Policy Change

In the interest of full disclosure, I wanted to inform you all of a policy change occurring on this end of the screen. As the blog continues to gain interest--we've received hits from as far away as Washington D.C., Barcelona, and the Bronx-- Spectator is looking to incorporate this blog more into the mainstream of the paper. As part of putting their full weight behind the effort, Editor in Chief John Davisson and Managing Editor Amanda Erickson have asked--and I have consented--that beginning with this message, they approve posts before they go live.
This blog has always been conducted with the blessing of the editors and I do not anticipate that the approval process will lead to any kind of censorship. (Of course, it's fully possible that I'm not writing this at all, that John and Amanda have tied me up, and are using the blog to manipulate you all into loving Spec. ) John and Amanda are wonderful human beings, God-like in every way.
I have appreciated all of the warm-wishes that I have received in the short time that this blog has been up, and I hope that you all submit comments, ask questions, give feedback, and help me to make this blog as useful as possible.
--Josh

The Case of the Missing Quote

Every single story that is published in Spectator is read by no fewer than four and as many as nine members of the staff. This order goes

Writer

Training Editor (for trainees only)

Deputy section editor

Associate section editor

Deputy section editor (optional)

Copy staffer (before 1:30 p.m.)

Section editor

Copy associate

Managing editor (optional)

Editor-in-Chief (optional)

We use these all of these edits as a method of quality-control which, at its best, ensures that stories are legible, grammatically correct, factually accurate, and all that jazz. But at its worst, the sheer volume of editors can have the effect of too many cooks making a soup. One week ago, on a trainee's first story--a profile of a campus figure--the story made it through six steps before I saw it. I knew that the writer had sat down for a half hour with the interviewee, but when I read the story, there were no quotes from him. Turns out that each person down the line had trimmed one quote until there were none left. Fortunately, we caught it before the paper went to bed, copied down some of the quotes from the original version, and went to print.
Monday night, we were less fortunate. Relatively late at night, we got a Google Alert telling us about an editorial in the New York Post that revealed a piece of information that we hadn't been told before--that Columbia had sent a letter of regret to Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist following his October speech on-campus.
We considered holding the story for a day to get the full text of the letter and comment from University officials and representatives of the Minuteman Project, but after a half hour of discussion, we instead decided to run a brief telling what we knew and getting reaction quotes from people on both sides of the debate.
And so it came to be that, just before midnight Monday night, I spoke to Karina Garcia. She gave me the following quote:

"I haven’t seen the letter, obviously, so I can’t comment on specifics … but it’s ridiculous, it’s ridiculous, if it’s true, that the Columbia administration would apologize to an armed vigilante groups that came on campus. ... They decided to apologize to a group that cam on campus and assaulted us? It’s ridiculous!"

Sadly, only half of that made it to the final edition. The second part of the quote, beginning "They decided..." was cut at some point during the editing process. When I saw Karina in Lerner Hall today to thank her for helping us the previous night, she asked me what had happened, understandably upset about the lost meaning in her quote.
As I hadn't yet seen the paper and didn't know that the quote had been cut, I took a look, saw what was missing, and gave her my best guess: that it had probably be cut for space issues.
Tonight, I walked around the office to find out what had happened, and... nobody knew. We were able to determine that it didn't happen in the last two stages of the night, but we weren't able to track it down beyond that. I didn't save a copy of the original, so as far as I can prove, it was never included in the original draft, and with the sheer number of edits that happen in any given night, it's unlikely that we'll ever know exactly where the quote was truncated.
The case of the missing quote goes on.
In other news, I stumbled upon the most-entertaining journalism site I've found in a long time yesterday. Go spend cruising around. I'm sure you'll amuse yourself.

