Student journalists at Armstrong Atlantic State University are suing the school and student government association for allegedly decreasing funding for the student newspaper after editors published unflattering stories about the administration.

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The students contend the student government association drastically slashed the budget for The Inkwell, the college's weekly newspaper, after a series of critical articles appeared in its pages.

"The budget reduction imposed on the Inkwell was greatly disproportionate, both in dollar and in percentage terms, to the reduction imposed on any other student organization," reads the lawsuits, filed Tuesday in Chatham County Superior Court. "Almost all other organizations funded through the SGA other than the Inkwell received either an increase or flat-level budget for 2008-09."

The suit says the problems started for the paper shortly after Angela Mensing became editor-in-chief at the beginning of the school year. Instead of following the relatively deferential approach to covering the school of years past, Mensing instituted a more aggressive journalistic stance, questioning decisions made by administrators in editorials and digging deeper into stories on campus, according to the suit.

In September, an assistant director of student activities complained the paper ran an interview with her without allowing her to "approve" the article first.

Later in the school year, the paper ran a story detailing problems with Armstrong Atlantic's reporting of crimes to federal authorities. The student police officer interviewed sat on a student government committee the next day that determined the paper's budget, the suit said.

During that meeting, committee members brought a stack of back copies of The Inkwell and talked about specific instances where they disagreed with the paper's viewpoint. The committee then voted to limit the paper's budget for the upcoming year, the suit says.

Mensing had requested a budget of $70,829 for the year. Instead, the students voted to decrease the amount of money the paper received from student activity fees by about $15,000 and said the paper should make up the difference by raising another $10,500 in advertising. That was a net loss of about $4,260 for the year, the suit said, and the advertising dollars aren't guaranteed.

Gerald Weber, who represents the students, said the reduction "teaches the student journalists the absolute wrong lesson."

"The lawsuit is really sort of twofold," he said, "In the narrow sense, [it is] to restore the funding and in the broader sense to insure the journalistic integrity and to give the journalists the right to do what all good journalists do."