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Letter to the editor

First Amendment 101

At Manatee Community College, an innocuous student newspaper story turns into a painful lesson, complete with hurt feelings, paper trails and lawyers.

By KELLEY BENHAM
Published July 25, 2004

[Times photo: Kelley Benham]

Administrators at Manatee Community College shut down the student newspaper, the Lance, after a semester of escalating tension with the staff, including, from left, reporter Sarah Zell, editor in chief Amber Foster, adviser Rebecca King and executive editor Mike Gimignani.

	[Times photo: Lara Cerri]
	David Kalwinski, left, and his editor Jim Malec of the Lance decided to print their story, “Dude, Where’re My Student Activities,” without running it by the newspaper’s faculty adviser.

BRADENTON - David Kalwinski was not thinking about the First Amendment when he wrote a little newspaper story, not a very sexy one at that, and put a headline on top of it: "Dude, where's my student activities?"

He was 19, and it was the second newspaper story he had ever written. He knew the headline was ungrammatical, but he liked the way it sounded. A solid story, he thought.

Thinking back on it - after people got mad and lawyers were called and the whole thing blew up and mutated beyond David's story, beyond David's control - he is left to wonder how it got so bad.

The fight over what is now commonly called the Dude Story turned into a tangle between the student editors and the Manatee Community College administration over who controls the content of the newspaper. Was it the students, or the professor whose name is on their report cards? It got so intense that when the semester ended the school shut down the newspaper for the first time in 40 years.

No one is sure yet which side won, only that it was bloody from February to June. For much of that time, David felt guilty, and he didn't even know why.

At the worst point, when the students were trying to decide if they should give in or fight, David met with his editor, a student named Jim Malec.

They sought out a quiet place on campus, an empty classroom far from the newspaper office and the trauma there. The room was dark and David was shaking and one of them said, "This is the most important test we'll ever take at MCC."

David remembers saying that. Jim thinks he's the one who said it. Either way, they agree, it turned out to be true.

The Lance was a skinny tabloid, eight or 12 pages depending on how many stories made deadline. It had a staff of about 12, depending on who showed up.

Its circulation was so small that at the printing plant, the pressman would flip the press on, then quickly flip the switch off, and however many issues spewed from the machine in the interim was how many were distributed. That was usually around 2,000 copies, about the size of a good public high school paper.

David Kalwinski was like many of its staffers, brand-new. If his high school had a newspaper, he doesn't remember it.

He dreamed up the Dude Story after he attended the campus "Club Rush" and observed few clubs and no rush.

As president of the History and Political Science Club, David had friends in student government, so he interviewed some of them about why the event flopped. Interviewing friends, David learned, was amateur mistake No. 1.

He showed the unpublished story around - amateur mistake No. 2 - and in so doing invited complaint.

David's unedited story spread so far that when he went to interview the college CEO for an unrelated story, he saw his rough draft on the man's desk.

"Everybody had a copy of it," said David's editor, Jim Malec. "Everybody had something to say about it."

"I felt like a criminal," David said. "God, what had I done?"

The complaints about the story are many and involve an assortment of students and faculty and meetings and allegations. The students say the complaints were minor. The adviser says they were major.

Fortunately for those keeping score, the fight really wasn't about the story, which a consensus ultimately deemed not worth the fuss. There would be plenty of other things to fuss about.

David's teacher Doug Osman had advised the newspaper for three years without major incident. At first, David and his colleagues welcomed his advice. Later, they didn't. So the problems began.

David's first draft was "kind of malicious," "potentially libelous" and not well-researched, Osman said. He suggested David rewrite it and disclose his involvement in student government. They discussed conflict of interest, he said.

Osman said he suggested David turn the story over to someone else to write.

David and Jim said Osman ordered the story killed.

"I was shocked," Jim said. Jim ran the Venice bureau of the newspaper, and he thought killing a story should have been his decision. But he says he didn't argue at first. "I thought he was like the boss," he said.

The MCC newspaper was unusual because it was produced in a class, JOU 1400. The school paid its printing bill, supplied its two teachers and thus felt somewhat responsible for the results. At most colleges, the newspaper functions as independently from the school administration as possible, but the Lance had not reached that stage of evolution.

Jim felt wronged, so he called the Student Press Law Center in Virginia, which gives free legal advice to student editors and advisers. He e-mailed David's story to the lawyers there. They said it was journalistically and legally sound, and the students didn't need permission from Osman or anyone else to publish it.

When David heard that, he felt the sick feeling in his gut dissolve.

"This whole time I'd been made to believe I'd done something bad," he said.

He and Jim met in the dark room on the other side of the campus and made up their minds about what to do. Jim added his name to the byline and told David they were rewriting the story and running it. They agreed not to show it to Osman again.