The Scariest Word in Journalism

At Spectator, we subscribe to a number of our peer papers, including The Dartmouth, The Cornell Sun, and The Michigan Daily.
Being from Michigan, I have a special spot in my heart for the Daily, especially considering that their former editor-in-chief and current photo editor both went to my high school. But beyond that, we have respect for any group of students that put out a quality paper and they are undeniably one of the better college dailies in the country, serving a university population substantially larger than that of Spectator, and probably the best paper in the two-paper town of Ann Arbor.
All of these things together added to the shock of opening up last Wednesday's issue to find an Editor's Note publicly admitting to and apologizing for four acts of plagiarism conducted by freshman Devika Daga. (He posted another four instances on his blog yesterday.)
In his letter to the readers, Editor-in-Chief Karl Stampfl announced that he is forming a committee to look into the issue of plagiarism on the paper, noting that this is the third time that plagiarism has been found at the Daily in as many years and that past attempts to keep plagiarism out of the newsroom have clearly fallen short.
I don't know what a committee is going to find nor do I understand the motivation behind somebody plagiarizing as part of an elective club, but from my own experience, I will say that what has struck me most about plagiarism is how little it is understood by a staff. What makes plagiarism the scariest word in the dictionary to editors is that 98 percent of the time, it doesn't through any sort of willful deception on the part of the writer, but arises because they didn't understand the process of sourcing. Basically, every word in an article must be independently verified to be true and cited to a source, which is an easy concept to hear, but one that is much more difficult to fully grasp and put into practice--especially when it isn't always a crystal-clear line. Further, as the number of media outlets easily available to student journalists increases, plagiarism has become easier to do and harder to catch.
While, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ripped off an entire news article and passed it off as his or her own during my time at Spec, there have been a handful of incidents where facts, statistics, and even quotes have been found during the editing process to have been lifted without attribution from another source. To the best of my knowledge, only one person has been suspended from Spectator for a particularly egregious act of plagiarism--one that, fortunately, was caught before going to print.
While I don't know the facts, as somebody who has seen how difficult it can be to stop plagiarism, my sympathy goes out to the editors and staff of the Daily. This week must be hell for them.

Nearly-Horribly Offensive Things

Sometimes, Spectator does horribly offensive things simply by mistake. Far more often, we avoid doing horribly offensive things just in the nick of time. The last two Mondays have been examples of the latter.
Today, we ran the above story on a Lunar New Year celebration held by the Chinese Students Club with the above photo. The story, written by former associate news editor Sandeep Soman, while not about to set the world on fire, was solidly written, but what really made the article is the accompanying photo--Asian women with parasols against a nice green backdrop, green being one of those colors that really draws readers into the page.
That photo was placed on the page at about 1:45 in the morning. When I first looked at the page at about 11:30, in that place was this photo. I said "Hey, our front page is showing a little leg today" and went back to editing. When I looked at it a second time at about 1:30, I noticed that it was probably a little bit weird to run a photo of two 7/8 naked white people for a story about Asian New Year festivities. So I asked the office to look up, explained the situation, asked how many people, when told the context, would find it horribly offensive, and after every hand in the paper shot up, we went back into the archives and pulled up the new photo.
That's actually not quite so bad as the error that almost ran last week. Without giving too much away and having you all think less of us as people and as a paper, I'll simply say that we probably should have been more careful on the first draft of a headline regarding a story on testing spaces for disabled students, including those in wheelchairs.
The daily miracle limps on.

Weekend edition

An editor's job is never done.
This weekend, I have slept for about 22 hours because I'm coughing so much that my friends are afraid that I'm dying. (Health Services, in their infinite wisdom, told me to pick up some Sudafed. Thanks, Health Services.)
But last night, I was pulled out of bed for Spectator's annual fund raiser, the Blue Pencil Dinner, where we invite our alumni to pay lots of money for a greasy steak and wine and to hear a speaker.
Due to an issue with seating arrangements, I ended up at a table with several former managing editors, none of whom I knew. The nice thing about talking with alumni is that you can hear all of the dirt that institutional knowledge has failed to pass on about people like former president George Rupp and Austin Quigley. I got a chance to talk to the Managing Editor from 1984 about Barack Obama, the ME from 2001 about reporting on Sept. 11, 2001, and also had a conversation about possible future career paths for students who spend 40 hours per week on Spectator (not one was unemployed--good sign!).
After former Spec Editor-in-Chief Steve Moncada talked about the state of the paper (in case you're wondering, our Web site sucks, our content is good, our new magazine is phenomenal, and our paper is an important voice in the campus community, so sayeth Steve), Janice Min, Editor-in-Chief of Us Weekly, gave one of the most interesting speeches I've heard in quite some time about the tabloidization of culture. Her argument was two-fold: First, the entertainment industry is one worth $29 billion per year, and as something that is that important, it makes sense to scrutinize its leaders as much as we would any other multi-billion dollar industry; Second: Just as it's the job of Vanity Fair and Us Weekly to scrutinize the entertainment industry, it's the job of CNN and co. to scrutinize politicians and politics, but when they fail to do so, the country is made worse off.
Made it back to bed last night at 11:30 for tea and West Wing reruns. Tonight, gonna be on until the paper goes to bed. Yay.

