James O'Keefe, Joseph Basel, and Stan Dai each founded or led the alternative conservative newspapers on their respective college campuses.
After graduating, O'Keefe, the filmmaker behind the ACORN stings, actually worked for a year as a recruiter for the Leadership Institute, one of a handful of conservative organizations that provide seed money to students who want to launch alternative newspapers.
Fostering the growth of alternative media on campus -- publications that are more often National Review-style opinion journals than reporting-intensive newspapers -- has been a tactic of the conservative movement for decades. The Collegiate Network, for example, was founded in 1979 and supports over 100 papers per year. CampusReform.org, the campus component of the Leadership Institute, employs 16 staffers.
Our first case is Stan Dai, who served as the editor-in-chief of the GW Patriot at George Washington University. Dai was also a Club 100 Activist of Young America's Foundation, and an Undergraduate Fellow on Terrorism of the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies, according to a scholarship citation at the conservative Philips Foundation (h/t Lindsay Beyerstein).
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The GW Patriot, it's worth noting, is the same paper that produced John McCormack, the Weekly Standard scribe with the habit of getting into scuffles at political events.
Both O'Keefe and Basel seem to have gotten their start in the conservative college press with a little bit of help from the Leadership Institute, the group that aims to recruit and train conservative activists.
