CCSC v. ESC--The War Wages On

On October 23, 1890, the Columbia Spectator ran the most insanely ridiculous article ever.

"With this issue Barnard College makes her bow--we beg the young ladies' pardon, her courtesy [curtsy]--to our readers. It is, for the present at least, our intention to make the news of our sister school a regular--and of course a pretty--department of our paper.

In if the course of time, however, we find that our sister students, prepossessing and spirituelle though they be, are not interesting and alert, we shall indeed feel obliged to sacrifice their publicity to more pressing news!

We shall, therefore, anxiously await from our correspondent the account of something 'real naughty and shocking' to keep alive interest. We should not like to suggest a love affair with a tutor; but if such an event came to pass spontaneously in the course of time, nothing could be further from our profession of impartiality than to restrain the news of it."

We have--I hope, at least--come a long way since then. That said, for time immemorial, one of the things that Spectator has been called out is that our coverage creates [or, more charitably, reflects] a hierarchy among the four undergraduate schools.

Knowing the prevalence of this concern, one of my goals coming into this position was equalizing our coverage across the four schools, and especially their councils and elections.

The problem, though, is what do you do when every school has a different system? CCSC is most open. Not only do their candidates usually leak that they're planning to run well in advance of the start of elections, they also have the longest campaign season, the greatest number of candidates, and the largest number of voters.

Compare that, for example, to the ESC. I lived on the same floor as president-elect Liz Strauss last year and we have a relatively good relationship, but she wouldn't even confirm off-the-record that she was running for president until the actual registration came (and even then, she was asleep and unavailable for comment. I never even knew that Eash--who also lived on the floor--was considering a run. The ESC announces their E-Board candidates on a Monday... and vote on Tuesday. There are no accusations of SGB bribes because there are no endorsements to buy off, no public debates to cover, and definitely no death threats because it's all done internally.

Barnard, in the same vein, disqualifies candidates who announce their candidacies before the date. And as far as GS goes, it's hard to get too much debate moving among a sub-1,200 student body among whom many are part time, the vast majority life off-campus, and who as a general rule don't care about their political representatives.

I'll leave that question open and invite you all to compare our CCSC and ESC coverage over the last two weeks in regards to parity for yourselves. But I did want to bring up a point that Owen, last year's campus editor, made last year when he got flak about the difference in article placements regarding CCSC and ESC election results--judging based solely on size or placement is an inherently flawed measure.

For some reason, I can't find a PDF of today's front page, but if you look at it, you'll see an enormous photo beneath a four-column headline. On the other hand, last week's story on Strauss being named president, while also in the upper-right hand corner, is only 1.5 columns wide with a smaller column below the article.

But look at the photos! We had a photographer sitting in the Satow Room for five hours waiting for a decent shot of Strauss and none ever presented itself. They didn't go out partying or drinking afterwards, and were generally unphotogenic. The best we could do is get this canned shot. Also, looking at the PDF, you can see Dani Zalcman's gorgeous shots from the alternative spring break in New Orleans.

On the other hand, this might be the best shot that we've had on our front page this semester. Also, the CCSC elected three class boards, three at large reps, and two Senators on top of the E-board, and the elections, in which about 1,500 people voted, were contested by some 56 odd candidates. For the ESC, a few dozen people voted on fewer than ten candidates for just five positions.

I'm not sure that I made any solid points here or led to any conclusions--personally, I'm not sure where the right balance lies, though I think we've done better this year than we did last year when Dan Okin's election was stuck at the bottom let of the page--but I simply wanted to say that these are complicated and difficult decisions.

Waiting for K4

I think it's about time that I introduced you all to a little friend of the office. The so-called "work-flow software" does wonderful things for the paper. Basically, it creates an automatic routing system so articles are read by editors in the correct succession and that no two editors are changing the article at the same time. It also allows for our production associates to layout the pages as editors are reading them. Articles automatically update in the layout as editors retool them, meaning that both finish at about the same time. It's hard to imagine what our job would be like without it.

But K4 giveth and K4 taketh away, and when K4 goes down, it makes all our lives a living hell. K4 can go down of its own accord, without warning, and when it does, we are usually crippled until we can get it back. Also, because the articles are so intertwined with our network, anytime that the network goes down, K4 goes down with it. This has happened more frequently this semester than I can remember in the past--though it's possible that I'm just more aware of it now--and has meant far more long nights that we would otherwise have.

Now, normally, when K4 goes down, it comes back up within about twenty minutes. On bad nights, it can go down for forty or fifty.

Right now, we are approaching our second hour without K4.

There is a backup plan for cases like this, but it isn't pretty. Every editor goes through the story one by one, e-mailing between each other as we go and praying that nothing else goes wrong. Once all of the articles are finished being edited, we then have to paste them on the page and, because we haven't been retooling the story sizes all night long, usually results in an additional forty minutes of playing with margins and making things fit.

So as K4 sits down [and I pretend I don't have a presentation on my term paper in class tomorrow], let's look into the grab bag.

Anonymous asked: "How does the Spec go about training reporters?"

The answer is actually pretty simple. We take a two-pronged approach. The first is a series of five or six classes talking about the fundamentals of journalism and how Spectator functions.

The first is about Spec's organizational structure, where we tell them how their stories go from idea to paper.

The second is a basic overview of how to report where we cover such topics as how to take down a quote and how not to make up facts--sounds simple, actually quite difficult and something that takes some time to fully grasp. [Just took 25 minute break to start placing stories. They're still going but I'm no longer able to help in the process at all.]

Day three covers how to write, touching on the basic inverted pyramid as well as some thoughts on features.

After the third session, trainees are eligible to start reporting. The fourth session is always about the structure of Columbia and usually touches on controversies or big issues that are ongoing within our coverage area. The last one or two sessions tend to vary based on who the training editors are--we have done courses on diversity in the office and in our coverage, legal issues faced by reporters, how to write a good feature, mock interviews, etc. In the last week, we always have a party.

But training doesn't end with the last training session. For the first several stories that they write, new reporters are required to come into the office and line-edit the article with the associate who is on for the night. After some number of stories--usually at some point between six and ten--or at the end of the semester when many of the new writers take on beat, wee promote the trainees to staff writers. For those of you playing at home, you can tell the distinction by the "qualine" that appears under writers' names. "Columbia Daily Spectator" indicates that the person is still a trainee or contributor, while "Spectator Staff Writer" indicates a training graduate.

