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Then do something about it.

Campus Progress supports over 50 progressive student publications across the country with funding, journalism training, content support, event assistance, and other tools and resources. 

We want to help you make your voice heard.

Apply today to become part of Campus Progress's Publications Network either as a brand new publication or an existing one.  But don't procrastinate, the priority deadline for applications is June 30th. 

This past year alone, Campus Progress has worked with students who have successfully launched new publications at the University of Georgia, Michigan State University, DePaul University, American University, Brown University, University of New England, Kenyon College, and other colleges and universities.

We're here to help you with the great work you're doing on your campus.  Feel free to e-mail publications@campusprogress.org with any questions.  

Registration just opened for the 2008 Campus Progress National Conference.  If you thought last year's conference was great, just wait for this year's event. Past keynotes have been Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi. And if one day of hearing from amazing speakers, networking with students activists from all 50 states, and building the skills you'll need to transform your campus into a progressive bastion in the fall aren't enough, then don't worry, Campus Progress has you covered.

On July 7th, Campus Progress is organizing with USSA and the Student PIRGs a Grassroots Training Day.

On July 9th, Campus Progress and The Nation present their annual National Youth Journalism Conference. Speakers already confirmed include Eugene Robinson, Asra Nomani, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and Mathew Yglesias.

All of these events fill up quickly so apply to attend today! 

According to this article from the NYT, the recent spike in food prices sparked riots in "countries including Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Italy."

In the United States, there's a large and growing problem of elites not serving in the military and, at the same time, the military becoming an institution dominated by the lower middle classes and by families who have a tradition of service.  Although America has lower social mobility and lots of hereditary wealth, in Britain, they have a real royal family.  But Britain's royals have a long tradition of military service.  Prince Andrew, Charles' brother, served as helicopters pilot in the Falklands. And Prince Harry, brother of Prince William and third-in-line to the throne, is serving in the British Army. 

Even though he's a royal, he's just a normal soldier and for the past ten weeks, he's been serving in Afghanistan.  But we didn't hear about until a few days ago, when the Drudge Report broke the story.  It turned out the British government got all the major media outlets in a room and requested that they not report that Harry was in Afghanistan, so he wouldn't endanger his fellow soldiers.  The embargo was broken and now Harry is probably going to the Persian Gulf.  But was it a good idea for the media to essentially be the lapdogs of the press?  I think so.

**Update: Check out this great write-up of the conference from a writer of a Campus Progress sponsored publication who attended the conference.

This past Saturday, Campus Progress and The Nation hosted its first West Coast Youth Journalism Conference at UCLA.  It was a smashing success with around 300 participants from around California, Arizona, Texas, and other states.  We had amazing speakers, small group workshops, and a keynote address by Naomi Klein.  Check out the full agenda here, and check back soon for photos from the conference and videos of the plenary panels and the keynote speech.  I was heartened to feel so much energy throughout the day from an outstanding group of young progressive journalists.  A huge thank you to all of our speakers and presenters. If you want to get more involved with journalism at Campus Progress, we provide funding, training, and other forms of assistance to student publications.  You can also write and blog for CampusProgress.org. Whatever great work you're doing, let us know how Campus Progress can help.

It turns out 2007 has been the deadliest year for journalists in a decade. According to a report released by the Committee to Protect Journalists, 31 journalists were killed in Iraq, along with 12 media workers. This makes me very nervous about the quality of reporting we can get out of Iraq. When it's so dangerous for journalists, many of whom are native Iraqi stringers for western news organizations, are we really going to get accurate information about what's going on in Iraq?

What's also interesting is that three journalists died in Mexico, a country supposedly at peace, and only two died in Afghanistan, a war zone. I read this great piece that appeared in the WaPo this summer that talked about how journalists really aren't doing that much reporting in Mexico because it's simply too dangerous. They've begun dropping bylines, writing styles, and even relying solely on police reports.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), a part of the Pew Research Center, recently released a survey of American journalists’ experiences in Iraq.

