The Stories Behind Spec

Flooding the Zone

2007-09-22T17:23:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-18T03:13:00.001-04:00

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

2007-09-12T03:19:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-10T13:30:00.000-04:00

[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

2007-09-07T19:09:00.001-04:00

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

2007-09-03T22:53:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-03T14:00:00.001-04:00

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.

Blogging Orientation

2007-08-30T18:08:00.000-04:00

The news section hasn't had that much success with blogs.

The big one was two years ago. That was when we launched SpecBlogs, a new media initiative which experienced a number of problems. First and foremost was a matter of staffing -- SpecBlogs didn't have a full set of content contributors and so if nobody wrote on a given day, there wasn't much accountability. Beyond that, though, was a greater problem of consistency. I once wrote a 1,000 word analysis on the University's sexual assault policy and another post giving a floor-by-floor description of what would be found in the Nexus (a document, by the way, which I wish I still had. Sadly, once the now-defunct SpecBlogs shutdown, all of the content was lost.) These competed with quippy and quirky 100 word writeups and free food announcements. There were pieces about Columbia, pieces about college in general, and pieces that were apparently random to everything else. It was generally all good content, but so scattered that it was hard for anybody to latch onto it.

Meanwhile, Bwog launched within a week of SpecBlogs with a real staff, a stronger sense of what their mission was, a consistent feel to the articles, and regular features. At least during the week, they updated something like five times daily to make their site something to come back to frequently. They were getting readers and we weren't. This made writing for the derisively-dubbed "Splogs" a venture with little payoff, and nobody wanted to write for it, which meant fewer posts, fewer people checking the site, and... you can see the vicious circle. The people who might have had an interest in blogging mostly went over to the Blue and White, and at some point, after something like two weeks without a single post, it went down with a whimper.

There's something else, too. It was clear from many of the comments that a large number of students were sick of the one-paper campus and were happy to see a little competition from a regular news source that felt a little less buttoned down. The crashing of SpecBlogs turned me off of the idea of Spec putting out a comprehensive campus blog and I have never looked back.

That said, the spark in the first few weeks of the blog before it came tumbling down as well as the continued success of Bwog proved that it was possible-even for Spec --to put out a blog that people enjoyed. I'm a guy who reads a lot of blogs--my Google Sidebar currently lists 24 feeds and there are more in a ticker that moves across the bottom of my Firefox browser, and news writers like being able to blog because it's so much faster and less-restricted than the paper is.

The trick, as the Housing blog, College Dems Midterm Election 2006 blog, and the Orientation blog (Averaging more than 300 hits per day and it got linked to by Gothamist --not bad for almost no advertising) I believe have shown, is to keep it focused. Spreading ourselves out across dozens of content areas or trying to do a job which needs five hours of work per day with a diffuse staff is going to put out a crappy product. But if we set limits on what we're doing--focus on a specific topic or for a specific amount of time--it's totally manageable. I would imagine that, at least for the news section going forward, blogging that gets done will be done along this model.

More Thoughts on Orientation Issue

2007-08-27T02:03:00.000-04:00

It's amazing what happens when you post to a blog.

Visitors to Editor Josh on these days

8/19: 2

8/20: 5

8/21: 0

8/22: 4

8/23: 5

8/24: 1

8/25: 4

8/26: 41

I guess I'll keep updating.

So the Orientation issue gets put together much differently than does anything else. If you look at the special issue masthead, you'll only see 14 names on there. That's because the paper is pulled together in its entirety by the people at the top. Of those 14 names, nine of them are for people on the managing board (Dani, Amanda, Erin, Ian, Anjali, Lana, Andrew, Oriana, Me). That's because we pull the issue together while it's still summer and we want to let the maximum number of people enjoy summer to the fullest possible extent.

What that means, though, is that we end up filling roles that we wouldn't normally end up doing. Amanda, for example, received two bylines, or half of what she wrote in all of the normal issues last semester, while I got four bylines and a contribution tag.

Certainly the oddest role, though, was that I ended up doing design. Not only is one of my photos included in the front page montage (brownie points if you can guess which one), but I ended up doing some production as well. Having spent a lot of time on Adobe software this summer ( Spectator is laid out using Adobe InDesign), I wanted to get a chance to see what the production people did. With a reduced staff and a time crunch, it was just the opportunity, and I spent a good amount of time helping to layout the front and back covers as well as the opinion page.

I came out of it with a renewed appreciation for the work that Lana, Maria, Danielle, Mady, Connie, and the others who layout the news pages on a nightly basis. With the exception of having their names written in minuscule font on the masthead, they never get enough credit for the long hours that they put in behind the scenes. They are vital to the paper, and we could not function without them. (Plug for any first-years reading this: If you are interested in joining their ranks, come to one of our Open Houses over the next few weeks. We'd love to have you on board!)

As for the final product, I'll leave that for you to judge except to say that I was proud enough of how the issue came out to want to e-mail the link to my family.

Welcome to Columbia. Would you care for some cynicism?

2007-08-25T17:40:00.000-04:00

For several reasons, Orientation issue is among my favorites of the year. This is our chance to form a first impression, to show that Spectator is a useful resource, focused on and and an irreplaceable tool for students. While we have to retain our reporterly neutrality, we also can get away with being a little bit hopeful. Further, the issue serves as one of our best recruitment tools, (hopefully) showing students and their parents that we are able to put out a professional-feeling product that might look good later on a resume.

The interesting thing about Spec is that, in many cases, Spec staffers don't actually like Columbia and Barnard. There are a number of factors that contribute to this: Reporting requires a high level of skepticism and cynicism; we get a closer view than most of the not always pretty process of how the sausage that runs the University gets made; and many top editors end up spending so much time on the paper that academics takes a backseat to it. Thus, when it comes down to it, the office often exudes a negative attitude towards the school that we are all paying so much money to attend.

And that's the real reason that I love the Orientation issue. As somebody who has had incredible experiences as a result of coming to this school I wear my school spirit on my sleeve. No, the University isn't perfect, but I love it here, and I love getting others excited about wearing the Columbia blue.

We'll get back to digging deeper and exploring what goes wrong next week. And, yeah, even here we deliver some honest criticism of the school. (See: Melissa's "This Wasn't in the Brochure" or my "official" guide to NSOP.) But for this one issue before classes start, as encapsulated by the annual list of 116 Columbia traditions or the front cover, we have a chance to look back over our times here and show our appreciation for the school.

Go Lions!

Josh

And... We're back

2007-08-25T02:33:00.000-04:00

After a three month hiatus, Editor Josh is back open for business.

