Here are the panelists:

Rich Hirsch
Senior editor of The Miami Herald, whose city is home to the largest Haitian diaspora in the United States

Tamara Lush
Associated Press reporter

Tom Brew
Deputy editor of MSNBC.com

Jon Bougher
UF documentary student, who was in Haiti when the earthquake struck

They will speak about their experiences covering the disaster and show photos and video. After their presentations, the event will open to questions from the audience.

If you are a journalism student, you’re invited to come early at 5pm to have pizza with the Advisory Council. This is a really good opportunity to tell the Advisory Council what you think about how the college is run, your classes and professors. The Council has a good say in curriculum changes at the college, and after they speak with students on Thursday night, they will meet with the faculty of the college on Friday to discuss what students are saying. So come make your voice heard and take a roll in the direction of your education. It’s also a good way to meet some of the top editors in the state.

Update: The Fine Print will be live-tweeting from the event, so follow us for supplemental links and other good stuff. The UF College of Journalism and Communications will be shooting a video, which will will be posted next week.

Hirsch played this video, in which three of his Miami Herald colleagues reflect on their experiences reporting on the disaster:

For 35 years, Goerings Book Store has struggled to survive in Gainesville’s increasingly corporate market. Located on 1717 NW First Ave., behind midtown, it was a place for students, professors and Gainesville residents to meet, talk about literature and browse titles by local authors. In a few weeks, its shelves will be empty. By March, even the shelves will be gone, and its doors will close permanently.

Remy Boucias, a UF journalism junior who grew up in Gainesville, recalls tagging along with his mom to visit Goerings as a kid.

“I really liked the environment,” Boucias said. “It was better than, say, Borders or Books-A-Million. A lot of it had to do with the owner, Tom Rider. He’d always be at the front desk with quirky books to show me – stuff I wouldn’t have read otherwise.”

Boucias appreciated seeing work there by local authors.

“When you go to a chain store, you just get the New York Times best sellers list,” he said. “You don’t get exposed to anything from your community.”

In addition to providing work by local authors, Goerings held events, such as book signings, which created a sense of literary community. UF English Professor Padgett Powell, a local author himself, has patronized Goerings since 1984.

Powell and other professors like him supported Goerings each semester by sending the store exclusive textbook orders. He expressed frustration with the UF Bookstore’s poor quality of service and the fact that they only stocked a set percentage of books ordered by each professor to prevent overstocking the inventory.

“If you told Goerings you had 30 students, Goerings would order 30 books,” Powell said. “They handled our textbooks with a moment’s notice. We sometimes ordered books after classes began, the way it should be done, not as we’re doing it now, so far in advance that you forgot what you ordered for your classes.

The drawback is that exclusive orders leave students with fewer choices when it comes to where their textbooks come from. This would have been a serious problem had Goerings chosen to take advantage of the situation by charging more.

“The prices were very reasonable,” said Hanny Lane, a UF economics and math junior. “And the people there were very friendly.”

Naturally, the UF Bookstore had serious competitive advantages, such as its ideal location and its affiliation with the University.

Until 2000, UF owned and operated its own bookstore located at The Hub. The decision was made in 2000 to build a new bookstore and welcome center. The Business Services Division of UF contributed $10 million to the project. Follett Higher Education Group contributed $2 million. Student fees contributed $6.3 million.

From 2000 on, Follett owned and controlled the campus bookstore. For the first $10 million made by the bookstore in a given year, the university got 10.75 percent. If the profits reached $15 million, the university got 11 percent.

“All the money made at Goerings stays in the Gainesville community,” said Tom Rider, a co-owner of Goerings since 1981. “Most of the money made at the campus store goes back to Chicago, where Follett Enterprise keeps its headquarters.”

The UF Bookstore may have been run by a $2.5 billion dollar corporation, but they could not match the level of service that Goerings Book Store provided.

“I don’t go to the UF Bookstore,” said UF junior Lindsey Green. “They’re not as interested in serving students as they are in making money, as is apparent in their prices. And they have terrible customer service.”

So Goerings remained competitive, despite the factors stacked against them.

“As chain bookstores flooded in, small bookstores…began to close,” Rider said.

Rider said each chain store controls such a massive sector of the market that publishers can’t force them to pay for their books on time. The publishers then have to make up for this by tightening restrictions on independent stores, like Goerings.

Still, Goerings prevailed because professors chose to support them.

“I ordered all my textbooks for all my classes at Goerings before they stopped doing textbook orders this semester,” said Elise Takehana, a UF graduate student who teaches literature and writing courses. “Goerings had so many texts that you don’t see anywhere else. There’s also a level of service here that you don’t get at other stores.”

