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.