As for Spec's relationship with CSPA, there really isn't one. I just happened to be working there to get some case over spring break.

More answers from the grab bag next time. Back to layout.

Late Nights, Long Mornings

Columbia's administration works on a different clock than Columbia's students.

I don't mean that statement as a dig in any way, but rather, simply as a statement of fact. They've all done the college thing and by now, all of the spokesmen and deans and EVPs have jobs that stop at the end of the day and families that don't. (The number of high-profile people at this school who have young children and still manage to put in 8, 10, 12 hour days always amazes me. You think we as students have it bad? Try earning enough money to pay NYC rents and making time to spend with your two year-old twins on top of whatever you do for school in a job where you often have to deal with crises that affect a University population of 65,000 people--more.)

And so it makes sense that when Spec is doing its reporting, many of our faculty and administrative sources have better things to do than to talk to us. At least one administrator puts his children to bed every night while another will set up a meeting with you basically anytime you like so long as he gets to have dinner with his children. Further, while students often give us information at 11, midnight, or one in the morning that makes it into the next days paper, administrative sources are asleep.

So what happens when, as has happened in both of the last two days, we receive breaking news about a big story that would seem to necessitate an administrative response. On Monday, we reported that students had been disciplined in the University's highest-profile news cycle all year, while last night we carried a quote by Karina Garcia, one of the censured students, which read: "They bowed to right-wing pressure. It's noteworthy that Columbia reserved the harshest punishment for Latinos-two Mexican-Americans and one Dominican."

So how does the Spec balance the need to report the news with the need to be responsible? It's handled on a case-by-case basis. On Monday, since we had our news relatively early in the day--around six p.m.--it involved a number of communications between Tom Faure, who reported the story, myself, and University officials.

Last night, though, we got our news--and Garcia's quote--at midnight, well after what we know to be the bedtimes of officials in the Office of Public Affairs. We put in a hopeless call, but had to decide whether or not to run the quote. If we run it and provide the University only a longshot opportunity to comment, it makes us seem uncritical in our reporting. If we don't run the quote, we risk marginalizing people who support Garcia's contention Spec.

The decision was made during a half hour meeting between myself, the managing editor, and the editor in chief. After reading through the piece again at two in the morning, we decided to run the quote (as Bwog readers have clearly noted). We believe that it's the right decision, though we can certainly see and understand how an opposite argument could be made, and I have been sitting in classes this morning with my stomach churning going back and forth about the pros and cons.

In any case, I guess my point is that we don't make these decisions lightly.

Breaking News!

And I had been looking forward to getting some sleep.

If you look at our front page today, it is filled with something that might be surprising to some of you--real, honest-to-God, breaking news. Most of it we didn't know we were going to have three days in advance, some of it was awkward, and all of it required good reporting.

We start, I guess, with the story about residents of 47 E. 3 St. holding a benefit concert to pay back their legal fees. It's an incredibly interesting case, pitting tenants rights versus those of the landowner, and its progression to the New York State Court of Appeals means that it could set a precedent for the city, which made it a legitimate news story for the paper. Further legitimizing it was the fact that the landlord is a Columbia College '94 alumna. But that's mostly a city-side issue. The reason that I, as campus editor, cared about the story (beyond its inherent interest) is that the landlord is also the daughter of Kathryn Yatrakis, whose class I'm taking. Whenever we run a story like this, we give a head's up to the parties who may potentially be affected, so I ended up with a potentially awkward (though ultimately fine) e-mail chain with my professor.

Starting Friday night, (five hours after a few members of the news board had sat down with him for an hour-long briefing... you would've thought he could have given us an embargoed leak or something) we found out that Mr. President, Lee Carroll Bollinger is going to become a director of the Washington Post Company. I set our Bollinger beat chief on the story and let her go to work.

Moments later, I learned that the University's CFO and EVP for Finance was set to leave to return to his alma mater in State College, PA. I called up Dani, who has covered Al Horvath for over a year now, and got her to start digging around for a comment.

That's two breaking news stories and a land deal that many say is suspect in a single weekend—solid by most stretches of the imagination. Add to that a front-page feature we ran about a grandmaster playing 30 games of chess simultaneously, a story about David Denby and several students talking about the Core Curriculum, a council debate, and a fantastic Implications page six weeks in the making and you end up with one of our best papers of the semester. We were all psyched up for a great paper

And then… the CCSC story broke. We got a tip that there may have been something up on Saturday afternoon. To be honest with you—as I try to be—when I first saw the tip, I wasn't sure if it was a story. As reporters, we often get told information with suspect motives. It's always important to verify the legitimacy of what we're told, but that is especially true in the middle of an election when there is always incentive for somebody to use us as tools to help them play dirty.

As our due-diligence calls for, we started calling up the people who were implicated—Tracy Chung, Michelle Diamond, George Krebs, Jonathan Siegel, Subash Iyer, etc. Through our reporting, we learned that there was, in fact, an attempt before the start of official campaigning by members of the SGB to get Michelle Diamond to, either figuratively or physically, sign onto increasing SGB funding substantially. We learned that there was going to be a formal filing of a rules violation. We came to the decision that even if Diamond had held a conversation about something that would have been illegal to sign but, upon learning it was illegal, decided not to, it would still be newsworthy given all of the context.

For those excited in newsgathering and reporting, it was hard to beat this weekend.

P.S.: Special shout-out to my production and photo friends, and especially Danielle Ash, for placing a visual element with every single story on the front page. So hot when that happens.

Trimming Good Stories

Sorry for the lag time on posting--I had meetings all day Friday, slept for 16 hours yesterday, and have been in meetings again all day today.

On Friday, we ran a story about four professors in SEAS collectively picking up $1.3 million in grant money. It was one of those stories that we get to write up a lot at Spec because we have so many world-renowned professors, and it's always difficult to choose which ones get stories and which ones don't. Because of the impressive size of these grants and the fact that they went to four professors, instead of one, we decided that this merited a story. We put it up on our list where it was requested by one of our trainees, Sara Maria Hasbun.

Now, most straight news stories that we run are skedded for between 400 and 600 words, closer to 600 if the story has wide-sweeping implications, a lot of facts, or a swath of sources, and closer to 400 if it goes the other way. That didn't used to be the case. As the result of a gradual shift on the part of news editors over the past three years, the average size of stories has been cut by about a third--when I came in my freshman year, I feel like my average story was in the 650-750 range and I never wrote something less than 500.