Photo courtesy of MediaBistro.

Two Versions of the Same Story

On Thursdays, we run two "New York City News Briefs," usually hitting a total of about 300 or 400 words summarizing articles reported by other city news sources that may be interesting to students but which probably aren't published in the Times and may otherwise evade the notice of Columbia students.
But on Thursdays, we also tend to get a little bit punchy and often find that the office is the latest it is all week, the slowest it is all week, and, either in spite or because of those things, the most creative all week.
With that introduction, I present both our published draft and our first draft--which we tried to write entirely in the titles of songs by Busta Rhymes--of one of yesterday's NYC Briefs.


Busta Rhymes Likely to Avoid Jail

It appears as though rapper and actor Busta Rhymes is going to avoid jail time regarding his alleged beating up of his former driver and a former fan, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
After rejecting an offer that would have landed Rhymes in jail for six months, Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Tanya Kennedy offered him a separate deal consisting of three weeks of community service, six months of anger management, and three years of probation, of which two will be spent talking to young people about “the perils of violence,” the Post reported.
Rhymes’ attorney Scott Leemon told the Post that, while he and his client denied that Rhymes ever committed the charges, “We will consider it [the deal].”


Busta Busts Outta Jail

It appears as though rapper and actor Busta Rhymes is going to "Bounce" after telling an attorney in the prosecutor's office "You Ain't Fuckin' Wit Me," rejecting a deal that would have put him in jail for six months for some "Street Shit" that he is accused of doing "All Night," beating up his former driver and a former fan, the New
York Post reported Wednesday.
"Against All Odds," the paper said that he could see the "Finish Line," likely with a "Get Out!!" of jail free after a Manhattan judge offered him a separate deal consisting of three weeks of community service, six months of anger management, and three years of probation.
Rhymes was not quoted as saying, "Bladow!! … It's All Good," but we wish that he had been.

Society of Columbia University Graduates

Last night, myself, Erin, Editorial Page Editor Oriana Magnera, Managing Editor Amanda Erickson, and Alumni Director Amanda Murphy traveled down to midtown to speak before the Society of Columbia Graduates at the Columbia Club (which, sadly, rents out space from the Princeton Club ).
The purpose of the event was to "highlight current issues on Campus and on Morningside ... without the filtering that takes place by the time we read about them in the New York Times," according to event coordinator Michael Garrett, CC '65.
The conversation centered around the usual subjects--Manhattanville and Minutemen--but the main thrust of the conversation actually came from the alumni reliving their glory days as anti-war protesters and decrying last week's anti-war strike. "Three hundred protestor?" they scoffed. "Why, in our day we had 3,000, in the snow. And we didn't have these newfangled copy machines for our fliers--we had to mimeograph them. Barefoot. In the snow. Insert old-geezer quote here."
Kidding aside, though, they basically called this new crop of student activists pansies. Also on the minds of alumni: changes to the core (it's nice to know that some things never change) and the use of four-letter words in print (nice to know that some things do, as well).

