TAB Scoops Heights On Undergraduate Student's Lawsuit

An editor at the Northeastern News, the student newspaper of Northeastern University, wrote in The Salt Mine that The Heights, the Boston College student newspaper, got scooped on a story that should've been a slam dunk for The Heights to cover.

Who scooped them? The Allston-Brighton TAB, a community newspaper.

At issue? The undergraduate who is part of the lawsuit against the city over the new zoning amendment that limits off-campus undergraduate student apartments to four students or fewer. Her name is Jessica Luccio, and she is a sophomore at BC. It only made sense for a newspaper to run an interview with her to find out why she joined the lawsuit. As of today, a search at the website of The Heights still produces no hit for the name "Luccio".

The NU News editor argued that there were two days for The Heights to file their story after the Boston Herald first named Luccio as part of the lawsuit -- albeit without identifying the university in which she is enrolled. (UniversalHub and Brighton Centered both noted soon after the Herald article that Luccio is an undergraduate at BC, I might add.)

Most of the main-stream media -- and non-MSM bloggers -- don't cover on-campus issues because that is the beat that ought to be covered best by student newspapers. I think there will be some red faces over in Chestnut Hill this week.

What were the stories that The Heights considered more important to run in their April 17th issue? One story was the debut of two flat-screen TVs in the dining hall. Apparently, students voted in February 2007 that these flat-screen TVs were more important than "a push for united social change, reshuffling the [Undergraduate Government at Boston College's] structure to improve efficiency, extending the UGBC's role beyond programming to improve student life, and [having the UGBC serve] as a more representative liaison between the students and the administration."


Image from Mike Wade through Creative Commons license.