Transitions

So the formal work of this blog--fulfilling a course requirement--is now completed and we have just five regular issues this year. As such, I'm trying to figure out what to do with the blog over the summer. That said, I know that I am currently planning to continue updating during the fall. The last thing that I heard was that the editors were looking to incorporate this more closely into the paper's framework next year. In response to many of your requests, the conversation that I had heard involved getting more of the editors to write so that it isn't just Editor Josh but a lot of people from the MB.

That said, over the course of the next week or so, I'm planning to do some recap of what it's been like blogging. First, some statistics.

Over the two months that this blog has been up, I've received more than 2,000 hits and close to 3,000 page views. Three other blogs have linked to mine. In total I've made 48 posts which garnered 32 comments. Not bad for a class project which I did almost nothing to promote.

In response to the last question--what would Spec have done if it had the resources of a DP to cover Blacksburg--as a rule of thumb, we always have enough money to send a reporter on a bus. In my time at Spec, we've sent people to Washington D.C., Albany, Cleveland, and Brooklyn among other places. On Election Day 2004, I went down to Perkiomen, Pennsylvania, with members of the College Democrats. Sometimes, as was the case last week when we were reporting on the accused rapist's arrest, Spec will even shell out a cab to get our reporters someplace quickly.

So, yeah, tell me what you want to know and I'll try and provide it if for no other reason than that it will give me an opportunity to avoid doing work.

Yay Graphics

Today was a good day for Spec.

When she applied to be Spectator's head production editor, Lana Limon made a major point of working to make our pages more visually appealing and accessible. To that end, over the course of the semester, she has implemented our new top teaser, created a visual identity for Off Lead, added a new logo for Weekend edition, and several other things to liven up our look.

One of her big goals year was to increase the number of cutouts and photo illustrations that we run off of the front page, which, as you can see, came to fruition today. The lead graphics package, illustrating the healthier foods that experts on a nutrition panel advocated for school children, came about for a number of reasons. The idea began at our weekly front page meeting last week, when we discuss all of our visual elements for the following week. The story came in relatively early in the night so we had time to fit the graphic to the story. But mostly, it came about because Lana has been persistent in trying to get this to happen—and for good reason, as our front page today shows.

It's been an all-around good week graphically. If you check the PDF of today's paper, you'll see that Grace's story on Them Earth Meteors, a puzzle-making group on campus, had a very cool layout (that, sadly, doesn't render correctly in the PDF version). And yesterday, we had another Lana design with stick-figure-plus-headshot depictions of the outgoing E-Board councils for CCSC and ESC.

All told, this has been a good week for design.

Visions of '68

Monday night, Robert Friedman, Editor in Chief of Spectator in 1968 came back to the office for the first time since he graduated 38 years ago to talk about his experiences reporting on the Columbia riot.

It's a story that pretty much every has heard by now, and going into the details of it here is unnecessary. What Friedman gave light to, though, was that Mark Rudd, Thomas Hayden, and the other revolutionaries were very much regular guys. Friedman, in fact, had been friends with Rudd and was invited by him to be a part of the strike steering committee. While I've talked to the Columbia students that New York magazine pointed to last week as leaders of the political resurgence on campus—and I'm pretty sure that none of them particularly hate me—I don't think that any of them would invite me to lead a strike with them.

The other thing that gets lost in the retelling of the strike story is the context. Everybody knows that it was 1968 and that they were tumultuous times, but the story that Friedman told about the lead-up to the strike felt an awful lot like the kinds of things that people are doing today. The difference? Whereas "The People who Rushed the Stage," as they were at one point calling themselves, still in many ways seem like like they're outside of the mainstream on campus—just look at how the College Dems have shied away from them this year—SDS was able to gather an enormous coalition of people to protest. When the Columbia Coalition Against the War tried to strike, they got about 300 people; 39 years ago, the coalition reached over 1,000. As Editor John pointed out last night, it seems like that's the inevitable difference between a war that employs the draft and a war that doesn't. Friedman appeared visibly disappointed in the apathy of today's Columbia class to stand up and force the powers that be to get involved in Darfur and to protest the war in Iraq.

