While I was working on setting up the website (well I still am, this stuff is tough!) I accidentally had a setting set incorrectly that let someone register with a non-baruch email address.  Our spam filter flagged the comment immediately, and I emailed the person to ask them to please post their comment using their baruch email address.  I even copied and pasted their comment so it would save them some trouble.  They didn’t come back.  Here’s the comment:

I don’t think the Ticker spends $10 grand on photography equipment and hiring student photographers. This seems a little mean-spirited. I don’t think the coverage was all that misleading. The event was labeled and conducted as a protest, and whether or not there were motives behind it with the upcoming USG elections, it would have been MORE irresponsible of the Ticker to report about the event with the slant that you’re taking here. A blog post is allowed to have a scathing opinion of an event at school. A news article is not.

My response?  The Ticker has several expensive digital cameras in their possession and the students that comprise the editorial staff take home 35% of the advertising revenues they bring in to the organization.  There is one picture, and only one picture for a front page story.  The truth is that there is more to the story than The Ticker reported.  Have I taken a slant?  Yes.  I’m reporting on the reporting of an event.    There’s nothing irresponsible in saying there’s more to the story — especially when I have the pictures to prove it.  But I want to be extra clear that I stand by what I reported: I’m saying the story you got from The Ticker is not only incomplete, but by the nature of it being incomplete, it’s downright false, and I don’t believe it was actually attended by the person who wrote the story and gets paid a share of that 35% of advertising revenue of a business that our tax and student activity fee dollars go toward.

I’ll tell you that I didn’t mean to imply that The Ticker spends $10,000 on photography equipment alone, but The Ticker is apparently wasting your money.  Whether it’s your tax money, your tuition money, or your student activity money, The Ticker uses a lot of it to produce a newspaper and pay themselves very nicely.  According to Michael Wursthorn in a post on the Ticker’s website, the staff splits 35% of the revenue the Ticker takes in.  He also claimed “the surplus” goes into the student activity fees.  There is no surplus.  The Ticker is funded through the communications budget of the school and student activity fees.  If they were making a profit for the school there would not be any money budgeted to them.  Since The Ticker has never operated in a transparent or democratic fashion, nobody knows what kind of money these people are stealing from you, and you just got tricked into paying more activity fees.  (See “Did you know?“)

The above is taken from a copy of that web page that I printed out.  It has since been one of those random removals you’ll find on The Ticker’s site.  The Ticker staff will delete something from their site if they don’t like what you say.

Interestingly, on that date where Michael Wursthorn is addressing the student activity fees – this was before the last referendum that was disapproved – he says that The Ticker is not going to receive an increase in budget:

Well, in the new referendum, the “media” fee increased quite a bit for full time students, from $3.95 to $7.00.  That’s so we can pay for a newspaper to be run out of the third floor and a few people who choose their friends to take over their jobs can pay themselves.  You see at The Ticker, there are no staff meetings and no elections for any position of power.  It is a purely nepotist organization in our public university.  If you know anyone who has written for The Ticker, ask them, they’ll tell you.

If you’re wondering why nobody hasn’t said anything before now, I have.  I have filed complaints in writing – not just in writing but in great detail (as if that wasn’t obvious, right?) – to Carl Aylman, Ben Corpus, Corlisse Thomas and Ronald Aaron who have given me one pathetic response after another, contributing a very bad reputation to Baruch College for their lack of interest in the utter absence of any ethics, morality or even faking the appearance of fairness at The Ticker.  All the while, they run a business out of our school and keep 35% of the money for themselves.  Do you think they don’t ALSO get reimbursed for their cell phones, luncheons, supplies and everything else they “need” to run the school paper?  Don’t kid yourself.

So back to that $10,000 on photography equipment.  I once applied to be an online editor at The Ticker, and was told several months later that someone else was hired for the position, who had less experience and tenure than I.  When I asked why, I was told that I did not have knowledge in Final Cut Pro (a professional video editing program costing $999 at Apple) and Adobe Dreamweaver (part of a suite of Adobe products that sells for $1899 at Apple).  The problem?  First, nobody asked if I knew those programs; nobody ever contacted me about the position, ever.  Second, if The Ticker purchased those programs they squandered our money.  The Ticker doesn’t need to use Final Cut Pro to edit the videos that they post, iMovie is more than sufficient for their occasional YouTube video and comes free with every Mac they order – and they order them every three years apparently; and Dreamweaver is a web page construction program that they also do not use or need because they pay a third party service – part of MTV networks – to host their site for them entirely.  These people are careless with wasting stealing our money.  When I pressed the issue by filing another complaint to the Administration about unequal access to a student activity, I was told I would be considered for a position if I produced a portfolio of my work and I had to prove proficiency in the two programs to Michael Wursthorn.  I was told that Michael Wursthorn would be the sole decision maker on whether or not I was hired as the online editor, and it was his prerogative to hire whoever he wanted.  No elections, no voting by any group of members of the Ticker, just a Baruch student running the show hiring his friends.  When I asked if the other people had to submit portfolios for the same position, I got no answer.  I then applied to be a copy editor to the managing copy editor, and Michael Wursthorn inserted himself and said that I had to interview with him and pass a test in order to be considered for the position.  When I asked if other people had to be interviewed by the editor in chief and take tests, I got no answer.  Later, when my participation waned in The Ticker, Michael Wursthorn took over my email account without telling me beforehand, intercepted and read an untold number of private emails for an extended period of time.  He defended that sleazy behavior to the administration claiming it was his right to do on behalf of The Ticker [as a paid employee].

When I contacted the former Baruch President, Kathleen Waldron after the leadershipless administrators previously noted, she directed me to school attorney (John Dugan) who expressed some serious concern and interest, or so I thought.  I never heard from him again.  His name’s not in the directory so I don’t know what happened to him.

If you have experienced similar issues with The Ticker, I encourage you to make your voice heard.  If you do not want to contribute here to the site, then call the President’s office and let them know what you saw here and that your experience was similar.  (But please do consider contributing here!)