Unsurprisingly, the results are grim, a fact made blatant by this chart from PEJ’s summary of the survey:

Following up on some past discussion of PBS anchor Jim Lehrer, this makes me feel somewhat vindicated:

Don't watch my "NewsHour" to be entertained, says Lehrer

Austin American-Statesman | Daily Texan
"You want to be entertained? Go to the circus, please," says Jim Lehrer. "We did 30 minutes [on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer"] comparing naturally grown tomatoes to unnaturally grown tomatoes. Don't ask me why we did it. We did 30 minutes on the Portuguese elections that not even the Portuguese cared about." || Related story.

The Statesman story goes on to quote Lehrer telling an audience, re: the future of journalism, "I believe we mostly have fear itself to fear, to coin a phrase." Actually, I think a larger fear than fear itself is the mindset of journalists like Lehrer, who once described his zombie-like editorial philosophy this way:

"I don't deal in terms like 'blatantly untrue," he averred. "That's for other people to decide.... I'm not in the judgment part of journalism. I'm in the reporting part of journalism."

From Romenesko:

Lehrer advises Medill students to give journalism "a whirl"

Daily Northwestern: PBS "NewsHour" anchor Jim Lehrer told a Northwestern University audience that despite the low pay for starting journalists, people should “give it a whirl,” both because of the public good and because of the unique experience journalism provides. "It's chasing fire engines. It's following the sirens and asking 'What happened? Why are all the sirens going off?'"

The thought that Jim Lehrer has been giving journalism “a whirl” on the PBS NewsHour actually repels me from a journalism career as much, much too boring. To paraphrase Apu, stop staring at me from behind the screen with your dead eyes!

Our own Zach Marks, having finished up his internship (though hopefully not his blogging) for us here at CP, has now been given a pretty sweet gig - blogging at HuffPo. Regardless of what you think of HuffPo, they don't pick nobodies to blog for them. His first post went up yesterday (and he then stopped by the office in the afternoon, yet didn't tell us about it...so modest). Our congratulations to Zach, and we hope you show his new blog some CP love.

 Also, to read about Zach's culinary skills with a microwave, check out this NY Times story.

One of Chronicle's blogs today discusses how journalism schools are slow to adapt to the changing nature of media. At a conference of J-School educators this weekend, "citizen journalism has moved from heresy — a topic to be considered, if at all, only in side conferences and hallways — to something that, while still not widely accepted, is at least of interest."

As a J-School graduate myself, I felt like I started a bit behind the starting gate. It took me a while to acclimate to blogs because in J-School I was taught that they aren't real journalism and we should reject them. This is mainly because journalism classes are taught by more or less retired journalists. The really cutting-edge journalists all have, well, jobs in journalism. Now that blogs have been (rather slowly) adapted to MSM. (Rick Hertzberg is even blogging now, albeit rather badly).

What I was most disappointed about in my J-School education was the way all of my classes basically ignored the fact that the Internet existed. They told us it was better to pick up the phone (it is, although the Internet is a great way to do a lot of background research for a story), go to the library (for what?), and never ever believe anything printed by a blog (!). I didn't learn HTML except by my own initiative. I never learned to write a blog post until I got a job at a magazine.

This makes me wary of the future of journalism, since we seem to have two streams of people entering the field: a group trained in ethics and reporting who think the future is in newspapers (it's not), and a group of people with no ethics or reporting training whatsoever who understand how to write blogs and get them read.

Glenn Greenwald posted this morning on something that should be receiving far more attention: the Bush administration’s borderline-desperate, last-minute attempts to link the Iraq war to the fight against Al Qaeda, and the media’s alarming pliability on this topic. Greenwald references an important column written by the New York Times’s public editor, Clark Hoyt.

New York has always had a steady supply of budding young writers doing their best to break into the journalism industry. Campus Progress tried to make that break a bit easier to get by hosting a discussion, "Career Tracks: Navigating the Changing Media Landscape," the Newspaper Guild's New York City headquarters, focused on the changes in the industry.

