Complete Story
08/15/2018
As national stories break on campus, Ohio State student journalists step up
From The Columbia Journalism Review
AS NEWS ALERTS began pouring into his phone last week, Colin Gay knew he had to get out from behind the concession stand. College football journalist Brett McMurphy was reporting that Ohio State coach Urban Meyer knew about domestic violence allegations against one of his assistants, and Gay, the sports editor at Ohio State’s student newspaper, The Lantern, had to write. He went to his supervisor at the Columbus, Ohio, movie theater where he had taken a summer job, and said he had to end his shift early. “I told my boss ‘I need to leave, right now,’” Gay says. “I knew I needed to get this story up because this is way bigger than me, way bigger than my minimum-wage summer job. This is information that people need to know.”
Gay is one of a handful of Ohio State student journalists who have found themselves in the middle of two major national stories this summer. The one shaking the college football world at the moment involves allegations of domestic abuse by former Buckeyes assistant coach Zach Smith, which has resulted in Meyer, one of the most successful coaches in modern history, being placed on administrative leave while the school investigates what he knew, and when. The other deals with sexual misconduct by Richard Strauss, a former wrestling team doctor, who is accused of assaulting more than 100 students during a tenure with the university that lasted decades, and has involved questions about what Ohio Representative Jim Jordan knew of Strauss’s behavior when he served as an assistant wrestling coach in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
