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.