Like their classmates at Commonwealth University’s Bloomsburg campus, Novalea Verno and Caleb Brown spent this academic year juggling classes and extracurricular activities.
Unlike their classmates, Verno and Brown’s efforts outside the classroom saw their work quoted in The Philadelphia Inquirer and Forbes Magazine — and widely shared around the university — for holding powerful school officials accountable.
Verno, editor-in-chief of The Voice, and Brown, the managing editor, led the bi-weekly student newspaper's coverage of controversy swirling around Commonwealth University President Bashar Hanna after a federal jury found him, the university and other officials guilty in a whistleblower case.
“I think the big thing for us was trying to put the story into context,” said Verno, a York resident studying journalism and political science.
That effort sometimes started with putting developments into context for themselves.
“There were certainly times when I'd be staring at my screen, at what the headline was going to be, and it was just like, ‘Is this really the school that I go to?’ You know, ‘Is this really what I'm paying so much money to attend?’ But you know, I let myself have those moments and then push it off to the side and keep pushing through for the edition,” said Verno, a senior.
“It's depressing to see all this as a Husky,” said Brown, referencing the campus’ canine mascot. As a journalist, however, “it's stuff that we have to cover,” said the media and journalism major from Nesquehoning, who graduated in May.
“It's things that students, faculty, even members of the administration as a whole may not know the full extent of what's going on. It's what they deserve to know,” Brown said.
Hanna verdict breaks
Hanna became president of Bloomsburg University on July 1, 2017.
Bloomsburg, Lock Haven and Mansfield universities merged on July 1, 2022, to become Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania, with Hanna as its president.
Jeffrey Krug, former dean of Bloomsburg's Zeigler College of Business and a tenured faculty member, claimed he faced retaliation and was improperly fired in 2018 for helping an administrative assistant file a sexual harassment report against Hanna.
Krug sued, and a verdict in his favor was handed down last August following a trial.
That was before classes resumed for the year at Commonwealth. Verno and Brown had been named to the The Voice's top posts, but work on the semester's first edition had yet to begin.
"And so we got this story, and I think we kind of had an 'oh, how are we supposed to cover this' moment," Verno recalled. "And it was a lot of frantic messages with Kozlosky right off the bat."
That would be Voice advisor John-Erik Koslosky, an assistant professor in the Communication Studies, Media and Journalism Department with two decades of newspaper experience.
"My role is advisor. It's not editor," Koslosky said. "They know that they can talk to me. They can contact me any hour, any hour of any day, talk to me about stuff."
"But we try to maintain as much independence as possible. And we try to empower them to make their decisions, to make smart decisions," Koslosky said. "And they do."
Verno, Brown and their team were prepared for the challenge on several fronts.
First, the issue was not new and a verdict was expected.
"This has been something that The Voice has been seeing since 2017 so it's not really out of nowhere," Brown said.
According to Krug's lawsuit, Hanna was hired at Bloomsburg that year despite a history of "confrontational" behavior in previous jobs — particularly toward women — at Delaware Valley, Temple and Kutztown universities.
Growing community concerns about that history captured headlines after Krug sued in 2018.
But on the personnel side, Verno and Brown also came to the verdict story with experience of their own when the news broke in August. Verno was a junior who had been with The Voice since her freshman year. Brown was a senior who had been with the paper since his sophomore year.
They would draw on that experience for the next eight months, as their initial report on the verdictwas followed by intensive coverage of ongoing developments.
"It's been like every week something new has been coming out that we've been putting our focus on," Brown said last month as the school year, and his tenure at The Voice, was coming to an end.
A contentious year
The university quickly responded to the verdict, saying Commonwealth was "disappointed" and intended to appeal.
That was followed soon after by news that Commonwealth University's Council of Trustees expressed its "unwavering support" for Hanna.
The Voice stayed on the story, chronicling the potential cost of an appeal, faculty outcry over the verdict, Hanna's response during a campus town hall, and a heated protest during a Council of Trustees meeting.
That all took place in just over a month, but the story was far from over as calls for Hanna's resignation began to mount, from the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty (APSCUF) union president, from union members themselves, and from The Voice in a Dec. 4 editorial.
Even stories not directly tied to the legal case were colored by it.
"There was one (story) where I don't think we explicitly mentioned Hanna in an article, but we did cover the $28 million deficit that the university had, and that is still strictly tied to some of the common criticisms that we see from students and faculty alike directed toward Hanna and his administration," Brown said.
