(NATHALIE KIERSZNOWSKI / STANFORD POLITICS)
The fact of the matter is, the Fountain Hopper has become a ubiquitous name on campus due to its penchant for breaking many of the most noteworthy Stanford-related news stories in the last four years. As much as other campus publications don’t like to admit it, the Fountain Hopper’s track record of bombshell reporting is unparalleled. In its first few years of existence, the Fountain Hopper broke the Caroline Hoxby – Kappa Sigma story (in which Stanford professor entered a fraternity’s backyard and tried using garden shears to cut through wires connected to the fraternity’s speaker); it reported on a legal loophole that allowed Stanford students to access their admissions files; and, most famously, it was the first publication to unearth the now-famous Brock Turner rape story. Just this year, the Fountain Hopper broke story on the suspected of drugging of students at a Sigma Chi fraternity party as well as the fact that Stanford University suggested using the words, “I’m okay, everything’s okay,” on the plaque at the site of the Brock Turner assault over the phrases desired by the victim.
The Fountain Hopper, which according to a recent Stanford Politics article “regularly critiques the University administration and challenges the status quo of student journalism,” is truly Stanford’s top muckraker. But despite its tendency to inform the Stanford community on some of its more unsavory goings-on, many retain conflicting opinions of the Fountain Hopper, and generally rightfully so. Some dislike the way it has mixed its editorial voice with its reporting. Others believe the omnipresent focus on anonymity, both for its lead writer/editor and its reporters as well as for almost all of its sources, runs the Fountain Hopper into journalistic and ethical problems. One critic, who was the subject of a recent Fountain Hopper story, has gone so far as to label the publication a “tabloid-rag” that sensationalizes the news.
In fact, the Fountain Hopper was partially inspired by tabloid journalism, but its most recent and outgoing editor has sought (and still hopes) to see it take a new direction. Thanks to interviews with her and with founding editor Ilya Mouzykantskii ’16, Stanford Politics can reveal the scattered — and until now, mostly unknown — history that has shaped the Fountain Hopper into what it is today. Perhaps above all else, however, the publication’s backstory reveals how the Fountain Hopper’s eagerness to embrace a muckraking, tabloid-esque identity may be the very thing that restrains its potential to be what it wants to be tomorrow.
When Ilya Mouzykantskii arrived on campus in September of 2012, he had already established himself as a student journalist of sorts, or at least a publisher intent on serving the community’s interest. In the months leading up to the class of 2016’s New Student Orientation, Mouzykantskii and another member of the class of 2016, Amelia Brooks, noticed that many of their classmates had taken it upon themselves to post some of their admissions essays on the class Facebook page. Seeking to collect these submissions and formalize them into something that could provide useful insights to both the Stanford community and high schoolers interested in applying to Stanford, Mouzykantskii and Brooks created a blog titled “Confessions from Stanford” with the aim of, in the blog’s words, providing “a collection of insights and experiences from members of the Stanford Class of 2016 recounting our transition into freshman year.” They posted the blog’s details on the class Facebook page and quickly began receiving submissions. Blog posts ranged from admissions essays, to biographical snippets, to reflections on the admissions process and tips on how to get into Stanford. The blog blew up. According to Confessions from Stanford’s statistics page, it has received over 40,000 hits from 103 different countries. Mouzykantskii, who now works in the cryptocurrency industry, tells Stanford Politics, “This was sort of my first foray into student journalism.” In Confessions he seemed to have found a way to give people access to the sort of information they wanted to know.
Prior to launching the Fountain Hopper newsletter, Ilya Mouzykantskii was an ASSU senator. (KRISTEN STIPANOV / STANFORD DAILY)
Building off his work on Confessions, once Mouzykantskii actually arrived to campus, he decided he would try to start another similar lifestyle publication somewhat akin to outlets like Buzzfeed, which were growing in popularity at the same time. Mouzykantskii and a group of his friends gathered in Old Union to brainstorm how this publication could work. They decided, Mouzykantskii retells, that they would run pieces like “Five people you might meet at late night” and that they would name their new blog, “the Fountain Hopper.” In a stunt to gain attention and readers, Mouzykantskii says they even went so far as to buy 1,000 rubber ducks with the words “fountainhopper.com” written on them which they dispersed in fountains around campus. Despite these efforts, the original Fountain Hopper never took off — Mouzykantskii and his friends abandoned their project after failing to garner more than 30 hits a day.