After the speech, a few of us went out to 1020 (I drank a Diet Coke) and he told us that of the entire managing board that reported on the '68 riots, he was the only one who had gone into journalism. It was something that struck me as odd, especially considering that nearly everybody else at the table was in one way or another thinking about going into reporting despite not having had that kind of catalyzing experience.

And then we went back to the office, ready to put out yet another issue of Spec. (Just five left this semester.)

What Other Ivy Leaguers Did

I should mention a couple of other notable Virginia Tech-related stories from around the Ivy League. The Daily Princetonian ran a banner headline (see above) with a story about the shooter's sister, who is an alumna of the school.

And then, there's the Daily Pennsylvanian, which sent a team of reporters down to Blacksburg to file two stories from Virginia Tech.

Covering a National Tragedy

The last few days have been particularly hard ones in the office as they have been across campus. We as an office have been deeply affected by Monday's tragic events on the campus of Virginia Tech. A number of people on our staff are from Northern Virginia and have lost people from their towns and counties in a tragedy that hit too close to home.

For us, it was obvious that this was a story that we needed to cover. As a campus with an international student body, devastating events in any part of the world, and especially those here in the United States, have a deep impact on the lives of those who come here.

But at the same time, we don't have the proximity or resources to do the kinds of reporting that are vital at a time like this. We knew that anybody interested in the story would be turning to coverage from The New York Times
the Washington Post and the Collegiate Times for updates.

We considered a number of options. My first thought was to run a story from the Collegiate Times through U-Wire--a wire service which Spec is a member of through which we can use articles from other college newspapers and they can use ours. We considered a number of other angles--getting at-large man-on-the-street type student reaction, trying to do a targeted people-immediately-affected story, or something on the (relatively small) immediate administrative response. It was a hectic news day, with a number of closer-to-home articles covering our front page. There was news of the horifically attacked Journalism school student, the elections of the last of the four undergraduate class council e-boards, and the Pulitzer Prices among other things.

What we ended up with was a story by Amanda about the basic news with quotes from a few student leaders, on Tuesday, my story on Wednesday about increased security precautions and more details about the vigil and today's story about the vigil itself.

Falling Back Asleep

Monday's paper was one where I woke up, looked at it, and wanted to go back to bed.

My sudden pang of not-wanting-to-be-awake-anymoreness stemmed from a well-reported article by Alex on New York's first city-wide Asian American student conference.

Spec has had problems covering Asian American studies at Columbia for a number of reasons. First off, as has been reported before, Spec's staff is disproportionately white. While as reporters, it's not a good excuse to not know what's going on in any community of campus, the fact remains that we as a paper know less about stories that don't affect us personally so we have fewer of them in our paper. I'm always going to know more about conferences centering around the urban studies program--like the exhibit on Robert Moses put on by Hillary Ballon, whose classes I have taken twice--then one centering about Asian American studies. And while we have taken some steps to mitigate this particular issue, appointing Alex Klingenstein to cover Asian American cultural groups on campus, it is just a first step in many that are necessary in bridging an institutional divide.

The second problem we have, and this will sound ridiculous, is a grammatical one. At Columbia, we have a major called Asian American studies. This is a relatively new, evolving, and dynamic discipline that, as part of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, has been at the center of the controversy surrounding what students describe as that program's underfunding and general inadequacies. That said, according to copy style, there should be no such thing as Asian American studies, but, rather, it should be a compound-adjective, or "Asian-American studies." This is a term that those in the program find deeply offensive and in the past when we have made that mistake, we have found ourselves running corrections and letters to the editor. We made that mistake in Alex's article.

But the big mistake was in the headline, which referred to "Asian Studies"--not "Asian American" (or, for that matter, even "Asian-American") studies. Asian studies is the study of a region that, while it exists, was not discussed at the conference and is not a part of the curriculum at Columbia. It's a mistake that I knew and that I should have caught well in advance of the story's going to print, and I spent a good amount of time apologizing to members of the group over the last two days, ensuring that a correction ran, and generally feeling stupid.

For those who don't know, reporters don't write their own headlines. Instead, headlines are written by editors who are on for the night. I'm certain that if the headline had been written by Alex K, the same mistake wouldn't have been made and we could have saved ourselves a correction.