Despite the controversial nature of the issue, Verno and Brown said university officials responded to questions from Voice journalists throughout the process.
"Everybody we talked to was very willing to speak with us — maybe off the record, but we were still very eager to have that even be a conversation we could have," Verno said.
"I even took a trip out to Millersville University to visit a professor there who has a history with Dr. Hanna — not to be used for an article, but just to understand the context of where he's coming from and what his history is like," she said.
"So I think putting in the hours just to understand who Dr. Hanna is in the context of his career, and how people feel about him, I think that that was probably the hardest and most draining, but rewarding," Verno said.
Even Hanna himself spoke with the paper.
"I did have two interviews over Zoom with him," Brown said, adding that the administration also set aside time for monthly conversations.
At other times the administration sent statements on his behalf, even just declining to comment.
"Truly, there wasn't a single email we sent that wasn't answered," Verno said.
Impromptu presidential visit
Then there was the pizza.
On Feb. 24, Hanna and two other members of the administration showed up at the newspaper's office during a staff meeting with short notice, as Verno recounted in an editorial.
"Prior to their arrival, tension had built for more than an hour. Someone from catering had placed a bin of napkins, plates, and drinks on the work table. Boxes of pizza soon followed. Then, the familiar ding of Outlook. What at first seemed like a joke about the president’s office sending us pizza, in a moment, became a sudden reality. It was Hanna. He was on his way," she wrote.
Koslosky was having car trouble on the way home from Harrisburg and couldn't be there in person. Verno gave a two-word directive to the staff: “document everything.”
"Hanna acknowledges the intrusion with a laugh. He jokes that pizza can’t be considered a gift if he joins us for a slice. We laugh when he laughs. We speak when spoken to. No one makes a move to open the pizza boxes on the table," Verno wrote.
"Right behind where he is sitting, there is an old edition pinned to the board. It’s the first article The Voice covered about his lawsuit at the beginning of the legal battle. I stare at the two presidents: the one captured in ink on the wall and the one sitting before me," she wrote.
The conversation, as recounted by Verno, was not hostile. In fact, it was a familiar recitation of things he had said to her, Brown, and another editor earlier that week: "a speech about his humble upbringing and experience with the financial demands of higher education," she wrote.
They are themes he has repeated many times, including with this reporter in interviews when he worked for another news outlet. Verno smiles and nods to hear the same details recounted.
"I will say, you know, Dr. Hanna, he's a very charismatic leader, and I think that he wouldn't be in his position otherwise. Every time I've talked to him, it's been enjoyable. We've been able to laugh. You know, I haven't had a sense of fear," she said.
"And it was a real inspiring speech. But then when he came to our newsroom meeting unprompted, he gave the exact one word for word," Verno said. "And so I think while he's a very well rehearsed individual at that, it is rehearsed."
The Voice waited until May to publish its account of the encounter.
"I was afraid of putting our newsroom in a position for the administration to paint us as ungrateful kids, reading too much into an interaction," Verno wrote.
In the end she and the editors decided "a legacy of integrity and independence" required them to put their account in writing.
Officials with Commonwealth University's communication office did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on the pizza meeting or The Voice's coverage of Hanna-related issues.
Change in the wind
By the time that editorial ran, the landscape had completely changed.
In February, "a staggering 88.65% of faculty and coach voters voted that they had no confidence in Commonwealth University President Dr. Bashar Hanna’s leadership," The Voice reported.
Nevertheless, as WVIA reported, Commonwealth Council of Trustees Chair John Wetzel released a statement saying that the panel believed Hanna "remains the right leader to guide Commonwealth University forward through these challenges, and our stance is unwavering."
That confidence contrasted sharply with conditions on the ground.
As The Voice reported in March, Hanna was to be evaluated by Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education two years ahead of schedule. The evaluation "will offer students and faculty the opportunity to provide 'critical feedback and input on university leadership,'" Brown wrote.
That same month, the paper reported that students would face an increase in housing, tuition and dining fees in the 2025-26 academic year, although the university countered that the average net price of attendance had declined since the 2017-18 school year.
The university meanwhile continued its legal appeal of last summer's verdict, with Hanna telling Brown “I’m an eternal optimist because I know what transpired, and unfortunately, that’s not what came out during the trial, so I continue to be cautiously optimistic that the truth will ultimately come out.”
