"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.