Ombudswoman #3

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

Last week, Barnard President Judith Shapiro announced that she is going to resign, which was pretty big news (we ran two articles on it: here and here). The headline, though, was bigger than the news. Bwog linked to the articles in QuickSpec with the tag: “PREZSHAP TO RESIGN OMG!!! (now, what font size do they use for assassinations or declarations of war?).” And, well, they make a point. While Spectator probably won’t be announcing assassinations or declarations of war any time soon, there is a sense that a headline that big leaves little room for bigger news. And we could have bigger news than the president of Barnard resigning.

How big would the headline be if PrezBo resigned? Or if a top administrator were arrested for tax fraud? Or if Columbia got a donation so large it could beat Harvard’s endowment? Or if Low blew up? I know that none of those things are particularly likely (though they would all make for a good time so far as journalism is concerned and some of them are not completely insane), but if those things happened, our headline really couldn’t get that much larger.

Why does this matter so much? Because as depressing as it may be, more people read the headlines than read the articles in newspapers and because the placement and size of headlines tells readers how important an event or story is. Above the fold or below the fold? Size? Bold? Centered? All these decisions mean something. And if a headline is huge, well, then the news better be that important.

I do think Shapiro’s resignation is a big deal. But so was David Charlow’s suspension, so was the next day’s $400 million donation to Columbia, so was the stage being rushed during the Minuteman Project’s speech last semester. And none of those got headlines nearly as big as Shapiro’s resignation. Nor did SEAS Dean Zvi Galil’s announcement last semester that he was leaving Columbia for Tel Aviv University. And while that announcement was less huge in important ways, that article got a normal one-column lede-article headline that doesn’t compare at all to the size of the Shapiro headline.

Each day’s Spectator is not an isolated group of articles; it is a part of a cohesive whole that is what Spec puts out each day. And that means, the news is all in relation to the news we published before the news we will publish afterward, and that means all that should be taken into account when the headline size is decided.

The headline also looked even bigger because it was all-caps. Spec’s style this semester (and off-and-on in the recent past) has been to run an all-caps headline for the lead article every day. And I am definitely not one who likes to mess with established Spec style, but I would argue that it might be worth considering not running the lead headline all-caps if it is the only article that runs above the fold. (I would also argue that even on regular lead articles that style sometimes makes the news seem bigger than it is.)

A good headline should tell the reader how important an article is and also what is in the article. One of my gripes with The Eye, is that often the headlines on the cover of The Eye do not do a good job telling what the cover article is about, and the cover art (though generally beautiful) only sometimes helps. And without that information, readers are unlikely to open the magazine. (“Generation Why” could be a headline for an article about any number of things.) One good option there might be to run subheadlines off the cover that give a little bit more information about what you’ll get if you open it.

Sports sometimes has a similar problem in that you can’t always tell what sport an article is about. Without a picture or a headline or an indication in the lede, an interested but not overly knowledgeable reader will be lost. I’ve been impressed that sports has been getting better about this. I know the idea of running tags on all sports articles to identify the sport has been bandied back and forth, but barring that, readers must know by the time they get to the lede what sport the article is about. The sports articles have been Web-saved recently with tags identifying the sports, which is definitely a good step, especially because on the Web site you can’t see the pictures the articles are attached to in the print edition to identify the sport.

There is no rubric to tell us exactly how important a piece of news is and how important the headline should be, nor is there a fortune-teller to let us know how a specific piece of news compares to the coming events. But part of a newspaper’s job is to figure all that out and then make decisions that best represent the news and most encourage readers to, well, read.

From Harvard

This week, the Neimann Foundation for Journalism at Harvard hosted the 2007 Christopher J. Georges Conference on College Journalism, an opportunity for editors from seven of the Ivy League's eight daily newspapers plus UMass and Howard to come together for drinks and some world class speakers. Some thoughts from the conference:

If Spec is a predominantly white atmosphere, it's not the only college paper with such a problem. With the exception of the staff from the Howard Hilltop, there was exactly one black editor with just a smattering of Asian American and no Hispanic writers.

