sidelines, which is where the best media advisers stay.
In a typical week, I’ll meet individually, in pairs or in small groups with anywhere from 10 to 50 students, occasionally more. I help students evaluate news design, figure out how to increase ad sales, develop expansion plans, improve on-air presence, manage their peers, get internships and jobs, and so on. Sometimes I drop in on student-run staff meetings so that I can better understand how the student leaders are interacting with their respective groups and, along the way, publicly show my support for them and their work.
The top leaders of UVM’s student organizations—the station manager at WRUV-FM, the president at UVMtv and the editor at The Vermont Cynic—get the vast majority of my time and attention—occasionally more than they would like—because they carry the greatest responsibilities within their individual organizations, and it’s by advising them that I can be of greatest use.
In a healthy organization, most people have someone they can go to with problems, and they know to whom they should go: the features writer to the features editor; the features editor to the assistant managing editor; the assistant managing editor to the managing editor; the managing editor to the editor-in-chief, etc.
The editor-in-chief—or station manager or president or whoever else carries final say in the organization—can vent with me, if he or she wants, and I can offer the outside but attentive perspective of someone who cares deeply about the organization but is not involved in its day-to-day workings.
Sometimes, I’ll admit, I get too involved, and this is when I do my job worst.
In my first job as a media adviser, for example, I spoke regularly at meetings of the student staff, and over time this led to student staff members coming to me with their problems rather than to the newspaper editor. Bit by bit, the staff began to depend more on me and less on one another. As I grew in importance, the student leadership declined in influence.
To be as non-profane as I can be: I’d seriously messed up.
I won’t do it again.
I have two overriding goals as UVM’s student media adviser:
- I want to help each student learn, grow and develop as a potential media professional and potential student leader. If I can help to make students better thinkers and problem-solvers along the way, so much the better.
- I want each of the media organizations I advise—radio, TV and newspaper—to continue to evolve as ethical, functional institutions that serve their membership and their audiences better than they have in the past.
Occasionally, these goals are in conflict, such as when a promising student leader comes to me with a question about whether she might have a better leadership experience elsewhere. Or when a student without the inclination to lead suddenly finds himself in a leadership position, and I know in my heart that the best thing for the organization would be for him to step down.
What do I do in these situations? Well, I figure it out. But the one thing I don’t do is exercise the kind of autocratic authority that, in theory, I could exercise. In these instances, I seek to resist the impulse to lead the organization rather than advise the leaders, which is what I’m paid to do—and what I believe in doing.
I don’t always succeed in showing this restraint, by the way. Occasionally my frustration boils over and I dive in and “get things done” the way I want them done. The result is often short-term gain—I accomplish what I believe needs accomplishing—and long-term damage to the development of the organization, its leadership and its membership.
In the moments of reawakened awareness that inevitably follow, I return to the ideals spelled out in the College Media Advisers Code of Ethics, which I sometimes append to my e-mails.
This code reads, in part: “The ultimate goal of the student media adviser is to mold, preserve and protect an ethical and educational environment in which excellent communication skills and sound journalistic practice will be learned and practiced by students. There should never be an instance where an adviser maximizes quality by minimizing learning. Student media should always consist of student work.”
In some student-run organizations, particularly university radio stations, there might be a large non-student component. About half our DJs at WRUV are non-students, “community volunteers” for whom I have the utmost respect, even reverence. Longtime community DJs at WRUV have helped make the station what it is, and new non-student DJs continue to improve the station with their experience, enthusiasm and personalities. I’d never want WRUV to lose them.
At the same time, I don’t advise non-students. I’m an educator, here specifically to help students create a damn fine organization and have an equally (damn) fine educational experience.
Occasionally the development of the organization will take a back seat to the educational experience, which makes everyone (myself included) uncomfortable. But this is why, if a non-student—whether a WRUV DJ or the university president—contacts me with a problem he’s having with one of the media groups, I won’t try to “solve the problem” but will instead ask whether the caller has already spoken to the appropriate student leader about his concern. If the caller has come to me first, I’ll point him directly to the student leader.
A big part of the college media adviser’s job is to train students well and then to get out of the way so that students can do their work.
If this way of thinking seems strange or you’d like to know more about what I do or why I do it, I’d encourage you to read the entire College Media Code of Ethics at http://collegemedia.org/Ethics
Afterward, if you still have questions, send me a note using the form below or call me at 802-656-2060. We can get a cup of coffee or something.
One last note specifically for my UVM readers, for whom this missive is intended: Given everything I’ve mentioned here, if there’s something that you believe a media adviser should be doing that I’m not doing, please let me know. Better yet, let the student leadership know. At the end of every January, I hold a leadership retreat with the exec boards of the three media organizations so that we can talk about goals for the coming year. At this meeting, I always seek feedback about how I could be a better adviser to them and their organizations.
If you get the message to them, you can be pretty sure that it will get to me.
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