While I haven't been updating the blog over the past three months, we have been doing a lot of work on the site. We followed breaking news on the ongoing Manhattanville expansion, Barnard's leaving the U.S. News and World Report rankings, University hirings, and--sadly--two student deaths. I even wrote a city-side story. By my count, we posted 40 stories, averaging close to one every other day--not bad considering we were spread across multiple continents when we did it.

In addition, we have been preparing for the coming semester, and in the coming weeks, you can expect to see a completely overhauled Web site with new functionality, some big stories which are breaking, a couple of analysis pieces that we have been working on all summer, and updates on everything that happened while you were gone from the neighborhood. Plus, there are some big changes coming to little old Editor Josh as well. Keep checking back here in the coming days and weeks as we make our way back into the year.

Josh

Year-in-Review Gaffe

2007-05-26T12:02:00.001-04:00

I should have responded to this comment made the blog earlier. Chris writes:

"can you explain how you managed to misspell the names of three of the most prominent activists on campus on the cover of the end of the year issue? we have a hard time believing diversity coverage is such a big deal when your fact-checking process manages to miss the only three names of black students you included. one step forward, four steps back."

There's no question that this is an obscene-seeming error. As Chris rightly points out, at a time when we as a paper are truly trying to improve our diversity coverage, just weeks after the botched story about the Ethnic Studies teach-in, this mistake seemingly confirms to those communities that have felt ostracized by us in the past and to whom we have attempted to reach out that we just don't care.

The basic answer for how we managed to misspell the names is exactly what Chirs said: We didn't fact-check the cover.

As I have said before, there is a lengthy editing process on every article that we do, and this was adhered to for the Year-in-Review. I spent a few hours in the office on Friday night doing the first set of reads and then got into the office at about 10:30 a.m. Saturday morning for a 12-hour editing stint. Erin and I, Jon and Jon, and Ian were all there editing copy as Mady and Lana laid out the page. At about seven, the production editors had to go (It was, after all, finals week) but Erin, Ian, John, Amanda, and I stuck around to do a few sets of printouts on the news content. When I left the office that day, we were set to go on the content.

But the cover hadn't gone through a single read. Lana was coming in the next day to finish it up. I showed up as well to make a couple of suggestions that I knew I had. When I got there, I saw Amanda, she said she would take care of it, and I went to the Math library to study for stats. The cover was never read by myself or by copy, and as such, the mistakes slipped through. It's a sad coincidence--but a coincidence all the same--that Jenni, Christien, and Bryan were the three people whose names we misspelled.

Hiatus

2007-05-22T23:48:00.001-04:00

Yeah, I'm going to stop pretending that I'm going to publish regularly over the summer. Editor Josh will return at full strength in the fall, and there may be a few posts in the interim, but for now, I'm going dark. Leave me questions and comments and I promise I'll check and respond to them regularly.

Transitions

2007-04-28T21:23:00.001-04:00

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

2007-04-25T15:02:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-24T18:48:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-19T21:09:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-19T02:43:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-18T11:35:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-17T02:08:00.000-04:00

“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

2007-04-15T20:12:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-13T23:28:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-04-11T10:52:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-10T05:20:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-08T20:38:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-05T20:40:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-03T13:41:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-02T12:48:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-01T18:05:00.000-04:00

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.

f

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

2007-04-01T17:34:00.000-04:00

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.)

CCSC v. ESC--The War Wages On

2007-03-31T05:28:00.000-04:00

On October 23, 1890, the Columbia Spectator ran the most insanely ridiculous article ever.

"With this issue Barnard College makes her bow--we beg the young ladies' pardon, her courtesy [curtsy]--to our readers. It is, for the present at least, our intention to make the news of our sister school a regular--and of course a pretty--department of our paper.

In if the course of time, however, we find that our sister students, prepossessing and spirituelle though they be, are not interesting and alert, we shall indeed feel obliged to sacrifice their publicity to more pressing news!

We shall, therefore, anxiously await from our correspondent the account of something 'real naughty and shocking' to keep alive interest. We should not like to suggest a love affair with a tutor; but if such an event came to pass spontaneously in the course of time, nothing could be further from our profession of impartiality than to restrain the news of it."

We have--I hope, at least--come a long way since then. That said, for time immemorial, one of the things that Spectator has been called out is that our coverage creates [or, more charitably, reflects] a hierarchy among the four undergraduate schools.

Knowing the prevalence of this concern, one of my goals coming into this position was equalizing our coverage across the four schools, and especially their councils and elections.

The problem, though, is what do you do when every school has a different system? CCSC is most open. Not only do their candidates usually leak that they're planning to run well in advance of the start of elections, they also have the longest campaign season, the greatest number of candidates, and the largest number of voters.

Compare that, for example, to the ESC. I lived on the same floor as president-elect Liz Strauss last year and we have a relatively good relationship, but she wouldn't even confirm off-the-record that she was running for president until the actual registration came (and even then, she was asleep and unavailable for comment. I never even knew that Eash--who also lived on the floor--was considering a run. The ESC announces their E-Board candidates on a Monday... and vote on Tuesday. There are no accusations of SGB bribes because there are no endorsements to buy off, no public debates to cover, and definitely no death threats because it's all done internally.

Barnard, in the same vein, disqualifies candidates who announce their candidacies before the date. And as far as GS goes, it's hard to get too much debate moving among a sub-1,200 student body among whom many are part time, the vast majority life off-campus, and who as a general rule don't care about their political representatives.

I'll leave that question open and invite you all to compare our CCSC and ESC coverage over the last two weeks in regards to parity for yourselves. But I did want to bring up a point that Owen, last year's campus editor, made last year when he got flak about the difference in article placements regarding CCSC and ESC election results--judging based solely on size or placement is an inherently flawed measure.

For some reason, I can't find a PDF of today's front page, but if you look at it, you'll see an enormous photo beneath a four-column headline. On the other hand, last week's story on Strauss being named president, while also in the upper-right hand corner, is only 1.5 columns wide with a smaller column below the article.

But look at the photos! We had a photographer sitting in the Satow Room for five hours waiting for a decent shot of Strauss and none ever presented itself. They didn't go out partying or drinking afterwards, and were generally unphotogenic. The best we could do is get this canned shot. Also, looking at the PDF, you can see Dani Zalcman's gorgeous shots from the alternative spring break in New Orleans.

On the other hand, this might be the best shot that we've had on our front page this semester. Also, the CCSC elected three class boards, three at large reps, and two Senators on top of the E-board, and the elections, in which about 1,500 people voted, were contested by some 56 odd candidates. For the ESC, a few dozen people voted on fewer than ten candidates for just five positions.

I'm not sure that I made any solid points here or led to any conclusions--personally, I'm not sure where the right balance lies, though I think we've done better this year than we did last year when Dan Okin's election was stuck at the bottom let of the page--but I simply wanted to say that these are complicated and difficult decisions.