Earliest Night of the Semester

Once a month, all thirteen editors on the news board come together to talk about issues affecting the whole section. Two nights ago, we had our second such meeting of the semester and the main focus was PDF times--the time at which the print edition is saved in its final form and ready to be sent to the printer in Queens. The progress that we saw during the first three weeks has slowed down as the associates are now getting the hang of the job, and with breaking news happening late in the night for the past few weeks, our average time of completion has been getting later and later. So with Editor-in-Chief John Davisson, we spent half of our meeting discussing strategies for making the night earlier.
This wasn't one of the suggestions.
At 10:00 on Tuesday night, I got a call from the associate news editor for Wednesday night saying that several stories had been delayed on the story list over the previous 24 hours and as a result, we only had a total of three stories and one photo for today's paper, all of which were only about 400 words. As a general rule of thumb, we look for a minimum of 7 articles and 3200 words to be mildly comfortable, but we can't run less than a page and a half of content, which translates roughly to 5 stories and 2300 words (not including events calendar and daily Off Lead features) as a bare minimum. Three stories is a big hole on the front page and another one on page two or three.
When this happens, Erin and I look reapproach stories for which we couldn't get writers the first time, look to see if there's anything we can push up, try to find events, and see what else we can do. We got on the horn, started making calls and found that we did in fact have some wiggle room. We pushed a feature story up a day, adding 500 words and a photo to the sked, reassigned a story that had fallen through every day for a week about a committee working to draft Jeff Sachs for president for another 450, got some facts about breaking news that we been hearing rumblings about that we figured we could pull together 350 words on, added an event story on a woman from Democracy Now! coming to speak for 500, and we remembered that there was a fireside chat at Barnard that we had forgotten we had assigned that would give us 500 words and a strong photo. In essence, we pulled 1800 words and two photos out of our asses, got us above our threshold, and went home for the night feeling pretty comfortable.
Then, all hell broke loose. The reporter on the feature that we had moved up a day fell through, couldn't pull together the breakingish news, lost one of the initial three stories and realized we had the wrong day on a second one. For those of you liberal arts majors out there having trouble with the math, that meant we had 4 stories, 1750 words, one story short of what we needed.
The second time that stories fall through, we scour Facebook, fliers around campus, and any other events listing we can find and pray that we can find somebody on our staff willing to bail us out. Praise be to Allah, we found an intriguing event as part of Black Heritage Month and a writer, the up-and-coming Julie Appel, who was willing to cover it, and one of our Off Lead features came in 100 words over word count. Five stories, 2300 words, breathing normally.

...

And then, at nine p.m. a second of the original three stories fell through.
If the first time we scavenge and the second time we scour, when stories fall through for the third time, Erin and I usually start to swear.
If you're looking at today's paper, obviously we don't have a big hole on the middle of page three. We had received a press release four nights ago saying that the Columbia Mock Trial had pulled out a win in a regional tournament and was going to nationals. We didn't think that the win merited a story as of yet, and told Evan Daar, the team's secretary, that we would cover them at the finals. Nothing makes you reevaluate newsworthiness quite like being three hours after deadline and confronted with a chasm of nothingness. I called up Daar, talked to him for 15 minutes, did some background reporting and pulled together 317 words and a stock photo in about 40 minutes.
The daily miracle continues, and, since it doesn't take very long to edit 2200 words, we PDF'd at 1:47 p.m., the earliest time all semester by a good 40 minutes.

JTT and Other Reasons to Go to Class Five Minutes Early

So last night, I forgot that I still had one problem to do for my stats class which meant that I had to wake up early this morning to get the book, finish the problem, and get to class. The long and the short of it is that I ended up in class five minutes early, meaning that I got to talk to the people in my class.
Within five minutes, one girl in the class--who turned out to be the sister of a guy I knew from a past CCSC election--had told me three things I didn't know about which could lead to stories.
Without getting into two much detail--newspapers aren't news if the information they give you was reported days ago on a blog--the girl told me about some fliers on Barnard's campus which I hadn't heard about before that had gotten people talking across Broadway. She only had the basics, so I'm going to head over there after class to read the fliers and maybe make some phone calls.
Second, she gave me an idea for an angle that we can take on our continuing coverage of the Nexus construction.
But finally, and certainly most importantly, she told me that apparently Home Improvement dream boat and the voice of Young Simba from The Lion King Jonathan Taylor Thomas has joined Columbia as a student in the school of General Studies. (As one of Spec's deputy news editors now tells me in one of our epic internal e-mail chains, "yeah, this news was soooo last week...")
So moral of the story: Go to class! You might just walk away with a third-of-a-day's worth of story ideas.

