The Berkeley Beacon is, and has always been, an ever-evolving community effort.
For months, I’ve known I needed to write this letter addressing the Emerson community—The Beacon’s readership—as is tradition for editors-in-chief at the start of each semester. I struggled finding the message I wanted to convey, until I took the short journey from my Quincy apartment to the Boston campus earlier this week and watched as student reporters and editors began collaborating to get the print product out. It has always been a weekly miracle, but the content goals we’ve set for ourselves for this semester reach higher than ever before.
When our leadership was restructuring at the end of last semester, like all Emerson student organizations, we reflected on how we could improve and came to an obvious conclusion: Our readership clearly showed a strong interest in deep dives into topics; investing in enterprise journalism was a natural next step.
Newly formed, the projects team is meant to be a facilitator of long-form journalism. It is where we encourage writers who want to try investigative reporting to pitch an idea and reporting plan to our editors. The section’s debut stories include an investigation into allegations of abuse on the set of a student-run production, and what started as a deeply reported story following Israeli anti-government protests that evolved into a breaking news update. Both of these stories were made possible by the students that sourced them.
A pillar of the projects section is collaboration. We want ambitious stories that challenge norms and bring power to account. We want well-thought-out and sourced articles that show a commitment to the truth and to the community. We know new contributors will offer untapped perspectives that strengthen the trust between Emerson students, faculty, staff, administrators, and everything in between because that is the only way The Beacon can represent the best interests of its stakeholders.
Historically, The Beacon has published articles and opinion pieces on a range of divisive topics—this edition is no different. Often, the most impactful stories that are published in the paper are the ones brought to us by the student body, but that only works with the continued improvement of our reporters’ relationships with the community.
I want to be explicit when I say we want to hear everything—it doesn’t matter who you are.
It would be unfair for me to assume our readership trusts us, cares about what we have to say, or would even continue to pick up our papers without first committing to transparency with those that fund our organization.
For the record, I intended to interview President Jay Bernhardt and write a feature article for this week’s paper that captured his take on how we, as a community, move forward together. He personally agreed to an on-the-record conversation last week. Unfortunately, the interview did not happen.
It went awry when the college assumed the article would be written as a Q-&-A, citing transparency reasons, as other Beacon interviews with the president in recent years had been—at one point, a college spokesperson did explicitly request I write it in that style. After a discussion with The Beacon’s managing team and news editors, I agreed to write the interview as a Q-&-A (because the story, above all, would have been huge for The Beacon) with the caveat that we would include a disclaimer explicitly stating that this was at the college’s request—and would not happen again.
The college pulled the interview two hours before it was scheduled to happen.
It is important that Emerson students know this, and are informed of the ethical reasoning behind other decisions Beacon reporters make, because it is the students who pay for us to practice student journalism (like every other organization, The Beacon receives funding from the Student Government Association to operate). The Emerson community remains undefeated at holding The Beacon (and the institution) accountable.
As we enter another semester at Emerson, please allow The Beacon to continue to be the common ground. Everyone here, in the Emerson sphere, is a student.
From myself and the rest of the Beacon staff, to the students, faculty, and staff, and all the way up to Jay Bernhardt, allow yourself, us, and each other to continue to learn as we move forward together.
