When John Lavine took over as dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, he said he wanted to move away from a curriculum heavy on the orthodoxies of the craft. He said students needed to learn not only writing and reporting, but also how tenets of marketing could help them reach and keep readers and viewers.
“Our students need to understand the experiences that motivate and inhibit media usage,” Lavine told the school’s alumni magazine in Fall 2006. “How do you involve and engage an audience?”
Traditionalists viewed Lavine’s moves as apostasy. In June, the university’s general faculty committee backed a resolution blasting the manner in which changes occurred as “ill considered” and harmful to Medill’s reputation. The new curriculum came without faculty input. The core complaint: too much blurring of the lines between marketing (think selling products) and journalism (think explaining what’s up). (This paragraph as published has been corrected in this text.)
University President Henry Bienen responded by extending Lavine’s term — originally set to expire in 2009 — indefinitely.
Now Lavine finds himself facing suggestions that he flouted a basic journalistic principle: Don’t use anonymous quotations unless it is absolutely necessary to, for example, protect someone’s safety.
And the person who challenged Lavine? Medill senior David Spett, a columnist for the Daily Northwestern who evidently demonstrated a mastery of old-fangled reporting skills and ferocious attention to accuracy.
Last spring, Lavine penned two introductory letters for Medill’s alumni magazine that relied on anonymous quotations from students expressing enthusiasm for classes. The words struck Spett as suspiciously un-studentlike. Example: “I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I’ve taken,” reads part of one quotation, which, Lavine wrote, “a Medill junior told me.”
“I didn’t see why the quotes had to be anonymous,” Spett says. So he started asking questions. He figured out which class Lavine was discussing. Spett says he then tracked down all 29 students who had taken the class. He says each of the 29 denied saying the words that wound up in Lavine’s column.
Lavine insists the quotations in question all “came from real people.” But he says he can’t remember when, or how, he got the quotations: “Context is all-important. I wasn’t doing a news story. I wasn’t covering the news. When I write news stories, I am as careful and thorough about sources as anyone you will find. … This is not a news story. This is a personal letter.”
Hardly. The dean of one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country, writing for that school’s alumni magazine, should know that students will hold him to the standards they must meet. Unnamed sources should be used sparingly and only when necessary. And their identities always should be cataloged by the writer.
In the Tribune, Lavine responded to the inference that he invented the unnamed students: “I am not about to defend my veracity.”
Unfortunately for Lavine, that doesn’t mean people will stop questioning it.