Students In Strike Zone p. 9

By: Allan Wolper STUDENT JOURNALISTS from at least 18 colleges and universities will work as interns this summer at the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, even if the papers remain on strike.
The Detroit editors who will supervise the students say they should not be classified as scabs or replacement workers because they're involved in an educational project, and not taking away anyone's job.
But the striking journalists insist the students will be scabs when they cross the picket lines to accept salaries and benefits negotiated for them in a collective bargaining agreement. The Newspaper Guild won an agreement in which interns receive $463.89 a week from the Free Press and $494.64 from the News.
The summer interns last year had been in their respective newsrooms for just two weeks when the July 13 strike began.
The newspapers advised the students not to cross the picket line, and none of them did. And several of them took up signs and joined the striking journalists parading in front of the newspaper offices.
The Free Press placed many of their interns at other newspapers while the News paid them for not working, believing the students had not been given enough warning about the labor situation.
The Press and the News said this year that they spoke to many of the students they recruited to prepare them for the conditions under which they will work.
The young journalists who were offered internships ? among the most prestigious and best paid in the country ? said they did not want to miss what they saw as an important opportunity.
But others rejected the summer jobs because they refused to cross the picket line and because their parents were concerned about their safety.
And there were some who worried that they would be blacklisted sometime in the future by journalists who believed they took advantage of a working reporter's misfortunes.
The Free Press interns include students from the University of Michigan, Florida A&M, Loyola-New Orleans, University of Florida, Howard University, University of North Carolina, Metropolitan State College in Denver, the Journalism Institute for Minorities at Wayne State University in Detroit, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
The Detroit News contingent lists recruits from Grambling College, Howard University, the University of Iowa, University of Kansas, Michigan State University, Queens College, in New York City, Wayne State, and Western Kentucky University.
Some schools require the students to register for academic credit, while others consider the internship a summer job and do not require them to pay tuition and receive no credit hours for their work.
The Journalism Institute, which gets $30,000 of its $120,000 scholarship annual budget from the Detroit News, is sending six interns to that paper.
It also has placed one intern at the Free Press and a second one at Detroit Newspapers, which administers the production and distribution of both newspapers.
The institute, which was begun in 1983, offers full tuition scholarships to minority students who have maintained a minimum 3.0 average in high school.
Michele Vernon-Chesley, a former Free Press reporter who runs the institute, said her students were torn by the conflict.
"We are in a working-class town," she said of the Detroit-based school. "Some of the students' parents are union members. I told them that they would have to make up their minds about whether they wanted to work there."
Vernon-Chesley said some students decided not to accept internships, while others who have graduated joined the Detroit Sunday Journal as $160-per-week reporters.
The 200,000-circulation weekly newspaper is published by striking workers of the two newspapers.
Joe Grimm, the 42-year-old recruiting and development editor for the Free Press, said the main issue for the students is whether they will be getting valuable experience in the newsroom.
"They are not scabs," said Grimm, a University of Michigan alumnus. "They are not taking a job away from anyone else. We are working under normal conditions here. It won't take any act of bravery to come into the Free Press building."
Grimm believes the students should honor their internship commitment unless they have a philosophical objection to crossing a picket line.
"The students should be asking what will they learn about the newspaper business. 'How good are the editors? How much will I learn from my co-workers?' The answer is a lot," Grimm said.
Roger Chesley, a striking reporter for the Free Press who is city editor of the Sunday Journal, warns the students that they will be branded scabs for the rest of their Detroit professional lives.
"If they cross the picket line, they will be helping to bust the union," Chesley said, "the union that negotiated one of the best contracts of an intern situation in the country."
Chesley also claims the students won't be getting the quality training available during the pre-strike period.
"There has been a terrible talent drain here," he said. "Some of the best reporters have left for jobs in other cities. They won't be there to teach them. And the students will always be tainted as scabs. This is not the best time for them to come."
Frank Lovinski, deputy managing editor of the Detroit News, insists the students should not stay home out of fear or because they don't want to cross a picket line.
"Where is it written that they can't do that?" Lovinski asked. "This is a chance of a lifetime for those young people. We've pledged to make them as comfortable as possible. It would be wrong for any university to advise them to pass up an opportunity like this."