Waiting for K4

2007-03-29T03:35:00.000-04:00

I think it's about time that I introduced you all to a little friend of the office. The so-called "work-flow software" does wonderful things for the paper. Basically, it creates an automatic routing system so articles are read by editors in the correct succession and that no two editors are changing the article at the same time. It also allows for our production associates to layout the pages as editors are reading them. Articles automatically update in the layout as editors retool them, meaning that both finish at about the same time. It's hard to imagine what our job would be like without it.

But K4 giveth and K4 taketh away, and when K4 goes down, it makes all our lives a living hell. K4 can go down of its own accord, without warning, and when it does, we are usually crippled until we can get it back. Also, because the articles are so intertwined with our network, anytime that the network goes down, K4 goes down with it. This has happened more frequently this semester than I can remember in the past--though it's possible that I'm just more aware of it now--and has meant far more long nights that we would otherwise have.

Now, normally, when K4 goes down, it comes back up within about twenty minutes. On bad nights, it can go down for forty or fifty.

Right now, we are approaching our second hour without K4.

There is a backup plan for cases like this, but it isn't pretty. Every editor goes through the story one by one, e-mailing between each other as we go and praying that nothing else goes wrong. Once all of the articles are finished being edited, we then have to paste them on the page and, because we haven't been retooling the story sizes all night long, usually results in an additional forty minutes of playing with margins and making things fit.

So as K4 sits down [and I pretend I don't have a presentation on my term paper in class tomorrow], let's look into the grab bag.

Anonymous asked: "How does the Spec go about training reporters?"

The answer is actually pretty simple. We take a two-pronged approach. The first is a series of five or six classes talking about the fundamentals of journalism and how Spectator functions.

The first is about Spec's organizational structure, where we tell them how their stories go from idea to paper.

The second is a basic overview of how to report where we cover such topics as how to take down a quote and how not to make up facts--sounds simple, actually quite difficult and something that takes some time to fully grasp. [Just took 25 minute break to start placing stories. They're still going but I'm no longer able to help in the process at all.]

Day three covers how to write, touching on the basic inverted pyramid as well as some thoughts on features.

After the third session, trainees are eligible to start reporting. The fourth session is always about the structure of Columbia and usually touches on controversies or big issues that are ongoing within our coverage area. The last one or two sessions tend to vary based on who the training editors are--we have done courses on diversity in the office and in our coverage, legal issues faced by reporters, how to write a good feature, mock interviews, etc. In the last week, we always have a party.

But training doesn't end with the last training session. For the first several stories that they write, new reporters are required to come into the office and line-edit the article with the associate who is on for the night. After some number of stories--usually at some point between six and ten--or at the end of the semester when many of the new writers take on beat, wee promote the trainees to staff writers. For those of you playing at home, you can tell the distinction by the "qualine" that appears under writers' names. "Columbia Daily Spectator" indicates that the person is still a trainee or contributor, while "Spectator Staff Writer" indicates a training graduate.

As for Spec's relationship with CSPA, there really isn't one. I just happened to be working there to get some case over spring break.

More answers from the grab bag next time. Back to layout.

Late Nights, Long Mornings

2007-03-28T13:29:00.001-04:00

Columbia's administration works on a different clock than Columbia's students.

I don't mean that statement as a dig in any way, but rather, simply as a statement of fact. They've all done the college thing and by now, all of the spokesmen and deans and EVPs have jobs that stop at the end of the day and families that don't. (The number of high-profile people at this school who have young children and still manage to put in 8, 10, 12 hour days always amazes me. You think we as students have it bad? Try earning enough money to pay NYC rents and making time to spend with your two year-old twins on top of whatever you do for school in a job where you often have to deal with crises that affect a University population of 65,000 people--more.)

And so it makes sense that when Spec is doing its reporting, many of our faculty and administrative sources have better things to do than to talk to us. At least one administrator puts his children to bed every night while another will set up a meeting with you basically anytime you like so long as he gets to have dinner with his children. Further, while students often give us information at 11, midnight, or one in the morning that makes it into the next days paper, administrative sources are asleep.

So what happens when, as has happened in both of the last two days, we receive breaking news about a big story that would seem to necessitate an administrative response. On Monday, we reported that students had been disciplined in the University's highest-profile news cycle all year, while last night we carried a quote by Karina Garcia, one of the censured students, which read: "They bowed to right-wing pressure. It's noteworthy that Columbia reserved the harshest punishment for Latinos-two Mexican-Americans and one Dominican."

So how does the Spec balance the need to report the news with the need to be responsible? It's handled on a case-by-case basis. On Monday, since we had our news relatively early in the day--around six p.m.--it involved a number of communications between Tom Faure, who reported the story, myself, and University officials.

Last night, though, we got our news--and Garcia's quote--at midnight, well after what we know to be the bedtimes of officials in the Office of Public Affairs. We put in a hopeless call, but had to decide whether or not to run the quote. If we run it and provide the University only a longshot opportunity to comment, it makes us seem uncritical in our reporting. If we don't run the quote, we risk marginalizing people who support Garcia's contention Spec.

The decision was made during a half hour meeting between myself, the managing editor, and the editor in chief. After reading through the piece again at two in the morning, we decided to run the quote (as Bwog readers have clearly noted). We believe that it's the right decision, though we can certainly see and understand how an opposite argument could be made, and I have been sitting in classes this morning with my stomach churning going back and forth about the pros and cons.

In any case, I guess my point is that we don't make these decisions lightly.

Breaking News!

2007-03-26T15:26:00.001-04:00

And I had been looking forward to getting some sleep.

If you look at our front page today, it is filled with something that might be surprising to some of you--real, honest-to-God, breaking news. Most of it we didn't know we were going to have three days in advance, some of it was awkward, and all of it required good reporting.

We start, I guess, with the story about residents of 47 E. 3 St. holding a benefit concert to pay back their legal fees. It's an incredibly interesting case, pitting tenants rights versus those of the landowner, and its progression to the New York State Court of Appeals means that it could set a precedent for the city, which made it a legitimate news story for the paper. Further legitimizing it was the fact that the landlord is a Columbia College '94 alumna. But that's mostly a city-side issue. The reason that I, as campus editor, cared about the story (beyond its inherent interest) is that the landlord is also the daughter of Kathryn Yatrakis, whose class I'm taking. Whenever we run a story like this, we give a head's up to the parties who may potentially be affected, so I ended up with a potentially awkward (though ultimately fine) e-mail chain with my professor.

Starting Friday night, (five hours after a few members of the news board had sat down with him for an hour-long briefing... you would've thought he could have given us an embargoed leak or something) we found out that Mr. President, Lee Carroll Bollinger is going to become a director of the Washington Post Company. I set our Bollinger beat chief on the story and let her go to work.