After these two brief but notable dips into campus media entrepreneurship, Mouzykantskii would go on to focus his extracurricular efforts elsewhere. In spring quarter of his freshman year, he mounted a campaign and was elected to the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) Senate, Stanford’s student government.
“The thought in doing that,” Mouzykantskii recalls, “was sort of like ‘yo, there’s a bunch of shit that’s fucked up here. How can we go about changing it?’ And not even changing it,” he adds. “Before that, just letting people know about it, because people are sort of blissfully oblivious, and that’s fine, but also it’s not really fine ’cause ignorance sucks.”
Through Senate, Mouzykantskii says he saw an opportunity to change things on campus for the better. Confessions from Stanford and the original Fountain Hopper represented ways in which Mouzykantskii had attempted to help Stanford students get to know their community better. But, his time on student government was ideally meant to go beyond that goal, he says. He wanted to help students understand how they could improve their community.
He had already become personally frustrated with the Stanford student experience early on, noting one specific experience in particular: “The thing that bugged me the earliest and the longest was Stanford’s international student health insurance policy.” As a Russian native, Mouzykantskii was automatically enrolled in a $5,000 per year Cardinal Care insurance plan, which, in his opinion was “wholly inappropriate for healthy 19-year-olds; it’s far too expensive.” Understanding that he could waive the health insurance with proof that he was enrolled in another plan, Mouzykantskii sought assistance from the University in finding alternative, cheaper plans but received, unsurprisingly, no such help.
“I wrote some [Stanford] Daily op-eds about it. I sent an email out to all the international students via an email list. I was mad,” Mouzykantskii recounts.
After spending almost all of his sophomore year serving on the student council, Mouzykantskii says he concluded in spring of 2014 that “student government is not the vector for change.” To him, the ASSU came to represent “this special thing that is created by administrators to interface with students in a way that they can control.” He was particularly bothered by the fact that Nanci Howe, the director of Students Activities and Leadership, would, according to him, sit in on Senate meetings and unduly influence the agenda. The ASSU was specifically created, according to its constitution, in part to “encourage responsible citizenship and the exercise of individual and corporate responsibility on the part of students in the government of student affairs and activities,” and to do so in a manner “free from control or suspension by Stanford University.” And for the most part, it is independent, yet Mouzykantskii still believed it did not provide him ample opportunity to enact the change on campus he sought.
The summer of 2014 quickly flew by, and as Mouzykantskii prepared to return to Stanford for his junior year, he says he stumbled upon a TechCrunch article titled, “Why Everyone Is Obsessed With E-Mail Newsletters Right Now.” The article essentially argues that, in August of 2014, email newsletters from all sorts of traditionally web-based publications were experiencing a rise in popularity, and it outlines reasons why it believes publishers and readers alike are drawn to this method of information delivery.
Ilya Mouzykantskii (SHIRLEY CAI / STANFORD POLITICS)
“I read this and I’m like, ‘Huh, very interesting.’ And so I begin thinking about what this could look like in the course of a publication,” Mouzykantskii recalls. So, once again, he convened a group of his friends — this time to bring the Fountain Hopper back as an email newsletter.
Not only did Mouzykantskii already have some experience in student journalism from Confessions and the original Fountain Hopper, but he also had professional journalism experience — during high school he twice interned with the New York Times in their Moscow bureau. In fact, it was these two internships that got Mouzykantskii into Stanford (which he claims he knows as a fact because he was able to look at his admissions file via a legal loophole he discovered and would report on in his new, very own email newsletter). However, although the publication would eventually become a quasi-news outlet reporting stories such as the aforementioned one, Mouzykantskii says he was actually not thinking of it in that way at the time of its conception.
“The focus here was not news,” Mouzykantskii declares. “The focus here was utility.”
