Editorial Oversight - It's a Good Thing

It would appear that someone at Cannon has realized that, perhaps, content should be reviewed before publication.

Rick Hillier Editorial

The editorial written by Scott Gilbert and posted on The Cannon Friday, January 9 has been removed while The Cannon operating committee investigates its appropriateness.

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In the meantime, those radical funsters at the U of Guelph paper decide to put up a new poll.

There was a time, before the internet and search engines, when student papers and those who wrote for them could vent their spleen without much editorial oversight, because their audience was pretty much limited to the campus of their particular university, or student newspapers on other campuses if they participated in an exchange of physical issues. Other than the campus paper's archive, any material which might be questionable was quickly forgotten with the next issue, and it certainly did not spread into the wider community.

People in local university communities who bothered to read the papers were usually aware of the individuals who were writing these pieces, either knowing them directly or by reputation. The remainder usually used the campus rag as birdcage liner. At that point in time, it wasn't like anyone other than students were really aware of what was being printed in their campus papers - and even that constituted a minority of students - despite the fact that they were paying for this from their student fees. Now that they have decided to go digital, its a completely different game.

Thanks to the development of algorithms that parse webpages by content and the computing power which makes such searches viable, anyone can type in any words into a search engine and get back web pages containg thousands of links to webpages referencing those words. Like computers, search engines are dumb. What you put in is what you get back. No where in these links does it say things like "this item is from a student newspaper and does not contain a basis in fact" or "this page was put up by someone with an axe to grind". The good, the bad and the ugly are all out there, and like cyberbulling/harassment, once something is out there it is difficult to get it back. Google cache and the wayback machine are forever; or at least until the next cycle scrubs them. There is no guarantee, however, that someone hasn't backed the webpage up between those cycles.

Because of its global reach and virutally instantaneous transmission, anything published on the Internet has the potential to impact the reputation of individuals as well as institutions. This is not a bad thing when used to faciltate debate on issues in an organized and respectful manner. The problem inherent in instantaneous communication, though, it that many of the people who engage in it lack the maturity to self monitor before hitting the publish button. In choosing to go digital, campus papers and student unions have unitentionally put themselves under a microscope. Given that these institutions are allegedly where those who would influence our society's future policy directions are coming from, I think its about time.