Moments later, I learned that the University's CFO and EVP for Finance was set to leave to return to his alma mater in State College, PA. I called up Dani, who has covered Al Horvath for over a year now, and got her to start digging around for a comment.

That's two breaking news stories and a land deal that many say is suspect in a single weekend—solid by most stretches of the imagination. Add to that a front-page feature we ran about a grandmaster playing 30 games of chess simultaneously, a story about David Denby and several students talking about the Core Curriculum, a council debate, and a fantastic Implications page six weeks in the making and you end up with one of our best papers of the semester. We were all psyched up for a great paper

And then… the CCSC story broke. We got a tip that there may have been something up on Saturday afternoon. To be honest with you—as I try to be—when I first saw the tip, I wasn't sure if it was a story. As reporters, we often get told information with suspect motives. It's always important to verify the legitimacy of what we're told, but that is especially true in the middle of an election when there is always incentive for somebody to use us as tools to help them play dirty.

As our due-diligence calls for, we started calling up the people who were implicated—Tracy Chung, Michelle Diamond, George Krebs, Jonathan Siegel, Subash Iyer, etc. Through our reporting, we learned that there was, in fact, an attempt before the start of official campaigning by members of the SGB to get Michelle Diamond to, either figuratively or physically, sign onto increasing SGB funding substantially. We learned that there was going to be a formal filing of a rules violation. We came to the decision that even if Diamond had held a conversation about something that would have been illegal to sign but, upon learning it was illegal, decided not to, it would still be newsworthy given all of the context.

For those excited in newsgathering and reporting, it was hard to beat this weekend.

P.S.: Special shout-out to my production and photo friends, and especially Danielle Ash, for placing a visual element with every single story on the front page. So hot when that happens.

Trimming Good Stories

2007-03-25T19:19:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the lag time on posting--I had meetings all day Friday, slept for 16 hours yesterday, and have been in meetings again all day today.

On Friday, we ran a story about four professors in SEAS collectively picking up $1.3 million in grant money. It was one of those stories that we get to write up a lot at Spec because we have so many world-renowned professors, and it's always difficult to choose which ones get stories and which ones don't. Because of the impressive size of these grants and the fact that they went to four professors, instead of one, we decided that this merited a story. We put it up on our list where it was requested by one of our trainees, Sara Maria Hasbun.

Now, most straight news stories that we run are skedded for between 400 and 600 words, closer to 600 if the story has wide-sweeping implications, a lot of facts, or a swath of sources, and closer to 400 if it goes the other way. That didn't used to be the case. As the result of a gradual shift on the part of news editors over the past three years, the average size of stories has been cut by about a third--when I came in my freshman year, I feel like my average story was in the 650-750 range and I never wrote something less than 500.

There are a number of pros and cons about shorter stories. The pros include that articles tend to be tighter and less verbose, have fewer extraneous quotes, and ensure that more peple read all the way to the end. On the flip side, it gives reporters less incentive to interview many sources and can lead to a loss of some context or extra information. For those reasons, our word count guidelines aren't hard and fast rules, but we tend to schedule the word count and hope that people tell us when they need more words.

I don't remember how many words we had originally allotted for Sara's story, but because we do run a lot of these, I can assure you it wasn't outside of the traditional range. Sara, however, went above and beyond in her reporting. On what could have been a simple recap of the basic news (Columbia gets money, professors say they're happy), she turned it into an analysis on the ways in which Columbia is better for incoming professors than MIT and Stanford, including the level of autonomy and resources they are given and they're ability to work across disciplines.

The problem is that this made the story substantially longer. While I can't tell you how many words Sara originally had, I can tell you that it was substantially less than the nearly 900 that I saw at midnight. By then, we had a couple of problems. The first was a space issue: we didn't have a single house ad and had about 350 more words than we could fit. The second, though, was a less obvious but equally important issue: since we do now have basic guidelines regarding how long our stories run, there are necessarily value judgments attached to those. In other words, if we give 900 words to a story, it makes it seem like we're saying it's twice as important as our normal story. As I said, while these are exceptional professors, the fact that they won this award is not in and of itself exceptional and we shouldn't treat in our paper as such. This semester, outside of Implications and Perspectives pages, I believe we have run three stories total more than 900 words. Thirdly, without some surprising or exceptional element, nobody was going to read all the way to the end of the story, no matter how well-reported it was.

We ended up at a compromise. I didn't want to cut the interesting additional research that she had found, but at the same time, we simply couldn't run 900 words on this thing. So I cut two full paragraphs--one of them was a rather lengthy quote recapping something that was essentially already stated--which got me about 100 words. I cut another eighty by tightening up language and snipping sentences here and there.

It's a weird experience cutting things that are good, but in the end, we believe that it made the paper better. I apologized to Sara Maria afterwards and the paper awarded her today with our trainee-of-the-week reporter's notebook. Good job, Sara Maria.

First Sunrise of the Semester

2007-03-22T13:46:00.000-04:00

With all of the talk about the Town Hall this week, it's difficult to remember that we were doing other things. Not only were we putting out a newspaper each day--including Monday's, which was one of the thickest of the semester--but for the last two days, we have been pulling together our annual housing supplement, getting out last night in "civil twilight," that time between first light and sun-up that Spec editors for a generation have learned to love.

The housing supplement--by far the most-read supplement we put out in a year--is at once among the easiest and hardest things that we do. It's easy because it's an annual thing so we know how to hit our bases. We know, for example, that we need the housing cutoff numbers. We know that we need an article about the actual lottery process. We know that there will be a story on summer renovations and another about LLC applications. We know all of that going in and we have a good relationship with Housing administrators across campus and they help us pull together the facts, quotes, and numbers that we need for these stories.

Beyond that, the story pitches that we get are relatively common each year, which, in a sense, is fine because the first-years who are picking it up need to know the basic information, and if that means some of it gets repeated year-to-year, then so be it.

But this bumps up against what makes putting the supplement out so hard--With similar stories getting published each year, how can we keep it fresh and relevant?

The supplement-planning process begins six weeks in advance with a pitch meeting. The relevant beat chiefs and deputies--this year, they were Julie Appel, Anastasia Gornick, Alex Peacocke, and Tom Faure--sit down and get a list of ideas up on the board about what we want to see in the issue. In this meeting, we tried to come up with a handful of stories that would add zip to the issue, and came up with Anastasia's tongue-in-cheeky guide to off-campus housing, and roommate quiz, Jacob's story on people who bend the rules to essentially live with their significant other, and the story, eventually written by Sandeep, about the first year housing experience. Judge as you will whether we effectively livened up the supplement and gave people a reason to read it.

