Strange editing follows Deseret media story on BYU Universe changes

On ksl.com, there is a January article (read) that notes that the BYU newspaper, the Daily Universe, is going mostly digital. The plans are that by April the Universe will be a “long-form” weekly and the “Daily Universe” will be online. This is not a surprise. BYU media has been a lab rat the past several years for changes that later occur at the Deseret News and KSL news.  What’s interesting about the ksl.com article is that it shows evidence of having been edited, or perhaps a better word is “chopped,” as the article is carelessly edited. BYU faculty member Joel Campbell’s name is misspelled, for example.

The opening sentence, or lede of the article, confuses as well. It reads, “Brigham Young University announced Thursday its award-winning daily newspaper, The Daily Universe, would become a weekly paper by mid-April, and some former staff members are blaming the school’s administration for the move.”

The problem is, there’s nothing in the rest of the article that says former staff members are blaming the administration. The closest thing to the controversy promised in the lede is a student editor asking Twitter users to “refrain from being ‘nasty.’” Even stranger is a “pull quote” from former BYU journalist McKay Coppins, which reads, “They were more worried about every story we wrote reflecting well on the university, when the reality is that just like any other school, there are tough issues being tackled there, and student journalists should be the ones doing it.” However, that quote is not in the published article.

It didn’t require much digging to learn that the article on ksl.com is a “second edition,” a poorly edited one as well. For a very brief time, ksl.com carried a much longer article on the Daily Universe’s demise that included “former staff members … blaming the school’s administration for the move.” There is a cached version of what was in the original article. (Read)

Coppins, who is a reporter for the national online pub BuzzFeed, has a lot to say. Here are his comments in the original post:

The paper has helped many on their way to a career in journalism, including current BuzzFeed political reporter McKay Coppins. He said the move is an unfortunate one.

“I worked with some fantastic people at the Daily Universe who saw the importance of student journalism and who taught me a lot about how to be a good reporter,” he said. “It’s a shame that it looks like some of them will be laid off.”

Coppins said based on his experience as editor during the 2009-2010 school year, he believes the school’s administration may have played a role in the change.

“I always got the sense when I was at The Daily Universe that certain administrators viewed the student newspaper as an inconvenience,” he said. “They were more worried about every story we wrote reflecting well on the university, when the reality is that just like any other school, there are tough issues being tackled there, and student journalists should be the ones doing it.”

Coppins said the BYU administration became stricter during his tenure as editor, to the point that “to do any serious journalism at The Daily Universe was a real uphill battle and a massive headache.”

Here’s what remained of Coppins’ comments after the edit:

The paper has helped many on their way to a career in journalism, including current BuzzFeed political reporter McKay Coppins. He said the move is an unfortunate one.

“I worked with some fantastic people at the Daily Universe who saw the importance of student journalism and who taught me a lot about how to be a good reporter,” he said. “It’s a shame that it looks like some of them will be laid off.”

So all the controversy was hacked out. I emailed Coppins, who is a Facebook friend, for a comment, but he never responded. Neither did Joel Campbell, who I have worked with before on journalism-related issues. Reporter Grimes did not wish to comment on this blog piece.

There’s more accusations against BYU’s administration that was sliced out of Grimes’ original article. Former Daily Universe copy editor Erin Kulesus had all her quotes and contributions to the article taken out. Kulesus — who blogs at tumblr and is critical of BYU media (read) — in the original piece, said:

Other former Universe reporters agreed with Coppins, including Erin Kulesus, who was a copy editor at the paper from 2008-2010. She said she is disappointed in the change, and concerned about the impact it may have on her “brothers in arms,” who at times allegedly run into problems with the BYU administration.

“At times, it seemed like there was constant fire between the BYU administration, higher-ups in the Communications Department and those who worked in the newsroom on a daily basis,” Kulesus said.

The catalyst for the tension, according to Kulesus, was an incident in spring 2010 in which the paper received an anonymous tip about the student government’s spending budget.

“The editors, along with some full-time staff made a decision at that time: write a story about this and risk a figurative burning at the stake from people in the BYU administration—as well as the Communications Department, or withhold the information from readers,” she said. “We chose to run the story.”

Kulesus said reporters were told that members of the student government had been instructed not to speak with reporters for the paper.

Soon after, a story ran in the paper that referenced a website that was “apparently too “risqué” for select members of the BYU student body,” according to Kulesus.

“From that point on, for about two weeks, that is when I remember the most censorship.”

According to Kulesus, the paper was screened nightly for inappropriate content, including pictures of R-rated movies and mentions of mating rabbits. Eventually, she said, the very design of the paper became more conservative, “because any time something else was done, it was often rejected.”

All of those accusations, many of which relate to ethics, failed to make the final cut. Still, there’s more. Comments from Bryce Johnson, editor of the BYU Political Review, were also snipped out. He said:

“It’s no coincidence that the Universe is being forced to shrink its campus-presence at the same time that a couple of alternative student publications are starting to get attention on and off-campus,” said Bryce Johnson, editor of the BYU Political Review. Johnson said alternative publications are “writing about the issues students care about, and in a more provocative way.”

“Students want to read something other than positive press for BYU and the Church,” he said. “They want thoughtful writing on topics that matter outside of Mormon culture with a few AP clipping slipped in.”

It’s now easy to see why the badly edited, hacked away ksl.com “second edition” is so confusing. The first article was a good piece of journalism, that captured the tensions between student journalists at BYU trying to do their jobs and the stresses of administrators concerned with moralistic, religious and PR-ish concerns. It bears noting that the original ksl.com article includes, appropriately, responses from BYU administrators Dale Cressman and Susan Walton to the charges leveled by Coppins and Kulesus. However, since those opinions were spiked for the edited versions, most of their comments were hacked out as well.

Deseret Digital Media, which owns ksl.com, has every right to edit stories as well as spike stories that its bosses don’t like. BYU administrators can poke their fingers in any story students produce. I’m not disputing that. The problem is the way Grimes’s original article was edited.

In my opinion, the story was bluntly hacked at to take out any criticism of BYU’s administrative role at the Daily Universe. There was no skill or talent in the edited, second version. Paragraphs were axed out, previous typos were left in, the original lede was kept and the pull graph was not yanked from the webpage. The person(s) doing the editing had no concern for journalistic ethics or quality. They just wanted stuff yanked out; and that’s all that was done by this professional media organization.