There are a number of pros and cons about shorter stories. The pros include that articles tend to be tighter and less verbose, have fewer extraneous quotes, and ensure that more peple read all the way to the end. On the flip side, it gives reporters less incentive to interview many sources and can lead to a loss of some context or extra information. For those reasons, our word count guidelines aren't hard and fast rules, but we tend to schedule the word count and hope that people tell us when they need more words.

I don't remember how many words we had originally allotted for Sara's story, but because we do run a lot of these, I can assure you it wasn't outside of the traditional range. Sara, however, went above and beyond in her reporting. On what could have been a simple recap of the basic news (Columbia gets money, professors say they're happy), she turned it into an analysis on the ways in which Columbia is better for incoming professors than MIT and Stanford, including the level of autonomy and resources they are given and they're ability to work across disciplines.

The problem is that this made the story substantially longer. While I can't tell you how many words Sara originally had, I can tell you that it was substantially less than the nearly 900 that I saw at midnight. By then, we had a couple of problems. The first was a space issue: we didn't have a single house ad and had about 350 more words than we could fit. The second, though, was a less obvious but equally important issue: since we do now have basic guidelines regarding how long our stories run, there are necessarily value judgments attached to those. In other words, if we give 900 words to a story, it makes it seem like we're saying it's twice as important as our normal story. As I said, while these are exceptional professors, the fact that they won this award is not in and of itself exceptional and we shouldn't treat in our paper as such. This semester, outside of Implications and Perspectives pages, I believe we have run three stories total more than 900 words. Thirdly, without some surprising or exceptional element, nobody was going to read all the way to the end of the story, no matter how well-reported it was.

We ended up at a compromise. I didn't want to cut the interesting additional research that she had found, but at the same time, we simply couldn't run 900 words on this thing. So I cut two full paragraphs--one of them was a rather lengthy quote recapping something that was essentially already stated--which got me about 100 words. I cut another eighty by tightening up language and snipping sentences here and there.

It's a weird experience cutting things that are good, but in the end, we believe that it made the paper better. I apologized to Sara Maria afterwards and the paper awarded her today with our trainee-of-the-week reporter's notebook. Good job, Sara Maria.

First Sunrise of the Semester

With all of the talk about the Town Hall this week, it's difficult to remember that we were doing other things. Not only were we putting out a newspaper each day--including Monday's, which was one of the thickest of the semester--but for the last two days, we have been pulling together our annual housing supplement, getting out last night in "civil twilight," that time between first light and sun-up that Spec editors for a generation have learned to love.

The housing supplement--by far the most-read supplement we put out in a year--is at once among the easiest and hardest things that we do. It's easy because it's an annual thing so we know how to hit our bases. We know, for example, that we need the housing cutoff numbers. We know that we need an article about the actual lottery process. We know that there will be a story on summer renovations and another about LLC applications. We know all of that going in and we have a good relationship with Housing administrators across campus and they help us pull together the facts, quotes, and numbers that we need for these stories.

Beyond that, the story pitches that we get are relatively common each year, which, in a sense, is fine because the first-years who are picking it up need to know the basic information, and if that means some of it gets repeated year-to-year, then so be it.

But this bumps up against what makes putting the supplement out so hard--With similar stories getting published each year, how can we keep it fresh and relevant?

The supplement-planning process begins six weeks in advance with a pitch meeting. The relevant beat chiefs and deputies--this year, they were Julie Appel, Anastasia Gornick, Alex Peacocke, and Tom Faure--sit down and get a list of ideas up on the board about what we want to see in the issue. In this meeting, we tried to come up with a handful of stories that would add zip to the issue, and came up with Anastasia's tongue-in-cheeky guide to off-campus housing, and roommate quiz, Jacob's story on people who bend the rules to essentially live with their significant other, and the story, eventually written by Sandeep, about the first year housing experience. Judge as you will whether we effectively livened up the supplement and gave people a reason to read it.

On top of the content issues, though, we place special emphasis on the visual layouts. This year, with an assist from Google, we had two maps (one of which-- the big Morningside housing map--ran as a full page in color) that allowed us to apply a (hopefully) creative, visually appealing layout to what could have been a big hunk of text. Beyond that, the slick photos from Key and the irreplaceable Anjali Biala on the front page (see the top) are as pretty as anything I can remember running our paper this semester.

I would love to say that we had organized these visual elements at the same time as the story pitches. We didn't. The photos were planned 13 days in advance of the paper--realize that ten of those were during spring break--and I first met with our incredible production associate who is responsible for all of those maps on Monday night. Four days in advance, I was nervous about us pulling this off.

Feel free to disagree with me, but I'm proud of how today's supplement came out. It was harried at times, and last night, we got to bed at about 7:15, but I've been walking around all day with a smile on my face because of this supplement. This was a good day.

The Town Hall

I'm sorry for the delay in posting this: last night was a particularly busy one in the office and this morning, I overslept.

As noted in Bwog and in Spec, last night was the Town Hall.

First, a note on objectivity. In one of our weekly diversity meetings where we were discussing the meeting, somebody raised the point that if this were another prominent or large student group talking about diversity, we would cover the Town Hall, and that, by that logic, it would make sense for us to cover it. Further, there was reason to believe that students who didn't make it to the event would be interested in what happened, as would alumni, faculty, and other members of the University community. So we decided to do a story.

That said, for purposes of objectivity, we obviously couldn't be involved in it. So I put the story up on our internal list and hoped that somebody would take it--I didn't want to choose the writer for fear of being accused of bias. I asked Jacob, one of our deputy campus news editors, to do the final reads, and that was that. I was, in fact, quoted in the story, but my quotes were all that I knew about the article until I saw it online after it had been published at about 5 a.m. Same goes for Erin, John, and Amanda. For that matter, nobody on the Managing Board with the possible exception of our production editor saw the story before it went to print.

Now, as for the event itself. Much hay has already been made about Jimmy's quote "I was struck people feel so strongly about being misquoted." At the risk of being mocked, I'm going to say something similar. I wasn't surprised at the fact that people were upset about getting misquoted--heck, when I'm misquoted, I get mad as hell. Facts, words are important--I wouldn't be in this job if I thought otherwise--and you should get mad about it. (You should also, as I have said several times in the past few days, tell us about it so we can evaluate whether a correction is warranted.)