“You want to create a publication, a product, that has a couple mantras. The first one is you got to respect eyeballs. You got to respect your readers. You can’t just throw trash at them. You have to understand that a Stanford student’s time is valuable. You’ve got to give them reasons to click on it, and they can’t be clickbait reasons; they have to be high-value reasons. My way into this was writing about things at Stanford you didn’t know that could essentially save you money. It was a consumer-focused publication.”
Indeed, if you look back at FoHo #1, you’ll see headlines like “Cheap Car Rental At Stanford From 15$/Day” and “Super Shuttle Discount Code,” detailing ways in which Stanford students can be frugal just like Mouzykantskii was when he switched his health insurance plan. In addition to these so-called “Stanford Hacks,” FoHo #1 also originally included a news digest of all Stanford-related stories.
“The way it worked,” Mouzykantskii explains, was, “I would read all the news with the word Stanford in it (I had a Google News alert set up), digest it, and spit it out in as concentrated a form as possible.” The intention was, he says, “By reading Fountain Hopper, you don’t have to read anything else.”
FoHo #1, to Mouzykantskii’s and his friends’ surprise, was very successful, he says. Mouzykantskii claims that 90 percent of people who received the first email (which he once claimed was upward of 10,000 Stanford affiliates) opened it and presumably read it. That same TechCrunch article may help to explain why the medium of delivery was so important. One of the reasons it argues that email newsletters are so popular is that “readers pay more attention to email.” As the author of the article notes, “While it might be harder to get people to fork over their email addresses than it is to get them to like or follow something, once you do, they’re much more likely to actually pay attention, and you can reach more people in the long run.” But Mouzykantskii and his friends even cleared that obstacle of getting people to “fork over” email addresses by instead just obtaining Stanford emails and auto-subscribing them to their mailing list. Though Mouzykantskii would not comment on the specifics of how they logistically went about doing this, he remains adamant that Stanford’s community use policy was not broken in the process as the emails are individually publicly available on the web. (University spokespeople have repeatedly criticized the Fountain Hopper’s distribution practice, though it is common for other student organizations to also send emails to recipients within the campus community who haven’t opted in previously.)
The subsequent few editions of the new Fountain Hopper email newsletter largely mirrored the format of the first. That is until FoHo #9 — “EXCLUSIVE: PROF ASSAULTS STUDENT AT FRAT PARTY, COURSERANK CLOSES, AND MORE STANFORD NEWS YOU CAN USE.” In FoHo #9, Mouzykantskii and his collaborators were the first to report on the now-well-known-on-campus Caroline Hoxby/Kappa Sigma story, detailing how the professor allegedly entered the fraternity at night, attempted to turn off its music by cutting a speaker’s wires with garden shears, and assaulted a member of the fraternity.
As Mouzykantskii recalls, “Someone wrote us a tip; we biked over there; someone had a video. We saw the video and were like, ‘Whoa, that’s not meant to happen.’ And we wrote about [it]a couple of hours later.” “It was not exactly highbrow news, but it’s what people want to read,” he states, repeating again, “It’s what people want to read.”
In Mouzykantskii’s opinion, “This is sort of when we graduated into being a news publication… We took our reporting much more seriously.” Following FoHo #9, he says the Fountain Hopper began expanding its team, bringing in more reporters to help investigate the increasing amount of tips they would receive.
One of those students that eventually made their way onto the Fountain Hopper’s team was Emma Johanningsmeier ’18. A Nebraska native, Johanningsmeier was actively involved in her high school student newspaper, rising to be its editor in chief before her graduation. It just so happened that Johanningsmeier’s arrival at Stanford in September of 2014 coincided with the Fountain Hopper’s, and discovering the newsletter in her inbox piqued her interest.
Emma Johanningsmeier, this year’s editor of the Fountain Hopper, has worked to take the publication in a more journalistic direction. (SHIRLEY CAI / STANFORD POLITICS)
“It was just something so different,” she tells Stanford Politics. “It was cool, and it was really mysterious. You would get these emails and they had yellow highlighting and things in red and silver, and none of the people in my dorm knew where it was coming from.”
