We wouldn't have it any other way

We are Princeton students. We live in the dorms, take our meals in eating clubs and dining halls, attend classes across campus and belong to academic departments, sports teams, dance troupes, a cappella groups and residential colleges.

But we’re also ‘Prince’ editors. Over the past 12 months, we have published a student newspaper charged with impartially examining every single aspect of life at Princeton and reporting controversial news that administrators, faculty members and fellow students — many of whom we interact with on a regular basis — often wish we wouldn’t.

Journalists are supposed to be unbiased, removed from the situations they report on and, under absolutely no circumstances, friends with their sources. But not a day goes by that we don’t publish an article quoting a roommate, professor, classmate, sibling, residential college adviser or other acquaintance of someone on the ‘Prince’ staff.

We publish articles about students hospitalized after Bicker initiations before heading to our own bicker clubs to grab a bite to eat.

Earlier this semester, when writing an article about eating club dues, we resorted to calling up our friends and asking them how much they had paid to join their respective clubs when we failed to procure this data from most eating club presidents.

This is not good journalism. But we’re not just journalists; we’re also Princeton students.

And just as we periodically lean on our friends to provide us with information for articles, they sometimes push us not to cover events or circumstances they would prefer go unnoticed.

In September, we heard passionate requests from our friends asking us not to print the names of the students arrested during Lawnparties weekend. When a freshman was arrested last March for carrying a replica gun on campus, he asked us not to print his name. When we profiled a sophomore who posed naked for a magazine, she initially asked us not to include her last name. We refused all of those requests, though the students involved had legitimate concerns about the ways these articles might harm their reputations and futures.

As friends and classmates, it is our responsibility to look out for our peers, respect their wishes for privacy, allow them the chance to move past any mistakes they may have made and support them when they screw up. But we’re not just Princeton students; we’re also ‘Prince’ editors.

All year long, we’ve denied requests from the subjects of stories or their friends — who were often our friends, too — to not publish unflattering or embarrassing information or to take stories off our website.

That’s not to say we’ve never held off writing a story for fear it might damage a close friendship or agreed to make friends’ quotes anonymous in certain articles. We have.

Balancing our identities as Princeton students and ‘Prince’ editors is a constant struggle. We’ll be the first to admit that we’ve made some mistakes.

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After two-and-a-half years as ‘Prince’ reporters and a third as editors, it’s become increasingly clear that there is a difference between the way one experiences — and should experience — Princeton as a journalist and the way one experiences this University as a student.

On March 7, as word of a potential gunman swept across campus, students all around us were seeking refuge behind locked dorm doors, some of them even hiding under their beds. It was our job to gather as much information as quickly as possible and present it as widely as possible. But we had to do this behind locked doors of our own, just as frightened as everyone else.

There are inherent tensions between the two roles that are often impossible to reconcile and that shouldn’t be reconciled. Our daily responsibilities to the ‘Prince’ often bring with them pretty clear conflicts of interest. Often we obtain information informally from conversations with friends or print stories about the eating clubs or departments or sports teams we belong to — groups where some of our close friends and acquaintances serve as officers.

We set out to challenge our staff and our readers to engage with serious stories and broach uncomfortable topics. We wanted to hold administrators accountable for their actions, to shed light on situations that would otherwise go unseen, to report on tales that would otherwise go untold.

The past year has been, by turns, relentlessly frustrating, genuinely fun, deeply disappointing, thoroughly challenging and immensely rewarding.

At times, we upset our professors, disappointed people with whom we interact on a regular basis and burned friendships.

As our board draws to a close with this final issue, we realize that over the past year, our identities as journalists have perhaps overshadowed our lives as students, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Matt Westmoreland is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Princetonian. He can be reached at mwestmor@princeton.edu. Josephine Wolff is the managing editor. She can be reached at jcwolff@princeton.edu.