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.