On top of the content issues, though, we place special emphasis on the visual layouts. This year, with an assist from Google, we had two maps (one of which-- the big Morningside housing map--ran as a full page in color) that allowed us to apply a (hopefully) creative, visually appealing layout to what could have been a big hunk of text. Beyond that, the slick photos from Key and the irreplaceable Anjali Biala on the front page (see the top) are as pretty as anything I can remember running our paper this semester.

I would love to say that we had organized these visual elements at the same time as the story pitches. We didn't. The photos were planned 13 days in advance of the paper--realize that ten of those were during spring break--and I first met with our incredible production associate who is responsible for all of those maps on Monday night. Four days in advance, I was nervous about us pulling this off.

Feel free to disagree with me, but I'm proud of how today's supplement came out. It was harried at times, and last night, we got to bed at about 7:15, but I've been walking around all day with a smile on my face because of this supplement. This was a good day.

The Town Hall

2007-03-21T15:44:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry for the delay in posting this: last night was a particularly busy one in the office and this morning, I overslept.

As noted in Bwog and in Spec, last night was the Town Hall.

First, a note on objectivity. In one of our weekly diversity meetings where we were discussing the meeting, somebody raised the point that if this were another prominent or large student group talking about diversity, we would cover the Town Hall, and that, by that logic, it would make sense for us to cover it. Further, there was reason to believe that students who didn't make it to the event would be interested in what happened, as would alumni, faculty, and other members of the University community. So we decided to do a story.

That said, for purposes of objectivity, we obviously couldn't be involved in it. So I put the story up on our internal list and hoped that somebody would take it--I didn't want to choose the writer for fear of being accused of bias. I asked Jacob, one of our deputy campus news editors, to do the final reads, and that was that. I was, in fact, quoted in the story, but my quotes were all that I knew about the article until I saw it online after it had been published at about 5 a.m. Same goes for Erin, John, and Amanda. For that matter, nobody on the Managing Board with the possible exception of our production editor saw the story before it went to print.

Now, as for the event itself. Much hay has already been made about Jimmy's quote "I was struck people feel so strongly about being misquoted." At the risk of being mocked, I'm going to say something similar. I wasn't surprised at the fact that people were upset about getting misquoted--heck, when I'm misquoted, I get mad as hell. Facts, words are important--I wouldn't be in this job if I thought otherwise--and you should get mad about it. (You should also, as I have said several times in the past few days, tell us about it so we can evaluate whether a correction is warranted.)

What surprised me--and, while I haven't spoken to him since the quote, what I think Jimmy was trying to get at--is how much people said we did misquote people, how many facts we published that were incorrect, how much we fundamentally misunderstood the stories we. write. It was a comment raised by probably two-thirds of the people who spoke at the event. In one form or another, most non-Spec people who were in attendance did not trust us to report accurately on them and did not believe what they read in the paper. And while I, like every person who has ever worked for or read Spectator, have heard grumblings, mutterings, and the occasional rant from people that the Spec is a worthless rag that can't get anything right, I was surprised at how prevalent the perception seemed to be.

What I had never heard were the points that Keondra and Aliyah made that people don't want to be quoted in Spec because they don't trust us. It knocked me back how much distrust of the paper there was in the room, and that was important for me to hear. If you can't trust Spec, there's no reason for you to read it, there's no reason for you to talk to its reporters, and there's really no reason for you to write for it--especially if you think, as Six raised, that your editors will change your meaning.

There were a lot of points brought up last night, all of which deserve our attention. If students don't know who they're supposed to talk to on Spec, as one member of the Muslim Students Association charged, that's something that needs to be addressed. If students feel as though we don't care about them, that's something that needs to be addressed. There were a number of strong points that were made, and while I can't say what they will be--mostly because we haven't had a formal debriefing yet--we're going to be making some changes in response to them.

But the biggest thing that I'm going to take from the night is this idea of accuracy and that it's not where it needs to be.

P.S. I know I'm behind on comments and I do plan to get to them, but I wanted to make sure that whoever the commenter on the last post was didn't actually mean that the blog is trying to "reduce transparency." Perhaps "reduce opacity" or "increase transparency?" Because if it's the other thing, I've got a problem.

UPDATE: 3/22/07, 8:45 P.M. The editor in chief of The Eye responded to the Town Hall in today's issue of the magazine.

Diversity Comment Follow-Up

2007-03-20T01:49:00.000-04:00

Last week, an anonymous poster commented: "To say you're more amenable to change than past boards is ridiculous. I applaud your efforts to try something new, but the campus coverage in the paper is worse this year than it was under any of the last three news editors. Holding a forum is one thing, actually creating good, representative content is another."

I have been holding off on responding until today in order to put in the plug for today's Town Hall (8 p.m. in Earl Hall Auditorium--come vent to us. We'll listen. Plus, free pizza!). Also, I've been trying to think through how to respond without coming off as either defensive or chest-thumping. Here's what I came up with.

I think the argument that there may be a gap between our efforts and the success that comes from them is a legitimate one. Whether this year's coverage is better or worse than previous years' is not something I can objectively judge, but we know that we haven't fixed all of the problem.

What I do know is that, in my time here, I have never heard more talk about about the level of diversity at Spectator as I hear now. I can tell you that the awareness and recognition within the office that there is a problem here has never been higher in my 30-odd months at the paper.

Further, I know some of the steps that have been taken internally to address the problem. I know that we have appointed a deputy news editor and a contributing editor devoted to looking at diversity issues among the staff and within our pages. I sit in a meeting every week with other top-level editors and we talk about what we can do for the paper. We are bringing in speakers, planning a media training, and are talking about how to recruit a more-diverse staff.

But these are all first steps in tackling a big big problem, and that's what tonight is about. We have some ideas about what to do to address the concerns on continue forward, but we don't know how best to move forward, and we don't even know where all of our problems are.

And so I urge you to come tonight and tell us what you think. I have said this before and I'll say it again--representation is active. We can't fix the problem that we don't know about, so tell us where are problems are and together we'll work to improve the paper and make it a better asset for Columbia.

"Sleep?" What's That?

2007-03-19T11:02:00.000-04:00

Hope that everybody had a good break. I for one made a lot of headway on a term paper, applied for some jobs, worked out, saw some opera, went to Brooklyn, and made some money--all told, a pretty decent way to spend ten days.

But I'm glad to be back at the paper. Today's paper is enormous. Thanks to a six-page ad selling spree that business side got into over break, we've got a 14 page paper. A nice piece with great photo on the front about the Iraq War protest in D.C., a nice interview with our newest University Professor, an important piece on the University backing down from a plan for McVickar that had outraged many area residents, and a well-executed piece on students stuck away from Columbia. It was an all-around solid paper.