George Stephanopoulos, the event's keynote speaker, was dreamy to be sure, but didn't deliver the meatiest of responses in the hour-long question-and-answer period. Among his insights: the campaign system in America works; there is nothing like working in the White House (though he's entered a "permanent place" in his career where he's happy, challenged, and fulfilled); it sucks to freeze on-air; it sucks when you know you didn't ask the follow-up question; it's difficult to find the right level of intensity for interviewing your former colleagues. By far the most interesting response that he gave was about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton as Lethario. It was obvious that Stephanopoulos was personally hurt by the President's "frivolous [and] irresponsible" act that he said wasted an incredible, irrevocable opportunity to do good coming off of the re-election.

After the event, we partied at the Crimson's offices. Compared to Spec's, they're palatial. Their newsroom bullpen is as big as our entire office, has wood floors (contrasted with our linoleum), a fully stocked vending machine (our distributor comes by once every month or so), and PCs (damn Spec and its inflexibly pro-Apple stance). That's not to mention their hallway, multiple floors, big party room, and printing press.

Day two kicked off with a harrowing speech from Dexter Filkins, Iraq correspondent for the New York Times. Some choice quotes: [about suicide bombers] "They always find the head."; [on the boredom of covering bombings] "Once you see your 150th dead body, your 151st doesn't really affect you."; [on what's changed since the war started} "It used to be 'Hey, there's a party at the Washington Post house. ... [Now] we watch videos. We drink. [Goes on to tell story about how Iraqis were targeting alcohol salesmen for a period.]" He also talked for a while about he was almost killed when a mob or Iraqis began to throw bricks at his car right after a suicide bombing--the getaway almost led to them running over a twelve year-old kid.

Mark Whitaker of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive talked about how the future of news media is going to be driven more by exclusive online content like blogs, podcasts, and videos and that the media have done a good job of moving towards that while Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal said that he didn't know what the future of newspapers would be or how to get there. He talked about some of the things that the WSJ had done--getting stock quotes out of print and putting them online, making newspapers narrower, creating a lucrative subscription-based (instead of free) Web site for high end content--and some broader trends within the business (blogs taking the place of daily newspapers, daily newspapers taking the place of weekly newsmagazines, and weekly newsmagazines struggling to find their niche), but didn't have much to say that was encouraging.

In fact, I came away from the conference feeling sad about where journalism is headed. I spent about ten minutes talking to one of the organizers who was an editor in Detroit until I was about 13 and he said, basically, that while the creme de la creme of national newspapers will continue to thrive and that there will always be a market for hyper-local journalism, the mid-size and regional papers are going to continue to see their papers shrink, coverage worsen, bureaus shutdown, and generally spiral downwards for the foreseeable future. We talked about the Detroit News and Free Press --my hometown papers--as examples of those that have incorporated flashier designs but have been suffering journalistically. All weekend, with some of the brightest young journalists in the country, the talk centered on the declining job market, papers cutting their web widths, the "commodification" of information, and the inability of most papers to afford the resources necessary for quality journalism.

I don't know where I'm headed in terms of my career, and it's very possible that I don't become a journalist. But if this weekend is any indication, the choice may well be made for me.

Georges Conference

Hey all,

Sorry that I haven't been blogging like I should. I have lots to say about writing 3,500 word magazine articles and some of the other ridiculousness that has been going on in the last couple of weeks.

For the moment, though, I am in the newsroom of the Harvard Crimson at the end of the first of two days of a conference for Ivy League (plus UMass and Howard) news editors. I'll have plenty to tell when I get back in regular Internet contact. Until then, hope y'all are having a good weekend.

Banner Head 2?

UPDATE: The original article in the Wall Street Journal was originally written by Sally Beatty, not Ben Casselman.

For a long time last night, it looked as though we were going to have our second banner headline in two days.

As the news about John Kluge's major donation began to leak online, we ended up hustling to report. We had been told that we needed to get a reporter to today's announcement in Low, but hadn't been told why, and while we had heard that it was probably going to be a donation of some sort, we had no sense for how big the donation would be or at whom it would be directed.

