A Recommitment to Neutrality (USUTP)

To start, we want to thank everyone for your engagement and insights over the last few weeks. Whether you agree with what we are trying to do or not, academia has always been about free discourse in the marketplace of ideas. 

We are trying hard to listen and integrate community feedback. After all, if no one cares what we have to say, or if we are saying it in a way that isn’t helpful or engaging, then all we are doing is wasting our time and yours. 

When we posted our first story, some of the feedback we got were things like “So what?” and “Why should I care about this?” Naturally, we care about the stories we post and we believe that this is important information for the USU community to have (if we didn’t care, we wouldn’t be spending our nights and weekends doing this). To be responsive to the community and integrate this feedback, in our next stories we tried to place more emphasis on why these issues might matter to you as a USU student, employee, or alumni. Unfortunately, then we started getting feedback that our stories were too preachy, alarmist, or biased.

We know we are never going to be able to please everyone, and every venture is going to have its growing pains. But we would rather have a reputation of being fair and boring than alarmist and flashy. 

To bring USUTP back in line with our original goals and vision, we will be taking the following steps:

• The “So What?” and “What’s Next?” sections will no longer be standard on every story. If we are reporting on stories that matter, hopefully the “so what” will speak for itself. Making suggestions about “what’s next” put USUTP too much into a role of “agitator” rather than “unbiased investigator.” The former is not in line with our professional principles or our project goals. 
• The Reddit story and Instagram posts about John O’Neil’s departure from the university have been deleted. The foundational facts were vetted, but our framing of the information was too speculative and not up to the standard we are trying to set. 
• Our efforts on future stories will have a renewed focus on impartial reporting. The information we post may be controversial and provoke strong opinions, and we may have limited access to certain information sources (ergo our call for greater transparency), but we will keep our own opinions out of it.
• As always, we welcome any suggestions on other ways we can continue to improve.  

On one final, lighter note, you can stop messaging us about the “USUTP” acronym. Believe it or not, it was intentional. We knew we wanted the word “transparency” in the name and we felt like “project” struck the right tone. We immediately recognized the connotations that “USUTP” would bring to mind, but we talked it over and decided to move forward with the acronym anyway, as a bit of an inside joke. Because after all, the whole concept of this project was to represent the polar opposite of a $750 bidet. 😊

Thank you all for your patience and support as we work to make this project the best it can be.