Flooding the Zone

So, I only have a couple of minutes between things, but I wanted to make a quick post about how we've been reporting Ahmadinejad. (Also, for those who want a Nadia recap, I'll get it after this craziness is over next week.)

When we first got the word from Public Affairs that this was a go, I sent an e-mail to all of the news deputies asking them to come into the office. We pulled out a giant whiteboard and started making a list of all of the people we needed to call. Then, as people flowed into the office, we sent them to the whiteboard and told them to sign their name next to a source and start calling.

That all started at about 6:30. The problem, as noted in the article, is that nobody was talking. The majority of student leaders who we wanted to talk to were in this session where they were churning out the student leaders' statement, and if they weren't there, they were on the phone talking to them or in class and weren't inclined to make a statement. So we had something like eight people making phone calls to students, faculty, and administrators, and nobody responding to them, save for Public Affairs and Dean Coatsworth.

At eleven, people started getting out of sessions and calling us. We had five people working the phones, and as the quotes came in, we e-mailed them among ourselves. At some point, we divided up into groups, huddled around computers, and started pulling all of the quotes together into coherent stories. The writing took less time than you might think--maybe forty minutes per story--but it was only because we had all of the notes coming in from everybody.

Thursday was different. There was the closed-door meeting with student leaders where we couldn't get everybody. I asked for and was granted a seat in the room, so that's how we got that story.

As for Monday's coverage, on Thursday night we sent out an e-mail to everybody who writes for us asking for volunteers. Yesterday, the news board met in my dorm room and we talked about what stories we were running and how many people we needed to write them. We then divided up the writers, distributing them to the different stories, and sent everybody off to report. We are sending a dozen or so e-mails every hour across our aliases to keep in touch of what's going on. Meanwhile, the bloggers are taking the best stuff and posting it live. This model--getting lots of reporters filtering things back into a few stories--is going to be the model we keep going on for the next couple of days as things keep happening.

Back to work. Keep checking the blog at www.columbiaspectator.com/ahmadinejad for updates.

Wow.... Yeah, Wow

So, to recap the last few days:

• A police officer said to a non-compliant Asian student “Have you had too much sake tonight?”


• Our best lead photo of the year on a fantastic story with a Washington D.C. dateline.


• A couple of fantastically-reported stories about some sketchiness going on regarding Collegeboxes.


• A friggin' nine story issue!


• A flood in Carman?!?!?!


• A link from the Wall Street Journal for our coverage of Michael Mukasey's expected (since-actualized) nomination of former Spectator Editorial Page Editor Michael Mukasey to the Attorney Generalship.


• And, just when we thought it was all over, Minutemen!

Going on almost no sleep, I have very few coherent thoughts on these events, but the one thing that I want to emphasize is how important new writers have been to the whole thing. Of course, Josh Chambers, Monica Varman, and Sarah Cohler had bylines. Beyond that, three first-years have been scouring through the archives for old pieces done under Mukasey's board. Further, their energy and excitement is freeing up some of the more-senior writers to finally write analysis pieces that they have been working on for months.

The only other thing I would add is that news is unpredictable, and as such, I have spent an inordinate number of nights in this office well past four, and I would never trade this experience for anything. (If you want to know why, just look at our front page this morning.) But if we do end up talking to you about a late-breaking news story, it's really nice when you are generally pleasant and call as early as possible as the people we talked to tonight did.

Sleep.

The E-Mail, The Quote, and The Decision

Wednesday's paper includes a quote from CCSC President Michelle Diamond in which she says of SGB Chair Jonathan Siegel: "that kid needs to be put in his place."

The story and the quote bring up the some of the more interesting ethics issues we've confronted this year, and it's worth taking a minute to explain how an alleged—and allegedly bygone—feud between the heads of the SGB and CCSC made it into a story about Community Impact.

The story began on Saturday when members of the CI board called me to express their displeasure with our coverage of the activities fair. In the pullout, CI groups were not included in a map of clubs which would be attending the fair (a problem which arose from an incomplete listing being sent to us from the office of Student Development and Activities) and were left out of a chart on how the Funding at Columbia University process works. (Our bad.) Additionally, they expressed confusion as to why SGB's 13 percent increase in funding deserved a story but their 10 percent cut didn't.