One of the most striking things about last night, though, was Ivy Chen's story on ESC E-Board nominations. Though only in the position for about two months, Ivy has been a fantastic beat chief for us, covering ESC so well that we also asked her to take on a second coverage area. For this story, we knew that it was going to be coming in late because all nominations were blocked until midnight.

So Ivy came into the story just before ESC President Dan Okin e-mailed us the nominations and she started her reporting. Normally on these stories, the goal is to talk to all of the candidates running for the big positions, find out any juicy internal conflict, and get as much as you can for the night of. For ESC, we approach things slightly differently--because it is an internal election, we see it as less important that we publish lengthy issue-based stories because the general SEAS student doesn't get to vote on the platforms anyways.

But we still wanted to talk to Eash and Liz (who, full disclosure, both lived on my floor last year) and ask them why we wanted to be President. We called Eash up around 12:30 and he gave us five minutes on the phone which was great, but by the time we called Liz, she was asleep. Step one is to call her cell; step two is to call her RoLM; step three is to call her roommate's cell and see if she will connect us.

After we had done those three things, we had a decision to make: Do we run the information that we have from Eash without giving equal time to Liz? Or do we cut Eash's quote in the name of fairness. As you can see, we decided to leave Eash's piece in with a conciliatory clause about us not being able to get in touch with Liz.

There are a lot of ways to explain a "no comment:"

"John Smith could not be reached for comment"

"John Smith did not return several attempts for comment."

"John Smith did not return 12 calls and five e-mails seeking content."

Et Cetera. In my mind, the least passive-aggressive of these is what we used: "John Smith could not be reached for comment late last night." It gives a reason for the exclusion on our end but also doesn't make it seem that the source was purposefully ignoring our calls. Sometimes, that kind of thing is appropriate, but last night was not one of those times.

Dispatch from CSPA 2

2007-03-15T14:43:00.000-04:00

Notes from today's CSPA:

Yesterday, I was blown away by design. Today, it was photo. Sharon Olson from Bishop Gorman, a private school in Las Vegas, showed off some ridiculous digital photos that had showed up in their yearbook. She gave me a CD of the photos after the performance but asked me not to post them online, so if anybody wants to see what good high schoolers can do, come by and see me.

At a stimulating session on the rights and responsibilities of the press given by AP Supervising Editor Marco Mulcahy, I met Megan Chase, the Woodlan High School sophomore from Fort Wayne, Ind., who wrote a pro-gay rights editorial in her high school paper which outraged the administration who then asked for editorial oversight.

Mr. Mulcahy said he'd be willing to speak to Spec. Score!

One of the speakers failed to show up so Key Nguyen and I fielded questions and talked about our own stories from Spec. Conclusions: students think covering riots is cool, but that drinking beer and shopping on Fifth Avenue is cooler.

Banner headline from "Building a Better Blog," hosted by Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society at Penn State Malcolm Moran: Middle-Aged Journalism Professors Distrust Wikipedia, Blogs: Cite Uncertainty About Future of Old, New Media.

Dispatch from CSPA Day 1

2007-03-14T13:23:00.000-04:00

Today is the first of three days that I am spending working the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. The annual conference for high school journalists has been going on for 83 years. This year's rendition brought in 4,500 students from 40 states, with attendees coming from as far away as Anchorage, Alaska.

It's a pretty good three-day gig. Free lunch and a few hundred bucks for nine hours work on a day that I was just sitting around. I figured I would just sit around for a couple of days, sit in the back, get ahead on some homework, and be done with it. And that's what I did for the first two session on high school news broadcasts.

But in the second session, I ended up with Ray Westbrook who teaches journalism at a small private school in Dallas called St. Mark's. This was where the creme de la creme of Dallas society--the mayor, a congressional representative, H. Ross Perot, etc.--sent their sons and grandsons.

He started showing off his students' paper, the ReMarker ... and I was floored. Their designs were the strongest that I had ever seen from a high school paper, and beat out a lot of what I had seen from the top-tier of college dailies as well.
Design-wise, they were doing things in print that were normally reserved for top-tier magazines.

For one story on drug culture in a high school--something that no school ever wants published but that they somehow managed to get an administration on board with--they took the poetry of a man who had attempted to commit suicide after losing all his money on crack and booze, laid it over a black and gray two-layered with neat typography background, and had an image of the man worked in there as well. The story itself was well-written (Westbrook taught two sessions--one on design and one on feature writing), and it was just an incredibly slick paper.

Seriously, just look at that front page. On another one about sex ed., they crafted an elegant bird and a bee out of condoms. It was stunning.

I also spent some time with a California paper called the Crossroads which also had a magazine. I can't find any images of it online, but man could they design. There were others I just hope that we can convince some of these guys to come to Columbia.

In any case, I left the day inspired... I really didn't expect that to happen.

Coming up with Stories

2007-03-13T02:58:00.000-04:00

You ask and I respond. So how does Spec come up with its story pitches?

At its most basic form, there are two kinds of editors who report to Erin and me--deputies and associates. Associates are in charge of shepherding stories from 6 p.m. on the night of production until the paper is PDF'd sometime between 1:30 and... well, sometime after 1:30. The deputies, on the other hand, are responsible for everything from the inception of the idea until 6 p.m., including reporting questions, issues of context, and, yes, the pitch itself.

Now, as covered in the last post, deputies each have their own staff of between six and ten beat chiefs. These are the people who are coming up with the bulk of the pitches--in fact, most deputies require that every beat chief brings in between one and five pitches to their meeting every week.

Where do beat chiefs get their ideas? Pretty much everywhere. Most come from regular communications with sources. I've seen beat chiefs meet with five sources in a day and while these are usually interviews, sometimes, they're just an opportunity to sit down and chat about what's happening within the beat.

Beyond just talking to sources, students go to meetings, get on listservs and newsletters, and sign up for Google Alerts on a bewildering number of topics that are in some way related to the beat. But our best pitches often come from the most mundane sources--walking around campus looking at fliers and talking to friends about what is pissing them off this week.

There is no scientific process to any of this, and often, pitches vary based on the beat you have. Our reporters who cover the class councils and the University Senate, for example, can expect a relatively steady stream of news about policies and campaigns. On the other hand, in non-news intensive beats like Health Services or Career, Fellowship, and Academic Advising tend to have more analysis stories that may lack a time hook.

As I said, beat chiefs bring their ideas to deputy meetings, where the pitches get fleshed out and either approved or tossed. One of the reasons that deputies are chosen is that they have what we call a "news sense"--an idea for the kinds of pitches turn into good stories and those that don't. Additionally, we have a sense for which stories we have written in the past two years, as well as which stories other media outlets have done, and we try not to repeat them. To help with this process, for the first month or so, deputies bring every pitch that they're given to the weekly deputy meetings with Erin and I and we talk about what makes it a good or bad pitch. By the end of February at the latest, all of the deputies have the hang of what kinds of stories work, though Erin and I still check in when we question something that's on the story list.