Thus, our first story on the issue last night attributed most of its information to the Wall Street Journal. From our perspective, it sucks getting beat out by the Journal--we should be able to cover our own home turf better than anybody else. (The bitter sting of defeat was softened minimally by the fact that the reporter for the Journal was former Spectator news editor Ben Casselman.)

But we continued to fire up the phones. In addition to Public Affairs--which wasn't talking beyond a media advisory issued "for planning purposes only" that several news organizations had been sent--I personally called both a Kluge and John Jay scholar,at least one dean, tried contacting a Trustee and a member of the Columbia College Board of Visitors and probably a dozen or so others, but I wasn't getting much traction.

Then, just like with the Shapiro announcement, somebody decided that it was time for us to know what was going on. I got a call from University Spokesman Robert Hornsby--to whom I had already spoken once--offering the paper an interview with President Bollinger to confirm and discuss the details of the gift.

Long story short, we got the interview, were the first ones to post quotes from Bollinger, and got the story confirmed and online first of anybody in the world. Not bad for a day's work.

Alright, I've gotta go now. While I'm not the reporter on today's official announcement, I decided to grab a seat in the back. I see Mayor Bloomberg, Congressman Rangel, and about a half dozen EVPs and deans. I'm really excited to listen.

Banner Headline

The first time that I met President Shapiro, in a briefing with other members of Spec at the beginning of the semester, the first question I asked was "Are you planning to step down?" It may have taken her two months, but we finally have an answer.

When The Crimson announced that Gilpin Faust would be Harvard's newest president, they ran a story patting themselves on the back for getting the news without the key players talking to them. The truth is that stories like this usually involve substantially less sleuthing than they may seem, and are generally the result of a helpful tip.

Thus was the case today. While we had been hearing rumors for months, we couldn't nail them down. And so this morning, one of our most-senior reporters--Kira Goldenberg--got an e-mail inviting her to a special meeting late tonight about a subject to be determined. The information of the meeting was embargoed, and Kira couldn't even tell me until 4:30, and when I swung by Barnard's PR office shortly thereafter, they wouldn't tell me what the news was.

A few thoughts. First off, a banner headline--one that cuts across the top of a page in all six columns--is a rare and exciting thing. We haven't had one all this year. Even Minutemen was only 4.5 columns. (A page is six columns wide.)

Second, the best way to report these stories is to flood the zone, but you also want to have point people run the thing. When we finally got the news, it became clear that we were going to want two stories--one news and one analysis. Today, I put Kira and Hayley Negrin as the main writers on our two top stories and had myself, Kaleigh Dumbach, and Melissa Repko making sure that nothing fell through the cracks.

Third... I couldn't be prouder of our coverage today. Kira's story, while straightforward, has all of the pertinent information, got all the right people, and has all of the quotes and background that we could have wanted. Hayley's story, though, is really something else. From a cold start, with just six hours of reporting, she got such incredible context and color that I can't help but smile, and her story came in as smooth as silk.

Banner headline days are always good days. If you see somebody who was involved in the issue, give him or her a pat on the back--we're all smiling today.

Bedtime.

The Ombudswoman #2

By Elisheva Weiss
For avid readers of Spectator (and let’s not make conjectures about how many of those there are), last week was confusing.


On March 22nd, The Eye published a feature on Columbia athletes, called “Ivy League Hustle.” Last Wednesday, March 28th, the sports section published a column by former sports editor Jon Kamran—“Story on Ivy Athletes Not Based on Fact”—about what he viewed as failures in The Eye’s coverage in that feature. In itself, slightly bizarre for the sports page to publish criticism of Spectator’s magazine, right? But the story got more bizarre because in Thursday’s issue of The Eye, the From the Editor slot contained excerpts from the very same column.


As a reader, this series of events confused me. (It also confused IvyGate, which linked to Jon’s article with “Sports columnist bizarrely furious at own paper’s sports story.”) I couldn’t really understand why a criticism of The Eye—a semi-independent magazine—would find its way to the sports page or how that criticism would find its way back to The Eye. After doing some reporting and finding out what happened, I’d venture that it was more of an anomaly than a reflection on larger problems, but it does point to a few points that should be addressed at Spec.


