Naked Journalism
Postscript No. 10 | Sarah Miller and Charlotte Hampton on covering campus politics and editing student newspapers
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*What follows is a conversation between Sarah Miller, Charlotte Hampton, and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Sarah Miller’s essay “Chasing the Story.”
Charlotte is from New York City and the editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth for the next three days.
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Below we discuss Charlotte’s 2024 arrest while covering Hanover’s encampment for The Dartmouth, the journalist’s exploitative and indexical urges, and the seriousness and salaciousness of running a campus newspaper.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*
ELAN Charlotte, tell us the story of your arrest.
CHARLOTTE Yeah. On May 1st, 2024, there was national upheaval on college campuses. Nothing had happened really at Dartmouth yet, but a small group of pro-Palestinian students set up an encampment — about 10 students on the Green. I was the head of the news section for The Dartmouth, our campus newspaper, at the time. So I was reporting on the encampment and working with some more junior reporters leading the coverage, and we were texting updates to the executive editors who were in the newsroom across the street. The night escalated because the police were called, and they told everyone to get off the Green, and there was a big showdown between this group of protesters and police officers who arrived on the scene. And it really escalated because probably hundreds of people eventually showed up and created a massive circle around a couple tents with the students inside.
They formed a line of protesters opposite this line of police officers and the College called in state troopers as well, which also escalated the situation because there were guns and massive armed vehicles. I talked with the editor-in-chief at the time, Emily Fagell, about what we wanted to do about this escalation — because they were telling everyone to get off the Green — and we decided that I would be the one reporter who stuck around with my photographer, Alesandra Gonzales. The school’s communications department also had a rep there, and she told me it was fine for me to be on the Green with her, so I was part of this small group of journalists — national journalists, too — there was a Boston Globe reporter there and a Valley News reporter, our local paper. My photographer at some point was lying down on the ground filming a history professor, Annelise Orleck, be brutalized by the police, and when Gonzales stood up, she got too close to the police officers, and they started to take her. Because she was my photographer, and she was younger than me, and she was my reporter, I said to the police, Don’t take her, she’s a member of the press, and that’s when they took me, too, because I was moving forward or engaging with them.
So we were both arrested despite the fact that we were wearing press identification — we were very clearly identifiable as press — and, yeah, we were taken to jail in zip ties. We were taken to the station, and we got our mugshots taken, and I used a prison bathroom, which has no mirror, and no seat, and no soap — evocative little details that live in my brain — and our editor came and picked us up and paid our bail, which was 40 bucks a piece, or 20 bucks a piece, I can’t remember.
Then the College did not drop our charges. Instead they released a statement saying, We understand the student journalists from The Dartmouth feel they were wrongly arrested, and we stand by their right to vindicate that belief through the legal process. That felt like a bit of a screw you to us at the time, even though their comms person had said we could be there with her.
We didn’t hear anything from the administration directly. I got a lawyer, and I went to meet with my lawyer in Norwich — I biked my little bike over to Norwich to meet with my lawyer to try to get my criminal trespass charges dropped — and as I was sitting with him, he actually got a call from the prosecutor saying my charges had been dropped. So the College dropped my charges after a little more than a week —after national free speech groups kind of rallied around me and my photographer and advocated for our charges to be dropped.
ELAN And how were you chosen to cover the protests?
CHARLOTTE Emily and I talked about it, I think I called her, and I said, They’re saying that everyone who’s here is going to get arrested, and she said, Well, we need to get all the reporters off the Green then, and I said, like, Look, there’s this group of journalists, we need to have someone here, how can we not have someone from The D reporting on this? And so I stayed and wrote her phone number on my forearm in Sharpie for my one call. And I used her phone number that was written across my forearm in jail as my one call. So yeah, there was definitely some sense that we were risking something, but also, you know, I felt like we needed to have someone from the school paper there reporting on it.
TESSA How do you conceive of The D’s role on campus? What coverage do you see as fundamental to The D versus personal essays and columns? What does better for you, and what are the metrics for success?
CHARLOTTE I mean, politically important, breaking articles definitely get a lot of clicks. Clicks and campus buzz kind of go hand-in-hand. Our “Verbums,” which are editorials, tend to get a lot of clicks when they’re controversial.
TESSA I know Elan’s op-eds get a million, bajillion views.
CHARLOTTE I mean, Elan is the key to our success — no, that’s actually not even a joke, like, you do consistently get a lot of clicks, Elan, but I think it’s just because you have — actually, no, it’s because your columns are good. It’s not just because of the headlines. They are good columns.
And there’s also “Freak of the Week,” what can I say? My directorate introduced this, you know, sex advice column called “Freak of the Week” at the request of two of our magazine columnists, and it gets so much attention. And I hate it, but people love it. People eat it up. Everyone’s talking about “Freak of the Week.”
SARAH “Freak of the Week” is a great name. Yeah, I think anything salacious does well at a college paper. So that could be something personal, like writing about starring in a nude project. That piece made Middlebury’s alumni blast, which was crazy. I mean, it was about the porn class I took at Middlebury, so they sent it to the alumni and put it on the school’s alumni Instagram.
CHARLOTTE I loved reading about your nude modeling.
RUFUS Charlotte’s also a famous nudist, you know.
TESSA She’s a nude model for the studio art department.
CHARLOTTE Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot of chemistry here, Sarah.
SARAH I love it. There was also a big corruption scandal at the end of my senior year where the student activities board was found to have embezzled significant amounts of money to buy themselves Aritzia Super Puffs and also to get Flo Rida to play on campus. So a story like that also got a lot of attention. It was really insane. And like, you could track it, via Yik Yak. Do you guys have Yik Yak?
CHARLOTTE Fizz. I had to delete Fizz freshman year because I wrote this one column that was just getting way too much hate on the app.
SARAH What was the column?
CHARLOTTE It was called, “Just Another Bitch On Your Frat Lawn.” One of the lines was, “Did they think I had arrived to give them all blowjobs?” It’s just like, oh, what the hell? [Laughs.]
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