Judging by the Twitter feed dedicated to online blogger-powerhouse Huffington Post’s college department, it would be relatively easy to surmise that the most relevant story affecting campuses across America this month is the outing and rise to stardom of a freshman at Duke University who shoots porn during her college breaks.
However, taking a look at the website of Duke’s student newspaper, The Chronicle, it seems that is not even the most important story happening on Duke’s campus.
Hidden in a slider near the bottom of The Chronicle’s homepage, “Portrait of a Pornstar,” is the only story the paper has published to date on the woman. Unlike other news sites (here’s looking at you HuffPost) The Chronicle chose not to disclose the woman’s real or stage name to protect her identity, even though it had already been widely leaked.
Also, unlike other college bloggers, the paper’s enterprise story on the woman was actually more about the allure of porn in the face of rising costs of college tuition (before even speaking with the woman, the writer notes that the annual cost of a Duke education hovers around $60,000).
The question is then, if the reporters at the Chronicle (who are not even journalism majors, as Duke has no such program) can find timely and important stories to write about, can the editors at Huffington Post College find a better use for their producer Rick Camilleri than interviewing the internet’s newest pornstar?
I guess the rest of their staff was busy covering crowd-surfing college presidents.