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.
2 comments:
you missed the point. the comment was about sga coverage, not admission rates. please address the point about doing no coverage of sga elections. there has been no article in well over a month and there were tons of front page articles about ccsc elections. i don\\\'t care how many numbers you get in the admissions story, you\\\'re not covering the student group elected to represent the school.
I don't know who this anonymous commenter is, but this is something I've been thinking about for a long time. Spec runs a ton of Barnard stories, and for several years have improved in GS coverage as well. Yet, the weekly complaints still stream in. The reason for the CCSC coverage, if you read the articles, was that there were additional issues to uncover about them. As for SGA elections, we ran one March. 5 story the minute we knew who was running for e-board, then found we could no longer write any such stories because the candidates aren't allowed to campaign until this week. There were not "tons" of ccsc election articles. There was coverage of rules violations, debates, a page-long profile (which we are doing of equal length for all council elections, see the paper next week for SGA and GSSC), and the beginning of campaigning--which we won't do for SGA since it is of such short length and would be redundant with the page of profiles we're running Tuesday for SGA.
I agree whole-heartedly that all councils should receive equal play, but I would argue this is the year we've done the best job of parity in coverage, to the extent that we could do it. Please let Kaleigh Dumbach, the SGA beat reporter, know if there are debates she can cover this week. We're all trying, keep your feedback coming, it's helpful and reflective of mutual consideration, but keep in mind there are rules that we want to respect as well, to a certain extent.
Not saying you're not right, just throwing in my albeit-limited perspective as a deputy editor overseeing campus politics coverage.
All the best,
Tom
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