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.