The Red & Black | Student Press Law Center
Two student members of The Red & Black’s board will have voting rights, the independent student newspaper at the University of Georgia announced Monday.
A conflict between the board and student journalists last year led to a weird chapter in the history of American university journalism:
1) The students walked off the job Aug. 15 after the board placed its adviser in charge of editorial content, a move the paper’s now-former publisher Harry Montevideo characterized as an “overreaction” in an interview with Poynter.
2) The students began producing an alternate publication called Red and Dead.
3) During one meeting, a board member who wrote a memo that contributed to the above events resigned and Montevideo got in a scuffle with a student journalist. Yep, there’s video.
4) The board rehired students who walked out and agreed to drop its insistence on prior review. Another board member then resigned, saying in a statement “I cannot in my mind — and will not in my heart — be a party to what you are about to do as a board today.”
5) Montevideo resigned as publisher this June.
The board’s grant of voting rights “is the last of the students’ original demands to be fulfilled,” Sara Gregory writes on the Student Press Law Center’s blog. The board also named Natalie McClure, who’s been acting as general manager since Montevideo left, its permanent general manager.
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