Johanningsmeier says she was so intrigued by this new publication that she actually sent an email to the Fountain Hopper asking if she could get involved. But she never received a response, so, instead, she joined the Stanford Daily her sophomore year with the hopes of revitalizing her student journalism career. After spending the year writing some news and occasional features, Johanningsmeier, who has since written during internships for the Omaha World-Herald and the Wall Street Journal, says she decided The Daily wasn’t the best fit for her and sought to join the Fountain Hopper yet again. Junior year, she began getting more involved with the Fountain Hopper, serving in her view essentially as a copy editor and helping out with reporting on the side.
Much like when Mouzykantskii biked over to Kappa Sigma chasing his Hoxby tip, there is one particular moment Johanningsmeier recalls that she began to really appreciate the Fountain Hopper’s reporting reach on campus.
“I remember I got a call one morning my junior year that was like, ‘Hey, the corrupt ex-president of Peru spotted hanging out in CoHo [a campus coffee shop]. Can you go look for him?’ So I kind of dropped everything and spent a whole day looking for this guy, trying to figure out where his office was, which is ridiculous and funny but also kind of cool that there is a publication at Stanford that does this kind of stuff,” she recounts.
The Fountain Hopper newsletter remained written, albeit anonymously, by Mouzykantskii for its first two years, after which the founder handed the reigns over and graduated from the University. At the beginning of this year, Johanningsmeier took over as the anonymous editor and author of the Fountain Hopper, taking over from another individual who asked not to be named in this piece and who had run it for a year with far less fanfare than during Mouzykantskii’s or Johanningsmeier’s tenures.
In FoHo #9, Mouzykantskii didn’t just write about the Hoxby incident, he infused his own criticisms of the University into it. The report explicitly and implicitly argues that Stanford should have temporarily suspended the professor from teaching until the corresponding investigations had concluded. It declares: “If Caroline Hoxby was a Stanford student (and not a professor), the University would come down on her like a ton of bricks. FoHo does not think professors injuring students is OK. FoHo also thinks you have the right to know and Stanford has the obligation to tell.”
Such jabs at the University aren’t unique to FoHo #9 — in fact, they’re integral to the identity of the newsletter. Though he originally conceived the Fountain Hopper as a consumer-focused publication, Mouzykantskii still believed, as he described earlier in our interview when discussing his motivation to join student government, that “there’s a bunch of shit that’s fucked up [at Stanford].” As the Fountain Hopper took on its newfound reporting role, it also took on more and more of an anti-establishment stance.
Mouzykantskii, speaking on behalf of the publication he founded but is no longer in charge of, declares, “We see our goal as educating Stanford students that all is not well in this green paradise and that the reasons that things are not well, generally speaking, have names; they are administrators that have names.”
Mouzykantskii himself was skeptical of the Stanford administration dating back to his issue with the health-insurance. That experience opened his eyes, he says, to the fact that, in his opinion, “Stanford Inc. does not work in the interests of the people paying in.”
“Any place where there’s a lot of money, you’re going to have unsavory things happen, and no one at Stanford,” until the arrival of the Fountain Hopper, Mouzykantskii states, “was trying to figure out what those unsavory things were.”
The Fountain Hopper’s most defining feature, the very characteristic that allows it to criticize the Stanford administration in its news coverage, is what Mouzykantskii calls “the special blend” — the way it employs a sarcastic, casual tone to mix reporting and editorializing.
The reason the Fountain Hopper’s tone may seem so conversational, he explains, is because, originally at least, it really was based off conversation.
“The way that I initially wrote news for FoHo was I would sit down and tell the story to a friend across a table with a timer. I would want to illustrate as colorfully and succinctly as possible what the issue is and why you should care about it… Then I would take that recording and transcribe it, and that would form the basis of the text that would later be edited.”
For Mouzykantskii, this method was another way he could ensure he was capturing people’s eyeballs and not wasting their time. Writing the Fountain Hopper in such “colorful” language certainly makes it more entertaining to read than a typical Stanford Daily story is.
Even Johanningsmeier, whose vision for the Fountain Hopper is often at odds with Mouzykantskii’s, justifies her continuation of his rhetorical style: “My goal with the publication is to provide news to our subscribers. That’s always been the primary purpose of the publication, but in order to get our subscribers to care about the news and in order to keep them reading our publication, we have to maintain this tone.”
