There is no shortage of complex, emotionally heavy topics for a journalist to cover on a college campus.
Simply stepping foot in a university dorm during freshman year implies you’ll experience the following: someone who is far away from home for the first time, someone who did not arrive to college in light circumstances, someone who will exit college with an immense weight of student loan debt, someone who is grappling with their identity and someone who will experience physical or emotional violence at the hands of another student before graduation.
As student journalists, we are experiencing such dilemmas at the same time we are attempting to cover them. As such, we want to be as empathetic and understanding as possible. That’s not to say that we’ve seen it all — we still need guidance from our
That is why this issue specifically addresses the definition of sexual consent and how that definition can vary from student to student and from journalist to journalist.
Like every student on campus, many of our reporters first heard of “sexual consent” and what it meant to have a conversation regarding it at our freshmen orientation with Dean of Students Jenny Hall-Jones. We talked about it as friends in our dorm rooms and as colleagues in our newsroom. But even as those conversations occurred, we still considered consent a concrete definition, rather than an ongoing ethical dilemma between some students.
Our cover story this week is a result of a conversation-turned-investigation into why students and administrators think of consent the way they do. It is a conversation that impacts our readers and our newsroom conversations, and I’m of the belief that such reporting is positive.
Because of that, help us key
Emma Ockerman is a senior studying journalism and editor-in-chief of The Post. Want to talk to her? Email her at eo300813@ohio.edu or tweet her @eockerman.