In discussing those and a few other concerns, the CI executives mentioned that their activities fair was being held today, which gave us a hook for a new story on CI. I pulled together a few writers and asked them to look into the funding cut. They came back with CI stating several concerns about the F@CU process--concerns which we had heard before but had never been able to fully explore. The reporters also tried looking for some other people who had concerns about the funding procedures.

Enter Jon, who said he thought the process was "arbitrary"--that the F@CU board, made up of the incoming and outgoing council presidents, decided on a number and then figured out a justification later. This was something that seemed to be borne out by CI's complaint that they hadn't received an explanation for the full amount of their cut.

The problem was that we had heard rumors for months--seemingly confirmed by the e-mail, which we received over the summer--that there was ongoing animosity between Jon and Michelle. (Michelle was one of the people in charge of proscribing the SGB allocation, which Jon had said he thought was lower than it should have been.) Given this background, Jon's criticism the system took on another potential context, one which we felt our readers should know.

It was this chain of events--CI's complaints about our coverage, leading to a new CI story, leading to their complaints about F@CU, which were supported by SGB's complaints, which were balanced against the apparent personal issues at hand--which led to the quote getting published, and the decision was only made after close to an hour of discussion within the office. Neither Jon nor Michelle, after hearing the quote would run, asked us to pull it, though they both stated their reservations and, as shown in their quotes, indicated that the two were getting along.

Anyways, that's the way it happened.

A word from our production editor about the redesign

[Editor's note: There's a touch of egg on our face—the original version of this post was written on low sleep and never made it to a copy editor, so it was pretty choppy. Apologies to those that suffered through the first draft, and our heartfelt thanks to Bwog for showing some mercy when it didn't have to.

As far as the content of the post, it's fair to say we've gotten mixed feedback about the print redesign. The intent, as Lana points out below, was to modernize Spectator's visual character and bring it in line with the growing ranks of stylish metropolitan dailies. As part of that effort, we've introduced sleeker fonts, narrower headline styles, wider spacing, and more teasers for inside content. Some seem to like the final product; others, as we've learned, aren't so fond.

We've tweaked a couple of elements in the past few days—caption size and body font, in particular—but we're certainly open to more suggestions. I can promise you it's not our goal to put out a paper that readers find visually unappealing, so if there's anything that bothers you about the new look of the Spectator, please comment away. We'll be reading.

Okay then. Back to fixing the Web site.

-John Davisson]

Back when print media were the primary means of delivering news, people would sit down and read papers attentively, flipping through the text-only pages and slowly digesting the day's events.

But that paradigm went out with bellbottom jeans and the Bedazzler. Planet Earth still rotates on the same axis, but it's infused with more colorful images, memorable advertisements, and shiny neon signs.

The institution of print news has been one object of these changes, and that’s where the production section comes in. Our job is to give the print edition of the Spectator a visual aesthetic—something snappy, easy to grasp, and informative that will entice readers to pick up the paper while sauntering down Broadway. Let’s face it: more and more, rapid-fire information and striking graphics are what readers want. The more accessible and pleasing to the eye, the better (in general).

Traditionally, that description hasn't applied to Spectator's look and feel. Teasers were few, graphics packages were fairly simple, and, for the first couple of years in broadsheet, the only source of color was photos. So, in January of this year, the Spectator went under the knife and came out looking just a bit younger.

Last semester’s tune-up was significant in that it brought the Spectator a bit more up to speed with the 21st century, but it was just a start. This semester, we’ve done a more significant ground-up redesign to bring you the crème de la crème, the cat’s “meow.” It’s a feel, we think, that embraces and reflects the creativity of Columbia University.

Though the Spectator will never be perfect, I believe we've snuggled up a little closer to it with this redesign. Enjoy!

--Lana Limón

If you feel compelled to join us in our graphical ventures, please e-mail lana.limon@gmail .com for Production training information.

Student Groups

At last spring's Spectator Town Hall meeting, one of the main points which was raised is that Spec did not cover students and student groups.

