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.