"I said, "This is about character,' " Jim remembers. "I said, "A lot of people want us to give in. We need to stay true to what we believe is right. We need to do the best job we can for the story, for the paper, for ourselves.' "

David doesn't remember the whole speech, but that sounds like something Jim would have said. "He's always noble and talking like that," David said.

At the paper's main office in Bradenton, other student editors and the other faculty adviser did not yet know about the Dude Story. But they had already upset the college administration more than once.

A request by the editors to start selling advertising in the Lance was met with resistance. Then a dispute about putting the MCC logo on Lance business cards caused such animosity that one administrator e-mailed another with the subject line: Help.

That administrator, Kathy Walker, summed up the semester this way: "It was a series of incidents and clashes, one after another, that led up to, I would call it a student revolt."

Editor Mike Gimignani agrees with that, but adds, "Well, you know, revolutions usually have points to make, and we had ours."

These editors were not like David and Jim. They had worked at larger, more independent newspapers. Mike Gimignani and Sarah Zell were recent arrivals from New College, perhaps the brainiest and most liberal of the state universities. Editor in chief Amber Foster had written for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

"We had a really outspoken and knowledgeable staff that the administration was not prepared to deal with," adviser Rebecca King said. She co-advised the paper with Doug Osman, but sided with the students throughout the semester. "They know to stand up for their rights."

When her "dream team" heard about the Dude Story, they budgeted it for the front page.

The school says that the story prompted at least four different meetings involving the dean. There would later be 20 more. The story about student activities itself became a student activity, and a faculty and administration activity, too.

Kathy Walker, the school spokeswoman, e-mailed the college dean. "I'll keep my fingers crossed along with you that the rest of the semester things don't blow up."

All this, and the little story still hadn't run.

No one - not David or Jim, not Mike or Amber - showed Osman the story. Rebecca King hadn't seen it either and didn't think she needed to.

In Venice, David and Jim avoided Osman, even skipped class once. But Osman didn't say much about the Dude Story until its publication date approached.

"He said, "We're supposed to work as a team, so I don't understand why you don't show me the story,' " Jim remembered.

"Then he said, "If I don't like the story we're not going to distribute the newspaper.' "

Osman's colleague Rebecca King remembers an almost identical conversation. "I told him that would be a mistake," she said. "It would be considered prior review, and it was illegal."

Osman denies both conversations. He says he doesn't know how the entire semester turned into a debate about prior review since he never tried to interfere. But then he said he might have said something about killing the story or not distributing the newspaper in an e-mail to someone else.

That e-mail "wasn't meant as a threat that we were going to pull the issue, it was meant as, let's pull the issue before we put David (Kalwinski) on the spot."

"I'm not stupid enough to be pulling newspapers off the stands."

But that's what David and Jim envisioned the day in early March that the paper came off the press. So they drove from Englewood, where they live, to the printing plant in Bradenton. They put Eminem in the CD player. David was bouncing in his seat.

Let's get down to business

on these clowns; can I get a witness? (HELL YEAH)

"We were feeling the vibe," David said. "Even though the speakers didn't work too well."

They loaded Jim's Camry with bundles of newspapers and pointed the car toward campus.

To keep the papers out of Osman's hands, they passed them out personally, one-by-one.

David had tried handing out an earlier issue. Then, people just stared at his hand. "It's a newspaper," he would say. They would walk away.

This time, there was a buzz.

"We're handing it to people, everyone in my classes, seriously, and between classes, and I told people, "Someone didn't want you to read this,' " David said.

"And they would stop right in the middle of campus and start to read it."

It was the first time he had watched people read something he wrote.

"I'm like, wow. This is it. We've won."

The Dude Story, in its final form, had an edited headline: "Dude, Where're My Student Activities."

It quoted a number of students "not necessarily impressed" with the recent Club Rush.

"I think it was kind of lame because there were junky tables, and there weren't a whole lot of people," said sophomore Kate McWeeny.

Student government vice president Olga Cheneycountered: "We don't think that it was so bad."

Perhaps most damning, the story noted the "alleged poor advertising practices" of student government officials who posted notice of a meeting three hours before its start, implying a violation of state "government in the sunshine" laws.

"If you're coming here to party," said student government adviser Jeff Snyder, "then you should probably go to University of Central Florida, University of Florida, and Florida State."

Doug Osman read the story when it was published, like everyone else. This is what he had to say about it, in an e-mail to dean Darlene Wedler-Johnson: "I thought the story was rewritten pretty carefully. That's to Jim's credit, I think. . . . I actually have more of a problem with the article on page 7, regarding students placing prank phone calls via the Internet."