Bwog Birthday Column

This week, we were posed with an interesting question. As a paper, we knew that we wanted to cover the one year birthday of the Bwog, the Blue & White's campus news and gossip blog. In just 12 months, they have had a serious impact on the status of debate at campus. They were the first to broke the news about the mayhem at Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist's speech last October, received 40,000 hits a day, were prominently featured in The Varsity Show, and have served as a forum for hundreds of students per day to discuss campus goings-on. They argue that we haven't given them the coverage they deserve--an argument that every group on campus could make--and it not having an article would have been proof positive that they were right, not to mention a sign of pettiness and unrepresentative journalism.
The question then became how do we want to cover the closest thing we have to competition on campus, people who criticize us on a daily basis but who are, in many cases, our friends. (Two of Spectator's campus news deputies are also frequent contributors and both the creator and current editor-in-chief of Bwog are Spec alumnae.)
As I saw it, there were three different options. The first, and by far the simplest, would have been to cover their birthday party. More than 115 people showed up at the West End last Saturday for drink specials and revelry to celebrate the "Bwoggiversary." We could have gone to the party, interviewed the guests, spoken briefly to the editors, taken some photos, and called it a day.
But that was never a serious consideration. Our second idea, and the one that we were planning on for a week, was an in-depth analysis. We would talk to the editors and creators, get some numbers and quotes, talk to their competitors including our own Editor-in-Chief John Davisson, talk to Columbia Public Affairs officials and other major sources on campus, and come up with a piece really looking at the effect that they have had on how they have changed the process of campus news coverage.
When somebody has an idea for a story, one of three things happen: that person says they will write it himself, an editor assigns a writer to it immediately, or it goes up on "Piana"--an internal Web site accessible by writers who can take the story. We decided to put this analysis pitch up on Piana, and there it sat for a week without any takers. Sometimes, articles are allowed to wither and die on the story list because nobody wants to write them, but nobody in the office felt comfortable doing that with this story.
And so we arrived at option three. As news editor, I write a whole lot less than I have in the previous five semesters. The one exception is Technically Speaking, a biweekly technology column that I debuted 15 months ago and that I absolutely love writing. News columns--as differentiated from opinion columns--are designed as a forum to analyze issues without advocating or condemning them. By writing the news as a column, it became a freer piece, allowing more latitude and discretion in approaching the tricky subject.
So that's how we got to today's column. Today's QuickSpec bemoaned that they had become "establishment" but when I saw DePillis briefly in the street, she said that she thought the piece was good.