What surprised me--and, while I haven't spoken to him since the quote, what I think Jimmy was trying to get at--is how much people said we did misquote people, how many facts we published that were incorrect, how much we fundamentally misunderstood the stories we. write. It was a comment raised by probably two-thirds of the people who spoke at the event. In one form or another, most non-Spec people who were in attendance did not trust us to report accurately on them and did not believe what they read in the paper. And while I, like every person who has ever worked for or read Spectator, have heard grumblings, mutterings, and the occasional rant from people that the Spec is a worthless rag that can't get anything right, I was surprised at how prevalent the perception seemed to be.

What I had never heard were the points that Keondra and Aliyah made that people don't want to be quoted in Spec because they don't trust us. It knocked me back how much distrust of the paper there was in the room, and that was important for me to hear. If you can't trust Spec, there's no reason for you to read it, there's no reason for you to talk to its reporters, and there's really no reason for you to write for it--especially if you think, as Six raised, that your editors will change your meaning.

There were a lot of points brought up last night, all of which deserve our attention. If students don't know who they're supposed to talk to on Spec, as one member of the Muslim Students Association charged, that's something that needs to be addressed. If students feel as though we don't care about them, that's something that needs to be addressed. There were a number of strong points that were made, and while I can't say what they will be--mostly because we haven't had a formal debriefing yet--we're going to be making some changes in response to them.

But the biggest thing that I'm going to take from the night is this idea of accuracy and that it's not where it needs to be.

P.S. I know I'm behind on comments and I do plan to get to them, but I wanted to make sure that whoever the commenter on the last post was didn't actually mean that the blog is trying to "reduce transparency." Perhaps "reduce opacity" or "increase transparency?" Because if it's the other thing, I've got a problem.


UPDATE: 3/22/07, 8:45 P.M. The editor in chief of The Eye responded to the Town Hall in today's issue of the magazine.

Diversity Comment Follow-Up

Last week, an anonymous poster commented: "To say you're more amenable to change than past boards is ridiculous. I applaud your efforts to try something new, but the campus coverage in the paper is worse this year than it was under any of the last three news editors. Holding a forum is one thing, actually creating good, representative content is another."

I have been holding off on responding until today in order to put in the plug for today's Town Hall (8 p.m. in Earl Hall Auditorium--come vent to us. We'll listen. Plus, free pizza!). Also, I've been trying to think through how to respond without coming off as either defensive or chest-thumping. Here's what I came up with.

I think the argument that there may be a gap between our efforts and the success that comes from them is a legitimate one. Whether this year's coverage is better or worse than previous years' is not something I can objectively judge, but we know that we haven't fixed all of the problem.

What I do know is that, in my time here, I have never heard more talk about about the level of diversity at Spectator as I hear now. I can tell you that the awareness and recognition within the office that there is a problem here has never been higher in my 30-odd months at the paper.

Further, I know some of the steps that have been taken internally to address the problem. I know that we have appointed a deputy news editor and a contributing editor devoted to looking at diversity issues among the staff and within our pages. I sit in a meeting every week with other top-level editors and we talk about what we can do for the paper. We are bringing in speakers, planning a media training, and are talking about how to recruit a more-diverse staff.

But these are all first steps in tackling a big big problem, and that's what tonight is about. We have some ideas about what to do to address the concerns on continue forward, but we don't know how best to move forward, and we don't even know where all of our problems are.

And so I urge you to come tonight and tell us what you think. I have said this before and I'll say it again--representation is active. We can't fix the problem that we don't know about, so tell us where are problems are and together we'll work to improve the paper and make it a better asset for Columbia.

"Sleep?" What's That?

Hope that everybody had a good break. I for one made a lot of headway on a term paper, applied for some jobs, worked out, saw some opera, went to Brooklyn, and made some money--all told, a pretty decent way to spend ten days.

But I'm glad to be back at the paper. Today's paper is enormous. Thanks to a six-page ad selling spree that business side got into over break, we've got a 14 page paper. A nice piece with great photo on the front about the Iraq War protest in D.C., a nice interview with our newest University Professor, an important piece on the University backing down from a plan for McVickar that had outraged many area residents, and a well-executed piece on students stuck away from Columbia. It was an all-around solid paper.

One of the most striking things about last night, though, was Ivy Chen's story on ESC E-Board nominations. Though only in the position for about two months, Ivy has been a fantastic beat chief for us, covering ESC so well that we also asked her to take on a second coverage area. For this story, we knew that it was going to be coming in late because all nominations were blocked until midnight.

So Ivy came into the story just before ESC President Dan Okin e-mailed us the nominations and she started her reporting. Normally on these stories, the goal is to talk to all of the candidates running for the big positions, find out any juicy internal conflict, and get as much as you can for the night of. For ESC, we approach things slightly differently--because it is an internal election, we see it as less important that we publish lengthy issue-based stories because the general SEAS student doesn't get to vote on the platforms anyways.

But we still wanted to talk to Eash and Liz (who, full disclosure, both lived on my floor last year) and ask them why we wanted to be President. We called Eash up around 12:30 and he gave us five minutes on the phone which was great, but by the time we called Liz, she was asleep. Step one is to call her cell; step two is to call her RoLM; step three is to call her roommate's cell and see if she will connect us.

After we had done those three things, we had a decision to make: Do we run the information that we have from Eash without giving equal time to Liz? Or do we cut Eash's quote in the name of fairness. As you can see, we decided to leave Eash's piece in with a conciliatory clause about us not being able to get in touch with Liz.

There are a lot of ways to explain a "no comment:"

"John Smith could not be reached for comment"

"John Smith did not return several attempts for comment."

"John Smith did not return 12 calls and five e-mails seeking content."

Et Cetera. In my mind, the least passive-aggressive of these is what we used: "John Smith could not be reached for comment late last night." It gives a reason for the exclusion on our end but also doesn't make it seem that the source was purposefully ignoring our calls. Sometimes, that kind of thing is appropriate, but last night was not one of those times.

Dispatch from CSPA 2

Notes from today's CSPA:

Yesterday, I was blown away by design. Today, it was photo. Sharon Olson from Bishop Gorman, a private school in Las Vegas, showed off some ridiculous digital photos that had showed up in their yearbook. She gave me a CD of the photos after the performance but asked me not to post them online, so if anybody wants to see what good high schoolers can do, come by and see me.

