Reporters with a UNC-Chapel Hill journalism school venture have obtained a copy of a contract oil company BP has apparently been using to assure silence from the workers hired to try to clean up the oil spill.

The young reporters who headed to the Gulf region recently have written about the document, which requires workers not to talk about what they see while working to slow or stop the flow of oil. 

The UNC-CH students are part of a larger project based at Carolina and seven other universities that employ teams of student journalists to get out and aggressively report on national issues.

It is deemed the Carnegie-Knight Initiative, named for the two foundations funding the venture.