I know that I'm being vague, and I apologize for that, but in truth, a lot of it is subjective and a lot of it is based on experience. Between Erin and I, we have probably read every story that Spec has printed in the last 30 months and many that were published in the three years before that, and because of that, we have gained a pretty good sense for the kinds of ideas that do and don't pan out as imagined. That said, we're always looking for fresh perspectives and new angles on stories that deserve to be told.

Keep asking questions!

You ask, I respond

2007-03-11T16:37:00.000-04:00

Sorry for posting so late. Slept until 4:15.
Yay! We finally got our first question for the blog. Actually, we got our first several questions for the blog. I'm going to string out the answers over the next few days in order to A) give more attention to each (I'm trying to limit these posts to 500 words or so. The fewer issues I cover in those 500 words, the more in depth I can go), and B) Without any issues coming out this week, I had been planning to address some of these exact questions

So without further ado, Anonymous asks: "Josh, could you talk a bit more about the editorial structure of the Spectator? As in, the division of beats?"

Certainly, Anonymous.

First, a little background. The idea of a beat system is to have one writer responsible for keeping tabs on a full coverage area. These "beat chiefs" are supposed to meet regularly with key sources within the beat, pitch ideas for stories every week and to be regularly writing these pitches into articles. In theory, this benefits everybody: our sources are better served by having a regular point person on the paper and reducing the number of calls made by random reporters on deadline; the paper has a regular stream of ideas coming in so that two or three people aren't responsible for coming up with 40 story ideas each week as was the case in the past; and the readership is better served by having stories across a broader range of issues than might otherwise happen.

The idea was first introduced at Spec three years ago by Megan Greenwell and Matt Carhart in a limited form and has grown over each successive year. Right now, we have 28 beats that are covered on the campus side and about another 15 on the city side.

The process of deciding which beats we need to cover begins in October. The outgoing set of deputy and MB-level news editors meet at their weekly deputy meeting and discuss areas during which they discuss a year's worth of coverage, analyzing what the paper covered well, what it covered poorly, where we most need to improve in the coming year, and if there are any beats that we are covering which don't necessarily need a full-time or part-time beat chief.

After we compile this list together, we announce the beginning of beat shadowing at our next news meeting. Any person on the paper who has gone through training is eligible to shadow for a beat. As a shadow, reporters spend a week as if they were covering the beat. They'll meet with sources, come up with three pitch ideas, talk to their deputy, and decide upon at least one article, which they will then write.

Traditionally, writers have been eligible to shadow for up to three beats. After the end of three weeks, the deputies reconvene and look at who ran for each beat, specifically looking at how [Crap, that's 500 words already. I'll swear I'm almost done!] passionate they appear to be about the beat, how good their pitch ideas were, and how their story came out. It takes a lot of thought, especially considering the domino effect of matching all of the writers up with something that they want when some beats are more popular than others, and at the end, we have a roster of names.

Inevitably, something is left uncovered. At this point, we go back to writers on staff--both those who shadowed and those who didn't but have done impressive work in the past--and offer them some of those beats that have been taken. This is always a tough calculus--we don't want to guilt somebody into accepting a beat that they don't have time to write, but at the same time, we want to cover all of our bases.

The finals step is to organize beat chiefs into deputy groups. The idea here is that we want similar beats that share common sources and issues in a single deputy group so that we don't repeat ourselves and so groups can expand pitch ideas into analysis pieces and deeper stories. Also, we don't want one deputy to have 12 beat chiefs while another only has six.

By the end of winter break, we have all of our beats set, though we are continuously reevaluating structural issues.

More tomorrow.

Matt Sanchez

2007-03-10T23:18:00.000-05:00

Sorry for taking 50 hours off. My mind went into overdrive spring break mode. I swear, I'm here now.
I said at the beginning that this would be a blog about what makes it to the front page of Spectator but what is just as important as that is what doesn't make it to the front page.
A year ago, our front page included an article on
Marine Corporal Matt Sanchez, GS and a member of Columbia University MilVets who has served in Iraq. Sanchez had lodged a formal complaint with the University, claiming that during an activities fair, he had been harassed by three members of the International Socialist Organization.
Since then, Sanchez has become a relatively well-known player in the conservative media, appearing regularly on Fox News, publishing pieces in the New York Post and generally telling his story. Two weeks ago, he was awarded the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom award by the Conservative Political Action Conference.
And if you're plugged-in enough that you're reading this, you probably also know that several blogs have since reported that he acted in various gay pornography films under the name of Rod Majors. Sanchez has since written an op-ed discussing the matter.
In the instance of every story that shows up in Spectator, there is a conversation about what makes it newsworthy, why we should care enough to give it valuable column inches in our paper. There are no hard-and-fast rules regarding what we publish and what we don't, but there are guidelines. In cases of disclosing personal information, we look at a number of things, specifically dealing with whether the person in question is a so-called "public figure," whether the information we would disclose has to do with his public persona, how controversial or mundane the information is, whether we can verify its accuracy, and other.
When the story broke, we had no fewer than 23 internal e-mails discussing whether or not to pursue it, and we came to the decision that publishing a story would constitute a non-newsworthy disclosure or private, personal information, even if it had already been reported in dozens of other outlets.
More spring break updates on the way.

Spectator Town Hall

2007-03-08T15:02:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are in the class, this may come as a rehash, but it bears repeating.
Right now, Spectator is at a point where I believe that the board is more
amenable to change and more open to criticism than it has been in the recent past.
And while past boards have come a long way in the last three years, I believe the fact that this year's content editors are entirely new have brought a fresh perspective to issues that have plagued the paper for years.
We understand that we have problems and we are trying to address them in the best way that we know how. To that end, on March 20--the Tuesday that we get back from vacation-- Spectator is holding a Town Hall that is being co-sponsored by the Chaplain's Office where we hope to get as many different perspectives as we possibly can, especially groups and communities on campus that feel as though Spectator has
covered them badly if at all. As such, we are inviting everybody and everybody to A) Come to the meeting ready to voice their own personal concerns, and B) Forward the
information included below to their friends and to organizations with which they may be affiliated.

Frustrated that the Spectator never covers issues you care about? Or dissatisfied with the story when we do?

Spectator invites you to speak your mind about the newspaper at an open discussion on Tuesday, March 20 at 8 PM in the Earl Hall Auditorium. The event, which is co-sponsored by the Office of the University Chaplain, is a chance to tell our editors how to improve the newspaper and discourse on campus.

The evening will be facilitated by Journalism School associate dean Arlene Morgan. After a brief introduction, she will open the floor for comment on any and all aspects of the paper.

