Student journalist Cameron Burns was recently manhandled by police, handcuffed, tossed to the ground, and bussed off to jail. But he got the story. Late last week, the eighteen-year-old multimedia producer for The Daily Californian at the University of California, Berkeley, joined a large group of anarchists marching roughly eight miles from Berkeley to Oakland to protest public education funding cuts. His mission: capture video and eyewitness observations for a Daily Calreport.
At one point, without warning, a splinter faction of protesters veered onto an interstate highway, suddenly enmeshing Burns in the mother of all journalistic dilemmas: covering a riot without getting caught up in it. He did not have his press pass with him. He did not know what the group had planned. He had no assurances of personal safety. He hesitated only a split second. As his editor shouted into his cell phone, "Go get the story -- go get it!"
A few minutes later, he was under arrest. He spent 20 hours in jail, worried his parents and editors, and now faces a fight to clear his name from a criminal record. But he got the story -- no less than what student journalists across the country are accomplishing daily, often without fear, for little to no pay, and at times in between classes.
The tale of Burns's dogged reporting has ironically arrived at the same time as a newChronicle of Higher Education report bemoaning the lack of higher education coverage in the professional press- especially among the old standbys, local newspapers. "Faced with declining advertising revenues and circulation, many newspapers are combining higher