FLORIDA — Last month, Dalton Tevlin, the sports director at Florida International University’s student newspaper, wrote a scathing column announcing PantherNOW would not be covering the football team at all this upcoming season in response to the school’s athletics communications office repeatedly ignoring reporters' requests for comment. Tevlin said 12 minutes after the Aug. 29… Continue reading FIU student newspaper resumes football coverage after resolving access issue
Tag: College athletics
PODCAST: What the privatization of Florida State University’s athletics department will mean for journalists
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Ginny Bixby: Access to public records can be the key to great journalism, especially at a public university. By examining public records, student journalists gain information about a school’s operations and hold school officials accountable for their actions. For student journalists at Florida State University in Tallahassee, covering the athletics department is about to become… Continue reading PODCAST: What the privatization of Florida State University’s athletics department will mean for journalists
A political journalism veteran turns the spotlight on college athletics
Daniel Libit is a political journalism veteran based in Chicago with no experience in traditional sports reporting.
It's no gag: Major-college athletes gain legally protected right to speak with media
A legal opinion from the National Labor Relations Board declares players at major private universities to be "employees," entitled to the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Those rights include freedom from university "gag orders" and from heavy-handed monitoring of social media.
Spotlight shines on colleges' regulation of student-athletes social media posts
In a new law journal article, Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, makes a case for why universities shouldn’t regulate student-athletes’ social media accounts and online speech.“What makes social media novel and empowering — that it is an immediate, unfiltered way to ‘speak’ with thousands of people — is also what makes it frightening to campus regulators,” LoMonte writes.
At a public institution, the First Amendment protects students' ability to express themselves free from government sanction, and the Due Process Clause protects against the removal of public benefits in an arbitrary way or without adequate notice.
N.C. ruling sets back college athletes’ ability to challenge removal from teams
There's an intriguing new ruling out from North Carolina's Court of Appeals that, while not directly related to free expression, portends difficulty for the inevitable legal challenge as more college athletes are punished for what they say on social media.The court of appeals decided Tuesday that a former Tar Heels football player has no claim against either the University of North Carolina or the NCAA for the loss of earnings he believes he suffered when he was barred from the team for his senior season, leaving him to enter the NFL as an undrafted free agent receiving the league's minimum salary.Michael McAdoo was kicked off the team after being accused of accepting inappropriate help from a tutor in completing a term paper for (yes, really) his Swahili class, leading the NCAA to declare him ineligible to play.On top of the NCAA disqualification, UNC suspended McAdoo for a semester and put him on academic probation, but did not take away his athletic scholarship entirely.It's worth perusing the entire opinion, but the bottom line is that, in the view of the three-judge panel in North Carolina, McAdoo has no case because he lost only playing time, not his scholarship, housing and other tangible university benefits.
TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: Six freedom-of-information resolutions every student journalist should make for 2013
There's nothing as empowering -- or maddening -- as a clean slate. What will you do with 2013? Drop those 15 pounds?