From the onset of the publication, Mouzykantskii says he knew that “this was always going to be the way that Fountain Hopper delivered information.” He says he had seen the style used successfully in another context. The Tab, a British tabloid-style publication by and for university students, Mouzykantskii says, was the one publication that most served as a basis for the Fountain Hopper. Though Mouzykantskii came to Stanford from Russia, he previously lived in Cambridge, England, where he had the opportunity to become familiar with these sorts of publications.
“It’s in your face, it’s aggressive, it’s attention seeking,” Mouzykantskii describes The Tab and other similar British publications, “and it works really really well in terms of doing the job it’s meant to do, which is checks and balances.”
As the editor of the Fountain Hopper this year, however, Johanningsmeier has tried to focus more on original reporting than commentary. “I’m not categorically condemning opinion-writing in the FoHo,” she says. “I think that there is a place for it; I think it can be useful even if it’s just a line at the end of a story saying, ‘FoHo thinks this is–,’ but I’ve really tried to focus on the reporting.”
Mouzykantskii, on the other hand, says he is aware of criticisms surrounding the tabloid-style of journalism — when mixing fact and opinion, it may be easy for readers to confuse the two and form skewed perceptions — but he says is not as worried about this happening.
“I respect Stanford students,” he says. “I respect their intelligence. I think that, by and large, they’re pretty bright, and I believe that they are able to extract what they need to extract from the Fountain Hopper, be that facts or opinion.” “Yes, we have opinions,” he emphasizes, “but I trust you to be able to tell what a fact is and what an opinion is.”
Perhaps Mouzykantskii is right — maybe the Fountain Hopper’s readers can indeed tell the difference. Once more, there’s nothing inherently wrong with mixing opinion and reporting; most professional magazine features do just that. The larger issue with this style of journalism is that, if not held to a thorough and high standard, it can sometimes sideskirt facts and critical nuance in favor of making a point. This may only be magnified in the context of the Fountain Hopper, which not only strives to deliver agenda-driven news in an entertaining fashion, but to also do so quickly. It’s not hard to imagine how the urge to deliver news “as colorfully and succinctly as possible” could lead to difficult decisions over which facts and perspectives to include and which to not.
Often, the Fountain Hopper’s desire to express its anti-establishment stance — whether that be aimed at the Stanford Daily, student government, or its most frequent target, the University administration — has seemed to lead to journalistic shortcomings in its reporting. Multiple Fountain Hopper pieces in the past four years have been either contested by the subjects of the stories or called out for skimming over key details. By taking shortcuts — sometimes failing to confirm purported facts — the Fountain Hopper is able to break more stories, though sometimes at the sacrifice of their readers’ true informedness.
The campus news cycle has essentially reached a sort of equilibrium whereby the Fountain Hopper breaks a story (and often provides its opinion, based only on the facts it chooses to report), and then writers from the Stanford Daily later provide a slower, often more comprehensive, look on the story sans editorializing. The problem with this sequence of events is that the Fountain Hopper, by regularly being the first publication to tell a story, can have an undue, slanted influence on people’s perception of certain events. Not as many people are as likely to read whatever follow-up is published by The Daily, and though the Fountain Hopper has printed some corrections in the past they only seem to come, if at all, a good amount of time after the initial story has been published, rendering their ability to inform less effective.
This is not to say that the Fountain Hopper does not meaningfully inform the campus. It has certainly brought to light some of the biggest, most important stories of the last few years, and its investigative work has been lauded, including in a previous Stanford Politics piece, as superior to that of The Daily. Most recently, the Fountain Hopper broke news of a lawsuit brought against Stanford for alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Perhaps due to the seriousness of the story in question, or maybe speaking to the goals of the Fountain Hopper’s current editor, the report avoided editorializing almost entirely and just let the story speak for itself.
