DEPAUW NAMES FIRST PULLIAM VISITING PROF
When he becomes the first Eugene S. Pulliam Visiting Professor in Journalism at DePauw University, Pulitzer Prize winner David Hall will bring with him four decades of experience in newspapers – half that time as the chief editor of a metropolitan daily paper. Hall, former editor of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer and the Denver Post, was scheduled to begin his new position at DePauw, located in Greencastle, Ind., in July. “I’m excited about it,” Hall said in a university press release. “It’s a chance, after many years in the business, to give something back.” Besides teaching classes and working with students, Hall also plans to conduct and publish studies on modern journalism. Hall will create an advisory board of journalists from around the country to provide feedback and to help with the project. The three studies slated for the first year concentrate on what Hall calls “the three legs on the stool of journalism” – reporting standards, editing and writing. “Journalism has problems today,” Hall said. “We want to look at those problems in terms of our historic traditions of how good journalism is done, what the public needs today, and try to find solutions to these problems, not just yell about them.” Hall added that “DePauw is going to be, we hope, a constructive and a major voice in how American journalism conducts itself over the next 20 to 30 years.” HARVARD CRIMSON TURNS TO CHEAP, FOREIGN LABOR
The Harvard Crimson, the country’s oldest continuously published college newspaper, is building a free Internet archive going back to its first edition in 1873. When the project is completed later this year, The Crimson’s president says it could be the largest online newspaper archive in the world. But to deal with the nightmare of typesetting 128 years of school history, The Crimson has turned to Third World workers as a source of cheap labor – a fact that appears to contradict The Crimson’s stance of supporting a “living wage” for campus employees. C. Matthew MacInnis, a Harvard senior and the president of The Crimson, told The Boston Globe that he signed a $45,000 contract for about two dozen Cambodians to typeset The Crimson’s 19th-century editions. Each worker is to earn about 40 cents an hour, a slight raise from their previous jobs. The 20th-century portion of the project is being typeset by a group of monks in India. “The job is projected to employ 20 typists working two six-hour shifts a day on 10 computers for six months,” The Globe said. MacInnis said The Crimson – which operates independently of the university – didn’t have the funding necessary to complete the project at U.S. wages. “We’re taking advantage of wage differentials, but we’ve been assured that these salaries are not only fair, but excellent for the people doing this,” MacInnis told The Globe. “Are we getting cheap labor? Of course. But you can’t employ someone in North America to do this kind of job at this cost.” MacInnis acknowledged that the overseas hires put the paper at odds with Harvard’s protest movement, as well as with its own editorials.