At a stimulating session on the rights and responsibilities of the press given by AP Supervising Editor Marco Mulcahy, I met Megan Chase, the Woodlan High School sophomore from Fort Wayne, Ind., who wrote a pro-gay rights editorial in her high school paper which outraged the administration who then asked for editorial oversight.

Mr. Mulcahy said he'd be willing to speak to Spec. Score!

One of the speakers failed to show up so Key Nguyen and I fielded questions and talked about our own stories from Spec. Conclusions: students think covering riots is cool, but that drinking beer and shopping on Fifth Avenue is cooler.

Banner headline from "Building a Better Blog," hosted by Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society at Penn State Malcolm Moran: Middle-Aged Journalism Professors Distrust Wikipedia, Blogs: Cite Uncertainty About Future of Old, New Media.

Dispatch from CSPA Day 1

Today is the first of three days that I am spending working the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. The annual conference for high school journalists has been going on for 83 years. This year's rendition brought in 4,500 students from 40 states, with attendees coming from as far away as Anchorage, Alaska.

It's a pretty good three-day gig. Free lunch and a few hundred bucks for nine hours work on a day that I was just sitting around. I figured I would just sit around for a couple of days, sit in the back, get ahead on some homework, and be done with it. And that's what I did for the first two session on high school news broadcasts.

But in the second session, I ended up with Ray Westbrook who teaches journalism at a small private school in Dallas called St. Mark's. This was where the creme de la creme of Dallas society--the mayor, a congressional representative, H. Ross Perot, etc.--sent their sons and grandsons.

He started showing off his students' paper, the ReMarker ... and I was floored. Their designs were the strongest that I had ever seen from a high school paper, and beat out a lot of what I had seen from the top-tier of college dailies as well.
Design-wise, they were doing things in print that were normally reserved for top-tier magazines.

For one story on drug culture in a high school--something that no school ever wants published but that they somehow managed to get an administration on board with--they took the poetry of a man who had attempted to commit suicide after losing all his money on crack and booze, laid it over a black and gray two-layered with neat typography background, and had an image of the man worked in there as well. The story itself was well-written (Westbrook taught two sessions--one on design and one on feature writing), and it was just an incredibly slick paper.

Seriously, just look at that front page. On another one about sex ed., they crafted an elegant bird and a bee out of condoms. It was stunning.

I also spent some time with a California paper called the Crossroads which also had a magazine. I can't find any images of it online, but man could they design. There were others I just hope that we can convince some of these guys to come to Columbia.

In any case, I left the day inspired... I really didn't expect that to happen.

Coming up with Stories

You ask and I respond. So how does Spec come up with its story pitches?

At its most basic form, there are two kinds of editors who report to Erin and me--deputies and associates. Associates are in charge of shepherding stories from 6 p.m. on the night of production until the paper is PDF'd sometime between 1:30 and... well, sometime after 1:30. The deputies, on the other hand, are responsible for everything from the inception of the idea until 6 p.m., including reporting questions, issues of context, and, yes, the pitch itself.

Now, as covered in the last post, deputies each have their own staff of between six and ten beat chiefs. These are the people who are coming up with the bulk of the pitches--in fact, most deputies require that every beat chief brings in between one and five pitches to their meeting every week.

Where do beat chiefs get their ideas? Pretty much everywhere. Most come from regular communications with sources. I've seen beat chiefs meet with five sources in a day and while these are usually interviews, sometimes, they're just an opportunity to sit down and chat about what's happening within the beat.

Beyond just talking to sources, students go to meetings, get on listservs and newsletters, and sign up for Google Alerts on a bewildering number of topics that are in some way related to the beat. But our best pitches often come from the most mundane sources--walking around campus looking at fliers and talking to friends about what is pissing them off this week.

There is no scientific process to any of this, and often, pitches vary based on the beat you have. Our reporters who cover the class councils and the University Senate, for example, can expect a relatively steady stream of news about policies and campaigns. On the other hand, in non-news intensive beats like Health Services or Career, Fellowship, and Academic Advising tend to have more analysis stories that may lack a time hook.

As I said, beat chiefs bring their ideas to deputy meetings, where the pitches get fleshed out and either approved or tossed. One of the reasons that deputies are chosen is that they have what we call a "news sense"--an idea for the kinds of pitches turn into good stories and those that don't. Additionally, we have a sense for which stories we have written in the past two years, as well as which stories other media outlets have done, and we try not to repeat them. To help with this process, for the first month or so, deputies bring every pitch that they're given to the weekly deputy meetings with Erin and I and we talk about what makes it a good or bad pitch. By the end of February at the latest, all of the deputies have the hang of what kinds of stories work, though Erin and I still check in when we question something that's on the story list.

I know that I'm being vague, and I apologize for that, but in truth, a lot of it is subjective and a lot of it is based on experience. Between Erin and I, we have probably read every story that Spec has printed in the last 30 months and many that were published in the three years before that, and because of that, we have gained a pretty good sense for the kinds of ideas that do and don't pan out as imagined. That said, we're always looking for fresh perspectives and new angles on stories that deserve to be told.

Keep asking questions!

You ask, I respond

Sorry for posting so late. Slept until 4:15.
Yay! We finally got our first question for the blog. Actually, we got our first several questions for the blog. I'm going to string out the answers over the next few days in order to A) give more attention to each (I'm trying to limit these posts to 500 words or so. The fewer issues I cover in those 500 words, the more in depth I can go), and B) Without any issues coming out this week, I had been planning to address some of these exact questions

So without further ado, Anonymous asks: "Josh, could you talk a bit more about the editorial structure of the Spectator? As in, the division of beats?"

Certainly, Anonymous.

First, a little background. The idea of a beat system is to have one writer responsible for keeping tabs on a full coverage area. These "beat chiefs" are supposed to meet regularly with key sources within the beat, pitch ideas for stories every week and to be regularly writing these pitches into articles. In theory, this benefits everybody: our sources are better served by having a regular point person on the paper and reducing the number of calls made by random reporters on deadline; the paper has a regular stream of ideas coming in so that two or three people aren't responsible for coming up with 40 story ideas each week as was the case in the past; and the readership is better served by having stories across a broader range of issues than might otherwise happen.