Why, then, did Goerings fail?

State legislation requires professors to post their textbook requirements online at least 30 days before classes start. This gives students more time to compare textbook prices and, if necessary, order textbooks online.

The University’s Office of the Provost is stricter about this than the state government. Professors are required to post their textbook requirements online two to five months before classes start. Otherwise, their departments get fined. The textbook information, posted online, can then be accessed by local bookstores. This effectively ends the ability of professors to place exclusive textbook orders, which were the life support of Goerings.

Goerings will clearly be missed by students and professors looking for noncommercial sources of literature and conversation. To prevent this sort of tragedy from happening again, Tom Rider suggests that sympathetic students do their best to venture off campus and support local businesses. After all, they may not be around for much longer.

Singing newspaper woes

But what you won’t see in even the token liberal media like the New York Times or National Public Radio is an analysis of what “democracy” actually meant to the countries on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. The fall of communism in these nations translated to a prime opportunity for American corporations to come in and privatize everything they could, from the labor market to the previously public utilities system to natural resources. For the citizens of the countries of the former Eastern bloc, democratization brought with it what Michael J. Jordan of the Christian Science Monitor calls a series of “negative consequences”, in his article about the nostalgia for communism in these countries.

“Each positive development of “democracy” ushered in negative consequences: Free-market competition brought soaring prices and joblessness; free elections brought extremist parties; free press brought incitement; free movement brought cross-border crime and westward ‘brain drain.’”

In a perfect world, with a mass media that isn’t under corporate control and searches for the true story, maybe we would have seen a different type of story surrounding the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one with a little less celebration and a lot more reality.

Don’t laugh… It’s my first time. I’m excited, but I’m also a little bit nervous. Will I look like a complete fool? Will my readers come back for a second go at it, or will they disappear and never call?

In the future, this blog will feature commentary from us, the editors of The Fine Print, on the future of journalism and the role of journalists in preserving democracy. We’ll also be providing criticism of mainstream media coverage and of ourselves. We’ll also use this as a platform to give The Fine Print’s perspective on the most important issues facing not only students and Gainesvillians today, but also the country as a whole.

So be on the look-out for new posts, and don’t laugh. It’s my first time.

Crisis is also an opportunity for creativity and for the emergence of new models.    -KVH

Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor-in-chief and publisher of The Nation, a weekly progressive magazine that’s been around since 1865. The Nation is based on a for-profit model, but is still largely reader-supported and relies little on advertising sales. Like most print publications, The Nation is facing challenges in its efforts to transform its model in order to keep up with a transitioning journalism industry. I talked with vanden Heuvel about her thoughts on the future of the media and what The Nation is doing to preserve quality journalism for the long run.

Jessica Newman: A lot of what we hear today about the journalism industry centers around the death of print media and journalism as a sinking ship. What’s your perspective on this, being a print publication and operating on a semi-traditional model?

Katrina vanden Heuval: Well I have to say that The Nation has never operated on the traditional model. We’re for-profit, and as someone said the other day, we’ve been a profit-seeking but not necessarily profit-attaining organization for 144 years. The model that we have had is one that I think now is ascendant in many ways, which is going to emerge because of the crisis of the corporate, more traditional model. That is reader-supported journalism. We have partners in the magazine; we have a circle of 100 supporters; and we have 30,000 Nation associates who give a small amount each month and each year above and beyond their subscription price to help us do the journalism we’ve been doing – investigative journalism, deep reporting, analysis that you don’t see in the mainstream.

JN: But you don’t see much investigative reporting these days in the newspapers that are dying every day. Does this mean journalism as we know it is dead?

KVH: The corporate model, if I can call it that, has failed. I think we’re seeing the failure of that around us as newspapers are folding. But as I said earlier, crisis is also an opportunity for creativity and for the emergence of new models. The Nation’s model is going to be one of the models. There are non-profit models. Those are possibly going to be part of our future. But I do think another model we need to look at is one that people sometimes shy away from but which is worth thinking about, which is how we use our tax and postal and regulatory policies to create a framework where we can support and sustain journalism. That would be low-profit journalism, not-for-profit journalism, public journalism, public interest journalism that is dying as the for-profit traditional model collapses. There are many people, many organizations, lots of conferences going on as people think through how we can not only sustain the newspapers – because those are really the ones that are like canaries in the coal mine that are going first – but how do you sustain quality, public interest journalism, which is vital for a democracy?

JN: What about the idea of government support for the media? How do you feel about using our tax dollars to keep journalism alive?