Frustrated critics wanted Hanna out, planning an April 30 walkout demonstration to air ongoing concerns about his leadership.
One day before the protest, Hanna announced his resignation and the demonstration was canceled.
Hanna said he would step down July 31 to become vice chancellor for strategic initiatives for Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education the following day.
That is the same organization tasked with evaluating his leadership at Commonwealth.
System Chancellor Christopher Fiorentino in May selected Jeffery Osgood as interim president of the school.
"If you asked me when we first broke the sorry with the verdict back in August, I would have said, 'No, I would never see President Hanna resign,'" Brown said.
Verno agreed.
"I don't think anybody in our newsroom saw that coming," she said. "I would like to think that some of our reporting helped in some way."
For Brown, news that the State System planned to evaluate Hanna two years early raised questions about how long he would remain.
"To me it was signaling that something, a big change, was going to come," he said.
Whether or not that would be a resignation Brown wasn't sure, "but it was my belief that that wholeheartedly was a possibility."
A passion for the craft
Verno and Brown are looking to pursue media careers. Their year of covering the verdict's aftermath offered powerful lessons in sticking with a complicated story.
Verno, who expects to graduate in December, landed a summer internship on the news desk with WGAL-TV in Lancaster.
"And the goal is to go into reporting," she said of her future.
Brown, who graduated in May, also has radio experience and said he was expecting to work with stations in his native Carbon County.
"I love reporting. I love broadcasting. Ideally, like my dream position right now, is hopefully to try and get a news director position," he said.
They learned from their time at The Voice about the importance of multi-platform reporting in a changing media landscape. The paper still publishes a print edition of about 1,000 copies, but like many news outlets The Voice relies increasingly on its website and social media to reach audiences.
"It used to be a lot more," Koslosky said of the print circulation.
"What we find is many fewer people will actually pick them up and take them with them, you know? They'll sit down and read them in an academic building and then put it right back down," he said.
"Years ago, when I was in college, when that newspaper came out, everybody grabbed the copy and took it, put it in their backpack and set off. And we don't see that anymore," he said. "So we've tried to do the most that we can with the website, and try to reinvigorate social media a little bit."
That was one lesson. Koslosky also stressed to Verno and Brown, as he does with all his students, that news reporting is not for the faint-hearted.
"Sometimes the discussions scare them a bit, you know, because we talk about journalism as a business and how things have really broken down, and we talk about the job losses that journalism has encountered," he said.
He reminds them the profession often entails long hours and a growing lack of stability for many outlets — especially in for-profit journalism.
"But then we come back to how important this work is, and here are the bright spots in the industry — nonprofits and places like that that are hiring more, and that are dedicated to public service journalism ... and the fact that a lot of them are growing," Koslosky said.
"People come to this work, you know, feeling that sense of mission, and I think in a lot of cases that sort of overrides those concerns about how stable the business is," he said.
"And what I tell students is, if you work in the business for five years and decide, 'hey, I want to have a family and I need to earn more money, I need a nine-to-five,' that's fine, but you spent five years doing something that you felt was really important, and then you moved on, but that's still something really important," Koslosky said.
Is Verno concerned about the career path she chose?
"I think if you asked my mother, she would say absolutely. But I think maybe I'm a naive 20-year-old, and just getting a taste of what it was (like) this year, this is something I want to dedicate my life to," she said.
"I'm incredibly passionate about not just journalism, but educating an audience, and I think that with that, I'll be able to survive off Ramen for a little bit longer," Verno said.
Brown sees himself as an idealist, but also an optimist.
"We are providing a public service, whether that be in journalism or radio, and there's always going to be a need for that, whether or not it takes a different form," he said.
"People want people to be held accountable, especially if it's something like a controversial series of events like those that Dr. Hanna has found himself in," Brown said. "The industry may change, but the ideal and the service we provide isn't."
At the student paper, Koslosky remains a constant.
"Every year, the newspaper changes a little bit," he said.
"The way we react to stories changes, and the expertise and the knowledge that that students have and the interests that they have in different things," he added. "Some years there's tons of interest in sports and not much in news. Other years there's interest in news."
"My job is really kind of to make sure that when they're ready to hand this mantle off, that we have a staff that is both prepared to take it and and will carry on that tradition that these folks have been carrying on," Koslosky said.