The idea was first introduced at Spec three years ago by Megan Greenwell and Matt Carhart in a limited form and has grown over each successive year. Right now, we have 28 beats that are covered on the campus side and about another 15 on the city side.

The process of deciding which beats we need to cover begins in October. The outgoing set of deputy and MB-level news editors meet at their weekly deputy meeting and discuss areas during which they discuss a year's worth of coverage, analyzing what the paper covered well, what it covered poorly, where we most need to improve in the coming year, and if there are any beats that we are covering which don't necessarily need a full-time or part-time beat chief.

After we compile this list together, we announce the beginning of beat shadowing at our next news meeting. Any person on the paper who has gone through training is eligible to shadow for a beat. As a shadow, reporters spend a week as if they were covering the beat. They'll meet with sources, come up with three pitch ideas, talk to their deputy, and decide upon at least one article, which they will then write.

Traditionally, writers have been eligible to shadow for up to three beats. After the end of three weeks, the deputies reconvene and look at who ran for each beat, specifically looking at how [Crap, that's 500 words already. I'll swear I'm almost done!] passionate they appear to be about the beat, how good their pitch ideas were, and how their story came out. It takes a lot of thought, especially considering the domino effect of matching all of the writers up with something that they want when some beats are more popular than others, and at the end, we have a roster of names.

Inevitably, something is left uncovered. At this point, we go back to writers on staff--both those who shadowed and those who didn't but have done impressive work in the past--and offer them some of those beats that have been taken. This is always a tough calculus--we don't want to guilt somebody into accepting a beat that they don't have time to write, but at the same time, we want to cover all of our bases.

The finals step is to organize beat chiefs into deputy groups. The idea here is that we want similar beats that share common sources and issues in a single deputy group so that we don't repeat ourselves and so groups can expand pitch ideas into analysis pieces and deeper stories. Also, we don't want one deputy to have 12 beat chiefs while another only has six.

By the end of winter break, we have all of our beats set, though we are continuously reevaluating structural issues.

More tomorrow.

Matt Sanchez

Sorry for taking 50 hours off. My mind went into overdrive spring break mode. I swear, I'm here now.
I said at the beginning that this would be a blog about what makes it to the front page of Spectator but what is just as important as that is what doesn't make it to the front page.
A year ago, our front page included an article on
Marine Corporal Matt Sanchez, GS and a member of Columbia University MilVets who has served in Iraq. Sanchez had lodged a formal complaint with the University, claiming that during an activities fair, he had been harassed by three members of the International Socialist Organization.
Since then, Sanchez has become a relatively well-known player in the conservative media, appearing regularly on Fox News, publishing pieces in the New York Post and generally telling his story. Two weeks ago, he was awarded the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom award by the Conservative Political Action Conference.
And if you're plugged-in enough that you're reading this, you probably also know that several blogs have since reported that he acted in various gay pornography films under the name of Rod Majors. Sanchez has since written an op-ed discussing the matter.
In the instance of every story that shows up in Spectator, there is a conversation about what makes it newsworthy, why we should care enough to give it valuable column inches in our paper. There are no hard-and-fast rules regarding what we publish and what we don't, but there are guidelines. In cases of disclosing personal information, we look at a number of things, specifically dealing with whether the person in question is a so-called "public figure," whether the information we would disclose has to do with his public persona, how controversial or mundane the information is, whether we can verify its accuracy, and other.
When the story broke, we had no fewer than 23 internal e-mails discussing whether or not to pursue it, and we came to the decision that publishing a story would constitute a non-newsworthy disclosure or private, personal information, even if it had already been reported in dozens of other outlets.
More spring break updates on the way.

Spectator Town Hall

For those of you who are in the class, this may come as a rehash, but it bears repeating.
Right now, Spectator is at a point where I believe that the board is more
amenable to change and more open to criticism than it has been in the recent past.
And while past boards have come a long way in the last three years, I believe the fact that this year's content editors are entirely new have brought a fresh perspective to issues that have plagued the paper for years.
We understand that we have problems and we are trying to address them in the best way that we know how. To that end, on March 20--the Tuesday that we get back from vacation-- Spectator is holding a Town Hall that is being co-sponsored by the Chaplain's Office where we hope to get as many different perspectives as we possibly can, especially groups and communities on campus that feel as though Spectator has
covered them badly if at all. As such, we are inviting everybody and everybody to A) Come to the meeting ready to voice their own personal concerns, and B) Forward the
information included below to their friends and to organizations with which they may be affiliated.

Frustrated that the Spectator never covers issues you care about? Or dissatisfied with the story when we do?

Spectator invites you to speak your mind about the newspaper at an open discussion on Tuesday, March 20 at 8 PM in the Earl Hall Auditorium. The event, which is co-sponsored by the Office of the University Chaplain, is a chance to tell our editors how to improve the newspaper and discourse on campus.

The evening will be facilitated by Journalism School associate dean Arlene Morgan. After a brief introduction, she will open the floor for comment on any and all aspects of the paper.

The event is free and open to the entire campus community. Refreshments will be served. Email speceditor@columbia.edu with questions.

