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.