Ralph Nader apparently gave the students at my journalism school a gift... copies of Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media? in their mailboxes. Apparently he just called up Richard Roth, one of my professors, and said he'd be sending over 1,200 copies of the book. A columnist for The Daily Northwestern smells something fishy, though I think he might be reading a too much into this.

Did Nader have an ulterior motive for giving me a book that obviously has an agenda? Probably, but that in and of itself didn't appear that threatening to me. I can deal with people telling me what to believe politically.

It's the free gift part that sometimes gives me problems. For example, several weeks ago, I took a tour of the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee, Wis. The tour, along with the beer samples, didn't cost a cent.

I wondered why Miller wouldn't charge for the tour. That is, until I realized that immediately following my visit, I purchased Miller High Life.

Woah buddy, just because you get a free lunch doesn't mean you have to eat there again! Nader clearly wants to promote his ideology among journalists. So he sent some j-school students a book. This shouldn't change anyone's opinion unless the book is persuasive and someone decides to read it. 

Being an "editor" of the Harvard Crimson is no rare distinction:

The Crimson currently claims that about 800 undergraduates are Crimson “editors.” That’s because, until recently, it identified anyone who has ever joined the staff as an “editor.” Joining the staff involves writing a certain number of stories (or taking photos or designing pages as the case may be) and attending a few seminars, steps fully one in eight undergrads has taken.

h/t Romenesko. 

If you want to get all misty-eyed about just how special the Internets make this day in history--our heretofore unheard of ability to connect with one another, find information, and create content--watch this video from Mike Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. The video brings up some provocative questions about how individuality, authorship, and other cultural constructs are challenged by Web 2.0. Here's another question: Why aren't we doing more to bring Web 2.0 to everybody? When will high-speed Internet become a public utility like water or highways?

Even-tempered thinking on Israel/Palestine is in short supply. So that's why the story of what's happening to New Voices--a progressive Jewish magazine distributed on college campuses--is particularly sad. After publishing articles that criticized select elements of Israeli government policy and writing about alternative student tours of Israel that travel to the occupied territories, New Voices lost tens of thousands of dollars of funding and had to layoff a staff member. Now New Voices' funders are forcing them to publish rabid advertisements decrying the supposed "anti-Semitic climate" ravaging American college campuses.

That's just the kind of over-heated rhetoric that made Jewish students like me tune out. As New Voices editor Ilana Sichel tells The Nation, "To suddenly be told you have to toe this party line--it's contrary to what we stand for and it's contrary to what the Jewish intellectual tradition stands for."

Campus Progress today released to its network of student journalists and activists a step-by-step guide to probing their campus financial aid offices for conflicts of interests that damage the student loan system.  The guide, “Honest Lending, Fair Lending,” comes in the wake of a groundbreaking investigation by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and weeks of front-page newspaper disclosures about loan companies exerting apparent undue influence on colleges and college officials.

To download a PDF of the guide, click here.

Shortly after yesterday's tragedy made its way into the U.S. media, reports that the shooter appeared to be Asian appeared on television and online. Before authorities identified the man as 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean national and English major at Virginia Tech, several news outlets including the Chicago Sun-Times (with a link from Drudge) and The Times of London reported that a suspect was Chinese.

Readers will note that both of the articles linked above now reflect the correct shooter. The papers apparently have used the same URL for their online story on the shooting, continually editing it. In this case, the Times has removed any mention of its previous statement regarding a Chinese suspect. (I'm trusting Josie Liu that the page did reflect this mistaken information before.) On the other hand, the Sun-Times includes the following statement in it's current story:

My alma mater is apparently close to a deal to open a branch of the journalism school in Qatar. This puts its Evanston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., locations in a little bit of perspective, doesn't it.

Others have already done so. And here's why:

The Qatar Foundation pays all of the universities' costs -- from construction of new buildings to faculty and administrative salaries -- and it offered Cornell an undisclosed financial gift when it opened a medical school there in 2002, according to Dr. Antonio Gotto, dean of Cornell's medical school.