Johanningsmeier, who Stanford Politics has deemed one of this year’s most influential undergraduates, says, “I think that I’ve done less editorializing than [previous editors of the Fountain Hopper]did in the past, and I’ve really tried to focus on the reporting side.” She says that, in her view, “if we have to resort to opinion writing in FoHo, then there isn’t enough content; the content should speak for itself.”
Nevertheless, even as Johanningsmeier has tried to make the Fountain Hopper a more legitimate journalistic outfit, the publication remains, above all, committed to accountability journalism — that is, reporting aimed at holding those in power accountable. It comes as no surprise then that the University is not a fan.
The University’s largest qualm with the Fountain Hopper, in the words of outgoing Vice President of University Communications Lisa Lapin, is its anonymity. Lapin told Stanford Politics that the University has a strict policy of not responding to “individuals, blogs or news organizations that do not identify themselves, operate anonymously, that do not identify their writers or editors, do not attribute sources of the information they publish, and that have no accountability to their audiences for the accuracy of the content they publish.”
Some of these concerns have also been shared by the Stanford Daily’s editorial board.On its selective and unattributed sourcing, they wrote, “This means, at any given time, The FoHo is only privy to one perspective (its side, or the side of its sources). You may agree with this perspective, but you should nonetheless be concerned. This means that if you take everything written in The FoHo at face value, your understanding will only ever be half-complete.”
To be fair to the Fountain Hopper, a significant number of their tips do come, they say (and it can often be inferred), from lower-level University administrators (many of whom are also included on the Fountain Hopper’s mailing list). Nevertheless, Fountain Hopper readers never receive the University’s official comments or statement regarding any of their stories until The Daily usually publishes a follow-up piece, letting attacks on the University (which are frequent in the Fountain Hopper) go unaddressed when shaping first impressions about a story.
The University’s policy does have ramifications, but the rationale for that policy may actually be grounded in widely-accepted journalistic standards. It’s useful to look to the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) Code of Ethics. SPJ is, in its own words, “the nation’s most broad-based journalism organization, dedicated to encouraging the free practice of journalism and stimulating high standards of ethical behavior.” Indeed, its Code of Ethics is widely accepted across the journalism world as the definitive guidebook for how to ensure one’s work remains accurate, fair, thorough, and, ultimately, ethical. A number of the Fountain Hopper’s practices do come at odds with some of the principles outlined in the Code of Ethics.
The Code of Ethics, which Lapin herself cites, states that journalists should “seek the truth and report it” in part by “remember[ing]that neither speed nor format excuse inaccuracy.” Though this specific point is not referenced in the University’s policy towards the Fountain Hopper, it nevertheless still applies to the publication. The Fountain Hopper’s desire to deliver the news as “colorfully and succinctly as possible” could potentially lead to, and arguably has in the past, the publication of information that is not necessarily inaccurate, but surely at least incomplete.
The past of the Code that Lapin does reference is its encouragement of journalists to “identify sources clearly” and “be accountable and transparent” by, in part, “abid[ing]by the same high standards they expect of others.” On both these fronts, the Fountain Hopper clearly struggles.
The Fountain Hopper almost always attributes many of its scoops to unnamed “tipsters.” To be clear, it’s unreasonable for the University, or for us, to expect the Fountain Hopper (or any publication for that matter) to name all of its sources. As the Code of Ethics makes clear in one of its position papers, anonymous sources have a long and important history in journalism for they are “sometimes the only key to unlocking that big story, throwing back the curtain on corruption, fulfilling the journalistic missions of watchdog on the government and informant to the citizens.”
Even so, it also makes clear that journalists should only grant anonymity in a unique set of circumstances, such as if the magnitude of the story necessitates it or if the source may genuinely face tangible repercussions because of the fact that they shared crucial information with a reporter. And, even when a source is granted anonymity, the Code states that “the reporter owes it to the readers to identify the source as clearly as possible without pointing a figure at the person who has been granted anonymity.”
In the Fountain Hopper’s case, this would likely involve saying something like “a University administrator within the Office of Community Standards told the Fountain Hopper that–” or “a member of the aforementioned fraternity stated that–.” The Fountain Hopper very rarely does this sort of labeling and thus leaves its readers to speculate about whatever motives the source may have had in speaking to the Fountain Hopper or whether the source is even credible to begin with.