Firstly, I think it’s important to note that The Eye did a great job keeping the sports section in the loop about this article. Knowing that it was an article that might worry sports, The Eye gave the sports editors advance warning and also shared drafts of the article. If the sports editors had voiced some of their concerns in response to the drafts that were forwarded, perhaps some of this could have been avoided. Maybe not, but communication is key.


Something else that needs to be addressed is the relationship between the daily and The Eye. I know that this is something that the 130th Managing Board (the one I served on) sort of left hanging. I also know that it’s entirely possible—in fact, likely—that Spec’s readers care very little about the relationship between the daily and The Eye. But that divide plays itself out in ways that matter. Because there is communication between the two publications. Because it confused readers when criticism of The Eye ran in the daily. Where exactly does The Eye stand in relation to the daily? Is it independent? What exactly does independence mean? Is there a value to it being that independent? Does shared office space and shared resources mean they are forever intertwined? Is that a bad thing?


Perhaps the most important point: a publication should have a venue for criticism in its own pages. In the daily, that place is the “Letters to the Editor” section on the opinion page. The Eye is enough of its own publication that it should run its own “Letters to the Editor” section. Readers should have a place where they can respond or criticize or praise the coverage the magazine provides. Feedback is important so that a publication can know what its readers are thinking.


Eye editor-in-chief Alex voiced concern about publishing a letters to the editor space when the magazine publishes just 16 pages a week, saying it seemed a bit too self-involved. Alex said that the magazine gets 4-5 letters a week. If those letters say something, especially ones that point to valid criticisms, The Eye has a responsibility to run those letters. Printing the already-voiced criticisms in the “From the Editor” column may have been a one-time solution, but it is not the way things should work. Readers should feel comfortable knowing they can send their feedback to The Eye. Perhaps a compromise that might work is printing letters to the editor every other week. (Fun fact: Former New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger rarely inserted himself in editorial decisions at the paper. He did, however, write letters to the editor, signed “A. Sock.”)


Readers should feel comfortable voicing criticism of Spectator to Spectator. One of the most disturbing complaints at Spectator’s town hall was that students felt like they couldn’t approach Spec with their criticisms—either because they thought there was an inherent bias or they thought the editors wouldn’t care or because they thought it wouldn’t make a difference. Readers need to know that Spec does care about them and is open to hearing their voices


This is not to say that I don’t think columnists should say what they want in their columns, but the question of what sort of criticisms belong where is one that also must be addressed. Last year, when an opinion columnist wrote an inflammatory column about athletes, two former sports editors responded with an opinion submission though either could have responded in a column. Probably the readers of The Eye are different than the readers of the daily’s sports page. (That’s an educated guess, but a pretty good educated guess.) And that’s fine. But if a response and criticism to an Eye article ends up on the sports page, then the response is going to reach a different audience than the article. When should criticism run on the sports page instead of the opinion page? Or in the daily instead of The Eye? Is the answer different when the criticism comes in the form of a column instead of a letter to the editor? Do columnists have a special role that allows them to voice criticism in the less-than-ideal space for such criticism? All questions worth thinking about.

The Never-Ending Quest to Improve Barnard Coverage... Never Ends

Yesterday should have been one of the best days of the year for our Barnard coverage. Our two lead stories were about a) a downward trend in the school's admissions numbers and b) Barnard, like Columbia College, bringing in an actor for its commencement speaker--the difference being that this one was a MacArthur Genius fellow.

It would have been a great day to point to the anonymous commenter who derided our coverage last week, saying "You know who's running but you haven't written an article in a month. I'm guessing you don't plan on polling students like you did for the CCSC elections. Don't claim you represent the councils equally" and showing her or him that there are many days where our Barnard coverage does a great job.

And then, we booted it.

At Columbia, admissions deans have to track thousands upon thousands of applications from all 50 states and dozens of countries worldwide. As a result, it's nearly impossible to arrange an interview for much of the year. We never ran a story this year on Barnard's early decision numbers because after a month of calls and e-mails, Barnard dean of admissions Jennifer Fondiller hadn't gotten back to us with the numbers.

