As personal information becomes more and more available online, student newspapers across the country are dealing with requests from alumni to remove embarrassing information from Web sites.

The University Daily Kansan fielded one such request regarding a 2005 article that one of the subjects said could be potentially harmful in job searches, Kansan Editor Brenna Hawley said.

The article appeared in the Kansan’s Jayplay entertainment magazine, and included some information about how the student met a boyfriend that could be construed as embarrassing, Hawley said.

The Kansan elected to keep the article online in its system, but to electronically “detag” it so that it would not show up on online search engines.

Hawley said the information would remain available on the paper’s Web site and on the printed page.

“I think it needs to be a compromise,” Hawley said, saying that newspapers shouldn’t always turn away such requests. “I think that’s why some people hate reporters so much.”

Hawley served as the paper’s editor in the spring semester and will again in the fall. This summer, she is working as an intern at the Lawrence Journal-World. She said she hopes to put together a new policy on the subject next semester. Decisions have to be made on a case-by-case basis, she said, and news value would play a role.

Adam Goldstein, attorney advocate for the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va., said he fields between 1,500 and 1,800 legal questions from student papers around the nation each year.

This particular topic — alumni who either wrote or were the subject of a newspaper article in college and now want it removed — comes up once or twice a month now, up from once or twice a year in previous years, he said.

Not all student papers respond like the Kansan did. In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the topic, some editors refused to take any action, Goldstein said, while others removed content altogether.

Goldstein said there’s no legal reason to remove the content, as long as it’s factually correct, so it comes down to an individual question of ethics and news judgment.

Student editors often view the issue differently from how professional editors would, he said, because they’re still students, too, and may have an eye toward when they are looking for potential jobs.

Most professional publications do have policies in place to withhold some types of information to protect the people involved, he said, such as names of rape victims and of minors.

The issue in student publications mostly comes up with articles that had low news value to begin with and, often, years out, now have no news value, he said.

“I don’t know of any school that would look at things like their crime blotter” for hiding online, Goldstein said.