KVH: What’s important to remember is that the media system we’ve lived with for many decades didn’t arise just out of the ground. It was supported by regulatory policies and government subsidies. But these were subsidies that helped build those big media conglomerates. What we need to do now is think creatively about how do we use tax money to sustain quality journalism.  What we think of as government sounds scary. But I’m not talking about censorship; I’m not talking about government intervention in any way in journalism. But the frame work that would support high quality journalism – by the way, as other countries do in Norway and in France where there is support for people who take subscriptions or support for publications that have a very low ad ratio so that there’s more public interest journalism. So I think that’s the challenge ahead.

JN: Can quality journalism translate to the Internet?

KVH: I would recommend to you an article in the New York Review of Books this issue by someone who’s written for The Nation over the years as well, Michael Massing. He has some good examples of quality Internet journalism. So I do think if we can maintain journalism and that kind of journalism, which is really what this country should be about, which is tough-minded, questioning, rigorous journalism that holds power accountable – watchdog journalism. I’m not here to say that the journalism we’ve had over the last few decades in the newspapers that are now collapsing has been exemplary because think about the failure of the media, as I spoke about, in the lead-up to the War in Iraq or the failure to alert citizens to the financial collapse, to even question the bubble economy that we were living in. No, I’m talking about the possibility of a journalism that may die. But seriously, think of the Michael Jackson coverage. All due respect to him, but the coverage was out of control. So in terms of where our TV and our cable are going, where radio is going, it becomes harder to find high quality journalism. So that is important to sustain. There’s a reason we have these vast corporate media conglomerates. I think that anything we can do to sustain, in the midst of this crisis, a kind of pro-democracy, smaller scale media, we need to do. It’s critical.

During its printing run of a single school year (’68-’69), this alternative weekly was the mouthpiece of UF’s so-called radical students, who were dissatisfied with what they saw as the Alligator’s toothless and irrelevant coverage of campus events.

Many members of its staff had worked at the Alligator (Steve Hull, one of University Report’s ringleaders, had been an editor), but quit amid controversy and censorship by the administration. They produced the paper on an old-fashioned typewriter on their living room floor. University Report’s mission statement was, in part:

In response to the Faculty Position Paper presented to the Action Conference by Professor Corbin Carnell, a group of students has formed the University Report. This weekly publication intends to analyze issues significant for members of the University community as well as allow dialogue between students and faculty…

…There is a tendency on the part of university administrators to regard free expression of the students as a mere symptom of the student status, and to ignore it. If University education is not to become mindless mass-production, the student must not in this way become depersonalized. Student free speech must not be too easily discarded as the emotional intensity and fantasy of adolescents undergoing identity diffusion. Rather it must be seen as the validation of experience; the message–not that he is right or wrong but that he exists.

To that end, stories questioned the legitimacy of reforms touted by the administration (epitomized by the Action Conference, PR stunt orchestrated by UF President President Stephen C. O’Connell), exposed government spying on UF students (“Wee is Watching You” discussed an alleged informant named Palmer Wee), and tackled questions like campus race relations and the social acceptability of protests. One article explored why “The Third Floor Boys” – the Student Body President, the leadership of Florida Blue Key and the editor of the Alligator – seemed to lack the cajones to lead students in challenging the administration.

One issue featured a burning American Flag on the cover. Another featured shots of a nude co-ed strolling through what is now Library East, causing a stir that reached news wires around the state.

“We had a different idea of citizenship,” said Michael Abrams, who served as the papers second Executive Editor. “It didn’t occur to me that I would someday have to earn a living.”

In an editorial, UR took The Alligator to task for cutting its ties to student government. While the paper claimed the move helped preserve its freedom to print what it wanted, the UR editorial charged that rejecting student government funds (which came with some minor strings attached) took the publication out of students’ hands and placed it under the control of the Board of Student Publications, which was dominated by faculty hand-picked by the administration.

Less than four years later, the administration’s attempts at censorship forced the Alligator off campus, and students haven’t controlled their campus newspaper since.

The University Report may have been “radical,” and may have routinely criticized the administration in ways the Alligator never would, but it was published during a time when student protests would shut down University Ave. for days at a time and frats would drag couches onto the Plaza of the Americas for all-night parties fueled by kegs of beer and sheets of LSD.

As Abrams, put it in an e-mail this fall, “We were pretty small potatoes compared to everything else that was going on.”

A look at the paper’s supporters reveals a campus culture less socially divided than it is today. University Report was endorsed by the Student Senate, and its staff included members of Florida Blue Key. The Inter Fraternity Council was among its largest advertisers. Imagine half-page IFC ads in The Fine Print, urging our readers to come out for rush.

“It was a time of protest” Abrams said, “and our generation wanted to change the world and raise hell doing it.”