(A similar thing happened last year as well, and we ended up having to run a correction after one intrepid reporter tried to do math. Whoops.)

This year, we were already a week late when we finally got the numbers on Monday night, so I was feeling pressured to get the story into the paper. We received the percentage of people who got in, got a couple of quotes from Dean Fondiller, tracked down an admitted student, and wrote it up for the next day's paper.

The story should have contained the actual number of applicants who were admitted (which would have made the graph that accompanied it more informative). Additionally, the article could have been improved upon by providing greater context and playing up the fact that Barnard's rate actually increased, with an admission rate ten percent higher than last year's.

Oh, Right, This Is for a Class

Hey guys,

It's about time for me to sit down and write the paper that is supposed to accompany this project, and as such, I'm looking for your input! I want to know what you think of the blog, of me, how reading this has affected the way you read the paper--if at all--why you read the blog, why your friends don't, etc. etc.

Please, leave comments, send me an e-mail, or give me a call to set up an interview and we'll talk about the project. Just think of all the fame you'll receive as an interviewee in a paper read by the distinguished Professor Liel Liebovitz!

So, yeah, get in touch.

K4 Continued

When last we checked in on K4, we had reverted to a non-K4-based workflow system. It was slow and inefficient, but, in the end, it worked.

Over the weekend, the paper brought in two ridiculously expensive K4 experts (Well, if journalism doesn't work out...) and spent several hundred dollars getting it back online. Considering the efficiency to be gained from a productive workflow, it was, in my humble opinion, money well spent.

At about 4:30 Sunday afternoon, John came out of the central office, arms raised, and said that K4 was fixed. It was a moment of jubilation.

The moment lasted about seven hours before K4, for no apparent reason, died again. It was especially sad considering that had K4 not gone down, we were on pace to get out of there by about 1 or 1:30, by far the earliest of the semester. We finally got ouat of the office--Web-saving and all--at about 5:30.

The K4 crises continue.

The Ombudswoman #1

While I have received compliments from many of you about the column (Thanks, guys!) the one constant refrain that I have heard is that you want it to be more than just Editor Josh--you'd like to hear what Editor Erin, Editor John, and Editor Oriana among others have to say.

I don't have news for you on any of those fronts, but I can offer you this. As her senior editor project, head copy editor of the 130th Managing Board Elisheva Weiss has begun doing an Ombudswoman column. I have asked her if she would be okay with my reprinting it here and she has assented. So, without further ado, the first of what I hope will be many weeklyish installments of The Ombudswoman:

“The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it be accurate, it follows that it is fair.”

I attended last week’s first-ever Spectator Town Hall and found the concerns raised there both interesting and troubling. One of the concerns that came up was the issue of accuracy at Spectator. Many people there felt like Spec just doesn’t get things right—from facts to quotes. Needless to say, this is a big problem for a newspaper. If people don’t talk to us because they think we’ll misquote them or don’t read us because they think we’re wrong, well, we’re in trouble.

As head copy editor last year, I was in charge of corrections, and I can tell you we ran a lot of them. So many that I had to get taller members of the staff to hang them up on the wall of shame because by the end I could not reach (which might also have something to do with my height, but…). So, first, why do we run so many corrections? Mostly as a result of sloppiness by any number of people from reporter to editor to copy staffer. One of the most frustrating things I found at the town hall was that people assumed Spec is inaccurate on purpose. I don’t think that’s true. I think we make mistakes because we’re working under the pressures of a daily deadline and we’re not nearly as careful as we should be across the board.

I don’t think the mistakes are malicious, but that’s not an excuse for them happening. Some thought on ways to reduce the inaccuracies in the paper:

Cq. Everything. One of the problems that is encountered at a daily newspaper is the issue of checking facts. After the Stephen Glass fiasco at the New Republic, a Slate article contained this: “[T]he joke is not on the New Republic. It’s on the conceit of fact checking in general. No publication is safe from a trusted reporter who makes things up. And hindsight is easy.” That rings true to me. Fact checking, by definition, is faulty. Especially at a daily. But the point of fact checking is that it should catch sloppiness.