The reason we know about the e-mail is that the Lance's fired-up Bradenton editors did some reporting in the months that followed.

They sent written public records requests for administrators' e-mails involving the newspaper. They also demanded financial documents involving student government.

That's a common journalistic practice, but it wasn't common at MCC and it wasn't well-received, particularly since the letters noted the penalties for refusing: fines, jail time. The requests became one more thing to fight about.

Sarah got a letter back from the college lawyer, and one from the dean that said, "This is truly insulting to your college community."

Doug Osman had become the boogeyman, so Mike Gimignani did some reporting on him: He searched for public records from his personnel files at two schools, obtained his college transcript and grades, pulled a 1985 course catalog from Michigan State University to see what he'd learned, and got a copy of his master's thesis: "Tracing the Era of the High-Concept Film: A Study of Cinematic Trends in Popular Motion Picture Production."

Osman was so upset he considered filing a grievance. "I thought he had gone over the line," he said. "I felt I was really being targeted."

David heard about all this on a staff trip to New York when a pizza parlor conversation turned to Osman. "They were making it out like he's one of the worst guys ever. Like a villain with one of those curly mustaches in the cartoons."

David and Jim thought things were getting out of hand, so they didn't get too involved.

But they did keep writing.

Jim wrote about dirty bathrooms in Issue 3.

("Unprofessional, gross, juvenile and the worst crime of all - bad writing," Kathy Walker wrote in an e-mail. "Banish him to the same desert island that Bubba the Love Sponge has been sent to.")

"I thought that was a work of genius," David said.

David wrote a column about masturbation in Issue 4. He did not come out against it.

"People would read it and say, "Oh my god that's the greatest thing in the newspaper all year.' "

No one tried to stop those stories. Osman left them alone, with the administration's support. "We didn't even want to imply censorship," Walker said.

In Issue 5, the paper ran letters to the editor praising and slamming the Dude Story.

And for the last issue, No. 6, Mike Gimignani wrote a front-page column about censorship, prior review and all the problems at the newspaper that semester.

During some of the meetings that were still being held, the dean attempted to sort out who ought to be running things. Administrators scrambled to learn student press law, interviewed other community college staffs, consulted their attorney and talked among themselves about what kind of newspaper they were willing to pay for.

Rebecca King decided not to return next year. Doug Osman threatened to quit.

"I did not want to walk back into the same boiling pot," he said.

Nothing was settled by the end of the semester.

So the dean sent out a letter. The paper was temporarily shut down.

The school had no willing teacher, and someone had to rewrite the course curriculum. That's a complicated matter and could take a year, the letter said.

But by then, the students say, the staffers who care will be gone.

No one else might have missed the Lance, if not for the whole First Amendment thing.

Mike called lawyers again, then the press heard about it, then the story went out on the Associated Press wire.

When the local columnist got hold of the story, the Bradenton editors felt vindicated. "We definitely had a celebratory moment," Mike said.

It turns out that a public college shutting down a school newspaper, even a small one, is a big deal. It's an arm of the government closing a channel of free speech. And when a school does so in the middle of a controversy over content . . .

"On the surface, I know, this looks really bad," said Kathy Walker, who had to take the phone calls as the story spread to dozens of newspapers and broadcast outlets nationwide.

The school was horrified. It never intended to squash anybody's freedom of speech, she said. "I mean oh my gosh, if we can't support that and agree with that we don't deserve our birthright.

"What we failed to understand was the impact that would have . . . by treating it as an academic matter only and not realizing the whole, you know, newspaper part of it," she said.

"We really could have handled it a lot better."

And another thing. The students were right.

"It appears the courts would be in their favor," Walker said. "This is new news to us. . . . This is a changing world out there in law."

Actually, this area of law hasn't changed in 35 years, said Mark Goodman, the lawyer from the Student Press Law Center. But if the school corrects the error that's a good thing, he said.

"Ultimately the proof of success here is what comes of all this in the long term."

The school will revive the Lance, Walker said, maybe sometime in the fall.

The school doesn't know yet how the newspaper will function, only that it will be more independent than it was before.

David heard from Jim that the newspaper was shutting down. He didn't think it had anything to do with him.

"I thought the school was just confused," he said.

Then a friend called him and told him to pick up the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. And there he found his story mentioned in the sixth paragraph, as the cause of the whole mess.

It made him proud.

"I'm like damn, I left my impression on that school.

"Even though they didn't mention my name. Or call me. I was like hey wait, where's my name?"

Here it is. Kalwinski. K-a-l-w-i-n-s-k-i.

And by the way, he got a B in the course.

He is pretty sure he deserved an A.

- Kelley Benham can be reached at 727 893-8848 or benham@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 22, 2004, 13:03:43]