By: Daniel Dodson, former Editor-in-Chief 2019-2020
I began my time at the Samford Crimson as a staff writer with a goal to write meaningful pieces about the campus community. I received a lot of great story assignments and met amazing people along the way. In the years to follow, I would become the managing editor and eventually, Editor-in-Chief of the Crimson.
When I first arrived as Editor-in-Chief, I had one goal in mind: how to make the Crimson the best college newspaper out there. I surrounded myself with similar thinking minds on the executive staff and we would meet weekly to discuss improvements and goals for the year.
Some of the first moves we decided to make was to update the Crimson logo to what you see today, eliminate the op-eds section and turn the back page of the paper into an ad spot. I really did not want our newspaper to be boasting anything political, and we found that many readers weren’t interested in hot takes about campus life that were being written.
Our former opinions editor, Thomas Cleveshart, was moved over to ad sales and wrote a weekly column called “Tommy’s Music Corner.” By reducing the number of pages we had to fill with content, we were able to focus on bigger, more in-depth stories and breaking news. And this is where the paper really started to get interesting.
Over the course of the year we published many in-depth front page pieces covering LGBTQIA+ rights on campus, racial injustices and university practices.
In October of 2019, I wrote a breaking news story about some Samford students that made a racially charged post on Snapchat declaring “we changing races tonight (sic.)” after receiving an artificial tan. The girls had posted the photo and it quickly started getting circulated around the community, causing a lot of anger.
I found out about it and reached out to leaders of diversity groups on campus for comment. I made the decision to originally publish the photo of the girl. AL.com also wrote a story and linked back to our publication because we chose to post the photo. This led to a series of legal threats by the family of the girl but we refused to take down the post while the story was relevant.
It was stories like this and others that were not commonly written before at the Crimson that led us from unranked to become the #1 College Newspaper in the South at the Southeast Journalism Conference in 2019. Journalism is a powerful tool, and we need to continue to harness it on college campuses and write stories that push the limits and raise eyebrows.