Of course, the first step is that reporters should not be sloppy. No one should depend on the copydesk to catch mistakes. I would propose a system in which reporters would be required to send in their articles with a “cq” next to every name indicating that the name has been checked in a reliable source (i.e., the Columbia directory, Facebook, LionLink, the Spec style guide, NOT Wikipedia). Writers should also indicate at the top of the article where the info within is from (i.e., interviews with so-and-so). The point being that reporters should consciously think about where their information is from and if it is correct.

None of this limits the responsibility of the copy desk to check names and look out for unbelievable quotes (like superlatives—always be wary of the most, the only, the first), but it just means that there’s that extra chance that things will be accurate. And the copydesk should never have to find a misspelled name. Ever.


I understand that this system might take time to implement logistically but encouraging everyone to take more responsibility will necessarily make the papers more accurate.

Invest in voice recorders. A quick perusal of the Internet showed that there are at least some digital voice recorders available for about $40 each. If Spec bought a number of them and lent them out, like photo does with camera equipment, then there could be a requirement to record all interviews and save the recordings for a week after the article is published. This will make interviewees feel more secure and will provide an easy way to determine whether someone has actually been misquoted. Until that happens, there are many people on staff who have recorders and are willing to lend them out, so feel free to ask your editor if you would like the use of one.

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Communication. Often facts get screwed up because people make assumptions when they don’t understand something instead of turning around and asking the relevant person. And you know what happens when you assume… The office is not that big. Talk to people. Ask the right questions. Get things right.

Keep a corrections log. Every time we ran a correction last year, there was more than one version of where the mistake happened. This could be solved with a sort of corrections log. I know this has been suggested and is being instituted in some form in the news section. But I envision a form that has to be filled out any time a correction is published in any section. There should be room for input from the reporter, the section editor, and the head copy editor, trying to pinpoint where the failure happened. These forms would then be kept in a file. That file could be evaluated on, say, a monthly basis and then appropriate steps could be taken.

On cleaning up quotes. I could write an entire column on the use of quotes (hmm, maybe I will…), but just a few quick thoughts: the way you choose to use quotes and the context you include can make a big difference in the way someone is understood. Don’t write that people think, write what they said. Don’t write that people represent a greater group if they were talking for themselves. (For instance, just because I say something doesn’t mean that is the position of Spec.) In short, be careful.

The Spec Style Guide. [Gratuitous plug.] The most comprehensive version is currently lost somewhere in cyberspace with the rest of Piana, but check out a version of the style guide on the Spec wiki—Besides for style concerns, there are a lot of facts there that can be helpful, especially about administrators’ titles and random historical Columbia trivia. Take a look.

So Wonderfully Dorky

This weekend, I spent probably eight hours making my computer run more happily/quickly/prettily because, well, I'm a dork to the extreme. I got WindowBlinds so I could ape some of the cool glassy effects that Windows Vista is doing and did a couple of other minor things.

But the thing that's really been sticking in my craw as of late had been my extraordinarily lame screen savers. Jealous of my Mac-toting friends, I had found an RSS reader, but that had a pretty inefficient and was making my computer run extraordinarily slow.

So I decided to create my own journalistically-based screen saver. I wanted to make it a pretty visual thing, so I had the idea to base it off of Newseum, which provides 500+ front page images every morning. I almost never have the time to check them, but they are a great way of picking up design ideas. Here, I thought, would be an excellent way to have a geek-chic screen saver that also served a purpose.

That said, Newseum doesn't have an RSS feed, so I had to figure out how to get all of the images. My first thought was to DownThemAll each morning using a Firefox plugin. The problem was, though, that the images on the gallery page of Newseum are quite small--too small to be legible. Thus, I would have had to click and download each page individually every morning. Not fun.

So what I found was an automatic download scheduler which I could program to download any image I wanted. Fortunately, Newseum saves every day's front page image with the same file name to the same URL. Thus, I only had to type in the URLs of each jpeg that I wanted once, set the program up to pull them all down ten minutes after they were uploaded to the site each morning, create a new folder for them all to go to, and direct my Windows photo slideshow screensaver to the folder to pull the photos up.

And the results? Tres magnifique!

(I'm such a dork.)