"Staff writers do a very good job at covering things that the administration does, especially when it's misbehaving," former Spec columnist Six Silberman, SEAS said at the town hall before going into point about how that coverage comes at the expense of students. Former student senator Danielle Wolfe, BC '07, raised the fact that she had no idea who on Spec was responsible for covering one of her clubs--Malama Hawaii--while a member of the Muslim Students Association asked me if I was on the MSA listserv. (I was not.)

It was a point that didn't sit well with us. Over the last five years, there has certainly been an increase in the amount of coverage of the administration that has occurred as the paper has grown in size and seriousness. But I don't believe that people on the paper fully appreciated the effect that this reallocation of resources had on students' perceptions of what we cared about.

It feels weird to quote an administrator in this, but President Bollinger--who has to worry about all of the different communities within the University as well as many beyond it--is fond of saying that students and student groups are the "life blood" of Columbia, and it is a belief that I, as well as the other student leaders of the paper, agree with wholeheartedly. After the Town Hall, we went back to the office and asked ourselves what we needed to do to reassert this effort.

The first step, I believe, was marked by the Town Hall itself--an active process of reaching out to students and getting their feedback. There will be several other forms of this occurring in coming months, with a meeting for presidents of student clubs scheduled for later this month and a readership survey which is in the works.

On Friday, we published what I believe is the clearest example of stage two of this process that we have yet had--improved coverage. Over the summer, we hired five or so beat reporters whose sole goal is to cover student groups and appointed Laura, who spent most of last semester in this role, as a deputy to oversee them. Over the past month, they have been working to divide up every club on campus such that they will all A) have a beat reporter and B) know who it is. We have also been reaching out to the clubs and asking them for story ideas and, as today's online spread shows, information about themselves.

Certainly there is more work to be done, and no solution would be adequate without improving the level of representation among different groups on the paper so that we can actually hear in the newsroom what people are talking about and what stories matter. Further, this spread wasn't perfect--we left Community Impact off of a chart and some people have argued with our focus. But we hope that today's spread and the actions of the past several months--as well as those in the months to come--will go some distance towards reasserting in the minds of students that we are, first and foremost, a student newspaper.

We're Back Into It Now

As I write this, we are (hopefully) less than three hours to our first issue of the year. For those of you who have been religiously checking the Spec RSS feed all summer (and I know you all did), this issue will have little by way of new information. The lead story is a compilation of articles about Columbia's attempt to rezone a chunk of West Harlem for its proposed new campus, and the main campus-side stories are the obituaries of two students whose deaths we covered over the summer. In some cases, we life full paragraphs from previous stories, which raises the question: Isn't plagiarizing from yourself and reprinting your own content a little sketchy?

This is actually the second time in as many weeks that this issue has come up. As Bwog rightly noted last week , our orientation issue was less than "utterly original."

For me, the answer comes from the belief that we did a good job on many of these stories the first time and there wasn't much to change. So on the list of 116 things that you should do before you graduate, we combed through to make sure that we weren't telling people to go to Casbah Rouge, Nacho's, or any other non-existent restaurants. Further, in many cases, there wasn't additional original reporting to be contributed--we can't recreate a memorial service for Tanya Hanley to cull new quotes, nor can I see any reason to try, and the ULURP documents didn't change between when we first looked at them several weeks ago and tonight.

As for why rerun the stories at all, the answer to that lies in numbers. These events are clearly newsworthy to those on campus and in the neighborhood as a whole, but they were seen by far fewer people than they would have been during the year. We print 10,000 copies of Spectator every day during our production cycle, and we can normally expect another 12,000 or so hits on the Web site. During the summer, those numbers plummet to 0 and 2,500, respectively.

So for all of you Spec junkies out there, forgive us the partial recap, delve yourselves into the new content which is placed in the issue as well, and explore our prettttty new Web site. Everybody else--welcome back. We've missed you all.

Web site down

You may have noticed that our Web site is currently down. Tonight is our first night of production, and we guarantee that the site will be back up for our first issue when you all wake up tomorrow morning.