Election Kickoff

There are few campus-side stories that are as much fun to report as those for Columbia College Student Council Elections. It has the same macabre interest as any good popularity contest, a cross between choosing teams for dodgeball and homecoming queen. Players begin scheming well before the game, positioning themselves as either "popular" or "unpopular," attempting to gain prominence, balancing their ticket between people who are well liked and people who know what they are doing. There is backstabbing, conniving, manipulation, and the last 24 hours at the end of the months-long run-up to the election that began at the beginning of the semester, still nobody has any idea what is going on.
This year was no exception. The weeks running up to the election were filled with rumors and pettiness as hyper-sensitive sources and super-ambitious students work to position themselves and their friends before the deadlines. One night last month, I found myself making calls for nearly two hours into the early hours of the morning, debating with potential candidate George Krebs, CC '09, on phrasing regarding his potential interest. We ended up saying "Krebs hinted at a possible run at president of the CCSC executive board" with the quote "I'm going to explode onto the scene in my own way should I decide to run." There were at least two communications regarding the more-direct phrasing "Krebs said he was considering a possible run...," a wording that Krebs objected to strenuously.
In any case, as the time ticked down to the deadline, it looked as though it was going to be a one-woman race--Michelle Diamond, VP of CC '08, was running for the presidency, the president of CC '08 was going to stay on in that position, Krebs decided he wanted to stay on as class president, and nobody else was stepping up. We have been told from several sources, though, that a few seniors basically decided that they didn't want Diamond to to be president. (Seniors Dan Okin, president of ESC, and Keith Hernandez, president of ABC, who were both fingered in the allegations, denied them).
We began hearing concrete rumors late on Sunday, 26 hours before the filing deadline, that two candidates--Will Snider and Felipe Tarud--were considering runs at the presidency. This meant couple of things for us: First, that the race probably wasn't going to be unopposed, meaning that we would have actual conflict to cover (if you will all flip to your copies of The Interplay of Influence, you'll remember that conflict is good for stories.), but second--and more importantly to me--both potential candidates were courting one of my best friends, Paula Cheng, to run for a position as vice president.
Now, brief review--Erin Durkin and I are both news editors. As a general rule of thumb, we split up stories so I take all those articles about things occurring within the gates, and she takes those beyond. If Paula had decided to run for VP, that would have meant I couldn't have read any stories about the E-Board elections, which, depending on how you look at it, is either great because I get more sleep or awful because I don't get to take part in one of the more-exciting stories each year.
Candidates burned the midnight oil and worked all through the next day, but even by 8:00 p.m., when we decide what stories are going to be on our front page, nobody was sure who was going to be running. We knew that our best photo was likely going to be of the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification's demonstration regarding the blight study within Columbia's proposed expansion area, and we weren't able to get an interview that we needed for a story on a new tapas bar (read today's issue for more on that), so we decided to make CCSC lead.
As the story finally reported, the last-minute maneuvering had produced a ridiculous slate of candidates. Four people initially declared--the most in institutional memory--quadruple the number that had been expected as little as two hours before. Of the candidates, we had only heard rumors regarding one beforehand, and, fortunately for Erin's sleep schedule, Paula decided not to run.
The last-minute nature of the declarations--and, in the case of the Revolve party, subsequent withdrawl--meant that we were up late reporting. The story finally came in at 2:20 a.m., meaning the paper went to bed at 4:30 and I got to bed at 5:30 which is why this post is coming out so late.
Time to go to bed again. I'll try and get these updates up earlier in the future.

Hello World

It's been said that people who publish newspapers work in the business of the daily miracle.
In any given week, Spectator's staff of more than 300 writers, designers, editors, contributors, and business staffers put in between 1,500 and 2,000 man-hours across nine departments. All that work gets you over 60 pages of content and advertisements, with roughly 200 stories quoting 600 sources. Each issue pays for itself in advertising, and with publishing costs ranging from $1,200 and $2,000 per day, Spectator approaching a million dollars in revenue annually. This is completed by full-time students who are undertaking one of the most rigorous college experiences that this country has to offer, the most-dedicated of whom spend over 60 hours per week on the paper and up to 18 hours in a given day.
We cover a University community of 60,000 students, faculty, and staff and a 160 square block section of the Upper West Side and West Harlem where more than 100,000 people live, and we strive to cover the most pertinent issues affecting them all.
And even if everything goes right on our end--something that never happens--we still have to deal with all of the factors that lie beyond our control. Sometimes news gets postponed or doesn't happen, people lie to us or misrepresent themselves, sources don't return our calls, and our internal servers shutdown. As one example of the nightly unexpected happenings, last night, our printer decided that they were taking off for President's Day without telling us. It's these moments that make Spectator a daily miracle.
The paper's impact is far-reaching. The more than 130 issues published every year are read more than 25,000 times every day, and when the paper breaks national or international news, that number can be many times that much. And on our best days, like last Thursday and Friday, our papers offer breaking news, in-depth features, insightful analysis, and an open forum for student voices, all laid out in a clean and attractive way. At our worst, as was the case today, we fall prey to the worst stereotypes of college journalism with articles that contain factual inaccuracies, miss the underlying importance of a story, and misrepresent or under-represent parties affected by the stories.
Yet, much of Spectator's goings-on occur beyond the public eye. It will be the goal of this blog to rectify that. As co-news editor for the paper's 131st Managing Board, I have an inside understanding of how the paper happens, from the initial pitch to the final printout, and I will try to spread that knowledge to the best of my ability through this blog. Every day, I will tell at least one story behind the story, and as happens with the best of blogs, this will be an interactive experience, answering any questions, comments, or concerns that you may have.
Enough bloviating. Let's get started.