Lovinski also noted that editors from competing newspapers he declined to identify had hired away prospective interns after warning them not to work in Detroit.
"It happened on at least two occasions," Lovinski said. "They discouraged them and then recruited them. That wasn't quite fair to the kids, but there was nothing we could do about it."
Louis Mleczko, president of Local 22 of the Newspaper Guild, views the students as political pawns in the bitter dispute.
"The newspapers and universities should tell them the truth," Mleczko said. "Interning at a scab paper is a sorry way for an aspiring journalist to start a career. We negotiated very hard to get the students the salaries and health benefits they receive as interns."
Mleczko insists that it is time for the students to repay the union for the salaries that were negotiated for them.
"We are involved in a fight for our lives. We need them. They should not be crossing a union picket line to do work performed by union members."
Patrick Witty, a 23-year-old senior from Western Kentucky who recently was named College Photographer of the Year, said he is concerned about the reception he will get from the readers of the Detroit News.
"I haven't taken an ethical pill since I won't be taking anyone's job," Witty said. "But Detroit is a union town. People might be angry. They may not want me to take their picture, not because of editorial content, but because of what is happening there."
Witty said he agreed to take the internship because all but one member of the photography staff had returned to the paper.
"There was a lot of solidarity," he said.
Ron Lederman, the 24-year-old editor in chief of the South End, the Wayne State student newspaper, said he believes that unions have outlived their usefulness.
"At one time unions were needed," Lederman said. "Now the heads of unions want to control the corporations they work for."
But Edward W. Wendover, publisher of the Community Crier, in Plymouth, Mich., worries that students were being shortsighted.
"If you plan on being in the newspaper business a long time," Wendover said, "you don't want half the people in the business mad at you. It's much easier to pass on an internship than to have people remember you as a scab forever."
Wendover, who is on the board of the State News at Michigan State University, said the paper there was so sensitive to the strikers that they refused to allow the Detroit News to reprint a feature on the school's first woman drum major.
"Still," Wendover said, "it is hard for students to turn the kind of money the papers are offering for those internships."
Robert Giles, editor and publisher of the Detroit News, wants colleges and universities to assume a neutral position on the internship issue.
"The appropriate thing for professors is to stand back and allow the students to make the decisions for themselves," said Giles, who also is president of the Accrediting Council on Education on Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC).
"If the students want to work in our newsroom, they should be allowed to," Giles added. "The strike has nothing to do with the internships. They are separate issues."
Giles said that none of the universities have sought his advice on the strike situation.
"If they call, I'd be willing to answer any question they might have," he said. "But taking an internship will not have any impact on their careers."
Jo-Ann Huff Albers, head of Western Kentucky's journalism department, said the universities are in a delicate position.
"We have concerns for everyone," Albers said, "for the students and for the employers. We have had zero contact with the newspapers. We don't give any academic credit for the internship, although it would be a leap for someone to say that giving credit is an endorsement of management. We are sitting on the sidelines with this."
Richard R. Cole, dean of the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications, believes students would get an interesting education working in the volatile atmosphere in Detroit.
"In some ways, the internship there would be more valuable than in other places," Cole said. "It probably will be something they will never forget."
Laurence Alexander, chair of the journalism department at the University of Florida, said he had mixed feelings about the Detroit internships.
"If the strike is settled, then it is a great internship," Alexander said. "But if it isn't, then there is some potential for a nasty situation. The students who go there will be perceived as scabs. It is not something that they would want on their resume down the road."
Dana Liebengood, professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, has not spent time analyzing the situation in Detroit.
"The students will be there a relatively short time," Liebengood said. "We are not worried about their safety. We've had somebody in Detroit almost every year. Two of our December graduates took jobs at the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press."
Liebengood pointed out that Giles had taught at Kansas several years ago on a Gannett Professional in Residence Fellowship.
"He did a wonderful job for us," Liebengood said of the Detroit News editor.
Suzanne Shaw, professor of journalism at Kansas and executive director of the ACEJMC accrediting council, believes journalism schools should do a better job of preparing students for strike situations.
"My suspicion is that we don't do it very well," she said.