Both Mouzykantskii and Johanningsmeier told Stanford Politics that they spend many hours thinking hard about sources’ motivations when pursuing a story, but that fact is still not at all communicated to the readers. The almost guaranteed anonymity tipsters receive from the Fountain Hopper is likely one of the things that encourages people to go to them with information, but the Fountain Hopper’s relentless pursuit of information in maintaining this practice undeniably contends with widely-held journalistic norms aimed to best inform readers.
Moreover, on top of rarely identifying sources to the fullest extent possible, the Fountain Hopper also remains an anonymous publication, making them mostly unaccountable to their readers. (It should be noted that Lapin does know that Johanningsmeier is the editor but takes issue with the fact that her authorship of the newsletter is not made public.) Journalists aim, in large part, to encourage public scrutiny of different persons and organizations; however, to ensure consistent accuracy from those in the profession, they too must be held under the same public scrutiny. It’s difficult for Fountain Hopper readers to do this because the vast majority of them don’t know who’s delivering them the news.
When asked why the Fountain Hopper remains an anonymous publication, Mouzykantskii states, “because it’s much easier to have an affinity relationship with a brand than with a person.” He believed that in order for the Fountain Hopper to successfully continue after his graduation from Stanford, he had to build the publication’s brand around “mantras and beliefs,” not around a person.
Johanningsmeier similarly offers that “the primary purpose of the anonymity is not to protect myself.” The anonymity, she says, “really has much more to do with the mystique. Honestly, no one is interested in reading Emma Johanningsmeier’s newsletter, right?” “There is a mystique about FoHo,” continues Johanningsmeier, who earlier cited the mystique as part of what attracted her to the publication in the first place, “and part of that comes from the anonymity. I think that putting a name on it would diminish the mystique quite a bit.”
Is the University right to insist on full transparency for all of the Fountain Hopper’s sources? No. It’s not difficult to imagine the Fountain Hopper granting anonymity to a University employee who fears employment-related consequences for leaking information about the administration. However, it is perfectly reasonable to ask for more transparency, specifically by way of identifying sources to the largest extent possible, and even by revealing the Fountain Hopper’s editor and team of reporters. The Fountain Hopper’s current practices may get more people interested in and reading the newsletter but that comes at the cost of their reliability as a news source.
Yet, many individuals on campus, whether they be students, teachers, or administrators, do trust the Fountain Hopper enough to continue going to them with tips — it’s what enables the Fountain Hopper to break the stories it does. Simultaneously, however, there are those on campus, Lisa Lapin included, who don’t trust the Fountain Hopper for the exact reasons Johanningsmeier outlines.
The Fountain Hopper thus currently finds itself at a critical juncture in its history as a news source. There is undoubtedly a higher level of accountability at Stanford because of the muckraking work of Ilya Mouzykantskii and Emma Johanningsmeier. But just because the Fountain Hopper has been widely successful beyond Mouzykantskii’s original dreams doesn’t mean it can’t still be better. In the same way the Fountain Hopper has taught us to think critically about and question the Stanford administration’s actions, we must also think critically about this publication that has risen to such prominence on our campus. A number of the Fountain Hopper’s tendencies, such as it’s anonymity and its unconventional tone, were specifically designed to keep people engaged with the publication (and quite successfully did so). But those same factors may now collide with its growing desire to successfully and ethically serve as the main watchdog of the Stanford administration. Is the Fountain Hopper better as an advocate or as an investigator and informer? Does it have to choose one or can it perform both? Does employing a tabloid-style tone and too easily granting anonymity to sources compromise its journalism? Would people still want to read the Fountain Hopper and provide it with tips if it loses the very qualities that set it apart? The Fountain Hopper has a number of directions it can go from here — it can revert to its tabloid-style, advocacy-oriented origins, or it can make efforts to do more legitimate journalism. Ultimately, its future staff (as well as current and future readers) must decide what they want the Fountain Hopper to be.
Lucas Rodriguez, a junior studying economics and political science, is a senior staff writer for Stanford Politics. This article appears in the June 2018 issue of Stanford Politics Magazine.
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