Big Paper

Days before vacations are funny things. As a general rule, people work hard to get stories in by their deadlines, but it can't always happen. An interview falls through, a call isn't returned, it takes a week to turn around some numbers and then it's suddenly it's 6:00 on the night of production and the anecdote, quote, fact, or stat that makes the story is missing and it needs to get held a day. But for some reason, when writers are faced with a 12 day wait until the next paper, they somehow pull everything together for deadline.
Such was the case today when, on our last night of production before spring break, we had a total of 18 stories on our docket, three times the number that we have on our worst days and about twice our average.
So what do you do when you have an 18-story paper? A few things. First, you barter with the Managing Editor to see how much space you can get. Every day, you need a bare minimum of 2200 words to put out a paper. But from the minimum to the maximum, there's a fair bit of flexibility. Basically, there's a semester-long publishing budget that can be allocated across the year in any way the editors see fit. An average eight to 10 page issue costs in the neighborhood of $1,200, more if the inside is in color or with our Monday and Friday sports supplements. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'll ask Amanda and John for the exact numbers and relay them here in the next coupla days.
Generally, news runs a half page of Off Lead and an additional half to 2/3 of a page of "jump" space, but on a day with a lot of content, we can ask for more than that and, if it fits within the semesterly budget, we can have some flexibility. The most I can ever remember running is three or three and a half pages of jump plus the front--incidentally (actually, not incidentally), also on one of the last days before a break. This budgeting depends on a lot of things, but my favorite, and the least understood, is that we can only run an even number of pages because whenever we print a front of a page, it always has a back. Thus, if opinion has 2 pages, sports has 1.5, arts has 1.5, and there are 3.5 pages of ads, then the options are running a 10 page paper with one allocated for news and a half for Off Lead--in other words, our bare minimum--or a 12 page paper which is the minimum plus up to two pages of jump. With 18 stories on the docket, confronted with cutting 2/3 of the content, Amanda made up a 12 page paper.
Three and a half pages of news. In layman's terms, that's between 9,500 and 10,000 words, a nice 30 words of Times New Roman double-spaced 12 point font, and that's before taking into account all of the photos which are shot, cropped, and otherwise edited (I don't know what they do--I'm not a photographer and the pages look pretty). That's actually almost exactly the amount of content that we began the night with when we had 18 stories, but as anybody who has ever dealt with a 30 page paper can tell you, it takes a long time to edit that much. Indeed, our team of editors and layout people probably would have taken something on the order of 13 hours to create a paper out of that much content.
The nice thing about having too-big papers instead of too-small ones is that you can run what we call "House Ads"--usually public service announcements given to us by the Ad Council or small banners advertising Spectator that take up space whereas with a too-small paper, we have to cut words, photos, and graphics to make it all fit.
So we looked at the content, chose I think four or five stories that didn't have any pressing time hook--most of which had already been pushed back at the writer's request, signaling to us that they could be held--and pushed through. It was still one of our latest nights of the semester, but if you look at our paper, I think that you'll agree that's it's also one of our best.
On a different note, just because it's spring break, don't expect Editorjosh to shut down. I'm fleshing out a couple of ideas for the hiatus so keep coming back and be sure to make comments and ask questions--we all really want this to be as interactive as possible.

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

As has been widely remarked upon and denounced, yesterday, in one of his last appearances before the assembled Columbia College class of 2007, a catered pre-dinner in Lerner, CC Dean Austin Quigley announced that Matthew Fox, CC '89, would be this year's CC Class Day speaker.
The announcement came at a moment of confusion to the seniors who spent the ensuing moments asking each other who this guy was and why he had been chosen even after a video with clips of Fox was shown to those assembled.
Those planning the event did Spec a favor and tipped me off to the scoop enough in advance so we could report it and get the story up the moment that it was announced under the threat that if we told anybody, we would lose all administrative comment on 50 percent of our campus-side stories for the foreseeable future.
So we went through the archives, looked up whatever stories we could find mentioning Fox, fact-checking that he was indeed on the infamous 1988 Lions football team that broke the streak against Princeton. We also set up an interview with senior class president David Chait, CC '07, to ask him about the choice and made sure that we would be getting some official language from the University in the form of a statement.
The problem with these kinds of stories, where you're fed information beforehand and not allowed to to talk to anyone, is that the potential is there for the story to come off as a press release. And, indeed, if you looked at the first version of the story which was posted online at exactly 6:05 p.m., that's exactly how it read--the announcement in the first paragraph, a mention of previous years' speakers in the second, snipits from Fox's bio in the third, and information about the selection process for the remaining four or five grafs.
The news here, though, was the overwhelming sense of disappointment that was felt in the room. When Quigley made the announcement, he made it a guessing game--let's see how many hints I have to give you before somebody shouts out the speaker. He went through four or five of these--he graduated in 1989, was from Wyoming, played on the football team, etc.--with the last being, "and in case you haven't guessed by now, it's Matthew Fox." And by the silence in the room, it seemed like people were still waiting for more clues to help them place the guy.
So I went around, got some more quotes from the crowd--I should remark that at least two people seemed pretty positive on the idea, one of whom is quoted in the story--and plugged them in for a quickly-launched second draft of the piece.
But everybody assembled agreed on one thing--the free appetizers and beer were a nice touch.

Ethics Questions

As you can likely tell from our lead story today, we found out over the weekend that some juniors who are members of the Student Government Association are preparing to run to be next year's SGA president. It was great news for us because we've been working to bring our coverage of SGA, ESC, and GSSC up to the level of CCSC so we can confront allegations of bias, not with claims that "we'll try harder," but proof that we're actually doing something. A story announcing the candidates are set to run, as we do with CCSC was just the kind of thing that we needed.
So we did what we do when we report. We called the candidates, got them to confirm on the record, called members of the elections board, checked to see if we could find out who else was running, and left it at that.
That was, until we found out that an SGA elections code by-law prohibited candidates from announcing their candidacy before the filing deadline as it would constitute an instance of unfair campaigning. The reasoning is simple: So SGA elections don't become as drawn out as presidential elections, the SGA will disqualify anybody who announces before they're ready for it. Suddenly, we were being told that publishing the article, even though the two candidates didn't know about the rule, could lead to them being disqualified from the election.
So, here are some of the questions that we asked ourselves before publishing the article:

Does the newsworthiness of announcing candidacies outweigh the possibility of said candidates being disqualified?

Are there circumstances under which we shouldn't publish information that we were freely given?

Do we have an obligation to protect candidates from disqualification if they freely gave us the information that would disqualify them?

Do we owe candidates a chance to respond or revise their comments if we find out about the rule?

Are any of these answers contingent upon candidates telling us that they either do or don't know the rules?

As a reporter, is there a difference between a candidate telling us she doesn't know about the rule and her actually not knowing about the rule?

If a candidate knows the rule and still tells us about her candidacy, do we have an obligation to report their flouting the rules?

Do the rules change if we are told independently of the candidate that she is running?

Should we ever attempt to influence elections coordinators to bend the rules?

If it's not the place of the paper to publish information that could lead to people getting disqualified, what assurances would be necessary for the paper to receive to publish the information with a clear conscience?

While I won't get into my answers these questions, I can assure you we considered them all and several more before deciding to publish the article today. We do not take these decisions lightly, and it took about two hours and several phone calls to come to the consensus that we should, indeed, publish the article. And for what it's worth, I believe that given all of the information we had last night, everybody reading this blog would have agreed with our final decision.

