Daniel Gross had cracked the story of mysterious resignations among student staff at a Towson University dormitory. But the student journalist's pride quickly turned to frustration when 3,000 newspapers went missing from racks around campus. Full Story »
Posted by Andrew Hazlett
I think this is a fairly good piece of journalism, with the exception that I would have liked to see more straight quotes from Gross and Dunsworth and not just a lot of paraphrased paragraphs. I thought that the article was good for being original and not something that would be covered on a widespread scale, but it is still important to the student population and community of Towson. This is also a story that the reporter could come back to and follow up on. That being said the writing was pretty good. The lead was interesting but maybe could have captured the readers attention better. I though it had a nice flow of ideas in it and didn't really place blame on anyone, only through Gross's words. They didn't really introduce the sources well until the third or fourth paragraph which is a little excessive. I think that this story needs more background information and a bit more time to sort out what happened before it can answer a lot of questions. Its hard to report on speculation.
As a Towson student and journalism major who will be working on the Towerlight, I guess I have some bias because to me students stealing papers because of a story I wrote would be enraging, so I definitely sympathize with how Gross is feeling. I also think it is very immature for people to be stealing newspapers, although I did not read the article, you never know if perhaps Gross did indeed place blame or conviction on innocent parties.