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.
