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.