Why We Don't Write Stories After Three Drinks

As QuickSpec noted last week, the lead on my story about the John Jay Awards referred to flying wine. I was all set to blame it on the editing process until I looked up my original version:

"The money flew as freely as the wine as Columbia College’s faculty, administration, and—especially—alumni elite turned out to fete five of the school’s most prestigious living graduates for the 29th Annual John Jay Awards dinner, held last night at Cipriani 42nd Street."

As entertaining as the image of a massive money-and-wine fight in Cipriani 42nd Street is, the correct word was obviously "flowed."
Whoops.

John Jay Awards

This job has some definite perks.
Beyond the whole "helping to shape the campus discourse while running a staff of 100 and publishing really cool things while getting your name in bold type in every issue and having something to put on your resume" thing, there is the access to PrezBo, the pride of knowing what's happening on campus, and the good Columbia catering cookies that come with every meeting with Robert Kasdin or David Stone.
And, on very rare occasions, there are nights like tonight. After my last class today, I got all dudded up in a tux and took cabs down to Cipriani 42nd Street with some four other MB-level editors and photographer Tina Gao for the John Jay Awards dinner. For those unfamiliar, the awards are a chance for Columbia College to raise a boatload of money for the school--an event that has gained in importance with the University's $4 billion capital campaign underway.
Money was certainly the theme of the night. Cipriani is in an impressive building that used to be a bank (You can still see the teller windows), two of the night's honorees were hotshot investment bankers, and the 700-750 people who RSVP'd raised $1.2 million dollars for the College. Not bad for a night's work.
And not bad for six college kids whose most-regular meal is the free pizza that is delivered every night to the office through an advertising arrangement with V&T. There were roast lamb and fresh fish for the meat-eaters, Eggplant Parmesan for the veggies, some kind of salmon appetizer, and a creamy dessert that nobody knew exactly what it was but everybody agreed was fantastic.
During dinner, the porters ensured that everybody's glasses were always full, and before and after there were at least three fully-stocked bars mixing. There are few things that make a group of reporters salivate more than their most important sources all in a single room with a never-ending supply of alcohol. It was an opportunity for me to shake the hands of a lot of people whom I had covered in some capacity but never personally met, including Norries Wilson (My God that man is huge), Frontiers of Science honcho David Helfand, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees Bill Campbell, CC '62, who earned my eternal respect by being the only person in the room drinking beer from a bottle. I also checked in with dozens of others--Alan Brinkley, Kathryn Yatrakis, Marcus Johnson, David Ali, Jerry Sherwin, Hillary Ballon--who I know in various capacities.
As for the event itself, David Paterson gave a phenomenally entertaining speech about his time at Columbia, Eric Foner spoke eloquently about the direction of the American government, and Charles Santoro gave what was perhaps the most intense acceptance speech I've ever heard--in which he expressed more affection for his days at Choate than at Columbia--that had everybody at the table looking uneasily at one another. In one way or another, every speaker--including the winners--subtly asked for money, and President Bollinger, who appears to have gained some weight, gave an address on what makes Columbia College "excellent." (Columbia “has a deep a respect for excellence. ... There is a sense that what we teach is excellence and that we try ourselves … to be excellent.” Awesome!) Got back around 10:45, the first draft of the story was in by 11:30, and I made it out of the office by 1.
All told it was a good night, which is nice because it will likely be the only time I ever get a chance to dine at the John Jay dinner.

How Did That Happen?

Tonight is possibly the flukiest night I've ever spent at Spectator.
Ever since hearing about fliers going up on Barnard's campus touting a Town Hall regarding the banning of laptops from classrooms, we had been planning for one of tonight's front page stories to be on the meeting, which we, being journalists, were hoping would be controversial, heated, and generally exciting. Having heard rumblings around campus all week and after opinion published an op-ed from the pointgirl on the SGA, we even wrote a preview of the Town Hall which touched on the background of the issue, a rare step we take to show our belief that a story is particularly newsworthy. (To the best of my recollection, the only other preview we have run this year was in preparation of the Columbia Coalition Against the War's Day of Action. )
At about 10:30, more than two hours after the town hall had ended, we were beginning to get concerned about where the article was, so we called the writer, and, after she didn't pick up, the deputy editor who informed us that the person we thought was writing the article actually wasn't. So we called the person she thought was writing it, who pointed to the first person. Meanwhile, a fourth person entered the discussion to point her finger at the second. (Are you confused yet, because we had to draw a diagram to keep it straight.) And after we had made all of our calls, we finally found that, while at one point or another four different writers had been assigned to the event, none of them had actually gone.
That was one of two stories today where we had a photographer but no reporter. At an event held by the Columbia University College Republicans, president Chris Kulawik turned reporter Laura Schreiber away at the door on the grounds that the participants in the discussion felt uncomfortable being quoted during the event.
After I argued from the office hallway (unsuccessfully) with Chris to get Laura into the event, fifteen feet away, Tom Faure couldn't figure out why he wasn't picking up his phone to answer questions about a report that we had confirmed moments before about the University refunding money to the College Republicans that they had paid towards Jim Gilchrist's Oct. 4 speech. (He would later decline to commment).
Kulawik, meanwhile, wasn't the only one picking up his phone. On any given night, Columbia University has one Public Affairs official on call to answer urgent press inquiries such as ours, but for some reason, calls and e-mails to the representative and others within the office--11 all-told--all went unanswered.
As a general rule, one late story can push a night back as much as two hours. With all three of these stories falling apart--two of them after 10:30, about four hours before our ideal PDF time--the night wasn't looking good and I was preparing for one of my latest nights of the semester.
And then, everything kind of fell into place.
After two minutes of panicking, I went into our front office where the spring class of new writers were enjoying cookies and soda at their graduation from the training period and asked if we could get a writer. Jackie Kazarian and Stephanie Turner raised their hands, I gave them a call sheet and left them to track down as many people as they could who had been at the meeting to write a story based on reaction quotes.
We struck a deal with Chris whereby Laura could collect quotes following the event -- slightly disappointing, but better than nothing.
On Tom's story, as we fretted over what to do if we didn't get a comment from Public Affairs, a source that we weren't counting on e-mailed us after midnight and confirmed the salient details of the refund, giving us a cushion on running the story.
I'm still dumbfounded by the whole experience, but praise be to the deities of PDF-Times, we put the paper to bed at 2:37, about 10 minutes behind our second-fastest time of the semester.
Off to study for the midterm in 9.5 hours. Good luck everyone!