The event is free and open to the entire campus community. Refreshments will be served. Email speceditor@columbia.edu with questions.

Big Paper

2007-03-07T05:56:00.000-05:00

Days before vacations are funny things. As a general rule, people work hard to get stories in by their deadlines, but it can't always happen. An interview falls through, a call isn't returned, it takes a week to turn around some numbers and then it's suddenly it's 6:00 on the night of production and the anecdote, quote, fact, or stat that makes the story is missing and it needs to get held a day. But for some reason, when writers are faced with a 12 day wait until the next paper, they somehow pull everything together for deadline.
Such was the case today when, on our last night of production before spring break, we had a total of 18 stories on our docket, three times the number that we have on our worst days and about twice our average.
So what do you do when you have an 18-story paper? A few things. First, you barter with the Managing Editor to see how much space you can get. Every day, you need a bare minimum of 2200 words to put out a paper. But from the minimum to the maximum, there's a fair bit of flexibility. Basically, there's a semester-long publishing budget that can be allocated across the year in any way the editors see fit. An average eight to 10 page issue costs in the neighborhood of $1,200, more if the inside is in color or with our Monday and Friday sports supplements. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'll ask Amanda and John for the exact numbers and relay them here in the next coupla days.
Generally, news runs a half page of Off Lead and an additional half to 2/3 of a page of "jump" space, but on a day with a lot of content, we can ask for more than that and, if it fits within the semesterly budget, we can have some flexibility. The most I can ever remember running is three or three and a half pages of jump plus the front--incidentally (actually, not incidentally), also on one of the last days before a break. This budgeting depends on a lot of things, but my favorite, and the least understood, is that we can only run an even number of pages because whenever we print a front of a page, it always has a back. Thus, if opinion has 2 pages, sports has 1.5, arts has 1.5, and there are 3.5 pages of ads, then the options are running a 10 page paper with one allocated for news and a half for Off Lead--in other words, our bare minimum--or a 12 page paper which is the minimum plus up to two pages of jump. With 18 stories on the docket, confronted with cutting 2/3 of the content, Amanda made up a 12 page paper.
Three and a half pages of news. In layman's terms, that's between 9,500 and 10,000 words, a nice 30 words of Times New Roman double-spaced 12 point font, and that's before taking into account all of the photos which are shot, cropped, and otherwise edited (I don't know what they do--I'm not a photographer and the pages look pretty). That's actually almost exactly the amount of content that we began the night with when we had 18 stories, but as anybody who has ever dealt with a 30 page paper can tell you, it takes a long time to edit that much. Indeed, our team of editors and layout people probably would have taken something on the order of 13 hours to create a paper out of that much content.
The nice thing about having too-big papers instead of too-small ones is that you can run what we call "House Ads"--usually public service announcements given to us by the Ad Council or small banners advertising Spectator that take up space whereas with a too-small paper, we have to cut words, photos, and graphics to make it all fit.
So we looked at the content, chose I think four or five stories that didn't have any pressing time hook--most of which had already been pushed back at the writer's request, signaling to us that they could be held--and pushed through. It was still one of our latest nights of the semester, but if you look at our paper, I think that you'll agree that's it's also one of our best.
On a different note, just because it's spring break, don't expect Editorjosh to shut down. I'm fleshing out a couple of ideas for the hiatus so keep coming back and be sure to make comments and ask questions--we all really want this to be as interactive as possible.

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

2007-03-06T11:46:00.000-05:00

As has been widely remarked upon and denounced, yesterday, in one of his last appearances before the assembled Columbia College class of 2007, a catered pre-dinner in Lerner, CC Dean Austin Quigley announced that Matthew Fox, CC '89, would be this year's CC Class Day speaker.
The announcement came at a moment of confusion to the seniors who spent the ensuing moments asking each other who this guy was and why he had been chosen even after a video with clips of Fox was shown to those assembled.
Those planning the event did Spec a favor and tipped me off to the scoop enough in advance so we could report it and get the story up the moment that it was announced under the threat that if we told anybody, we would lose all administrative comment on 50 percent of our campus-side stories for the foreseeable future.
So we went through the archives, looked up whatever stories we could find mentioning Fox, fact-checking that he was indeed on the infamous 1988 Lions football team that broke the streak against Princeton. We also set up an interview with senior class president David Chait, CC '07, to ask him about the choice and made sure that we would be getting some official language from the University in the form of a statement.
The problem with these kinds of stories, where you're fed information beforehand and not allowed to to talk to anyone, is that the potential is there for the story to come off as a press release. And, indeed, if you looked at the first version of the story which was posted online at exactly 6:05 p.m., that's exactly how it read--the announcement in the first paragraph, a mention of previous years' speakers in the second, snipits from Fox's bio in the third, and information about the selection process for the remaining four or five grafs.
The news here, though, was the overwhelming sense of disappointment that was felt in the room. When Quigley made the announcement, he made it a guessing game--let's see how many hints I have to give you before somebody shouts out the speaker. He went through four or five of these--he graduated in 1989, was from Wyoming, played on the football team, etc.--with the last being, "and in case you haven't guessed by now, it's Matthew Fox." And by the silence in the room, it seemed like people were still waiting for more clues to help them place the guy.
So I went around, got some more quotes from the crowd--I should remark that at least two people seemed pretty positive on the idea, one of whom is quoted in the story--and plugged them in for a quickly-launched second draft of the piece.
But everybody assembled agreed on one thing--the free appetizers and beer were a nice touch.

Ethics Questions

2007-03-05T03:00:00.000-05:00

As you can likely tell from our lead story today, we found out over the weekend that some juniors who are members of the Student Government Association are preparing to run to be next year's SGA president. It was great news for us because we've been working to bring our coverage of SGA, ESC, and GSSC up to the level of CCSC so we can confront allegations of bias, not with claims that "we'll try harder," but proof that we're actually doing something. A story announcing the candidates are set to run, as we do with CCSC was just the kind of thing that we needed.
So we did what we do when we report. We called the candidates, got them to confirm on the record, called members of the elections board, checked to see if we could find out who else was running, and left it at that.
That was, until we found out that an SGA elections code by-law prohibited candidates from announcing their candidacy before the filing deadline as it would constitute an instance of unfair campaigning. The reasoning is simple: So SGA elections don't become as drawn out as presidential elections, the SGA will disqualify anybody who announces before they're ready for it. Suddenly, we were being told that publishing the article, even though the two candidates didn't know about the rule, could lead to them being disqualified from the election.
So, here are some of the questions that we asked ourselves before publishing the article:

Does the newsworthiness of announcing candidacies outweigh the possibility of said candidates being disqualified?

Are there circumstances under which we shouldn't publish information that we were freely given?

Do we have an obligation to protect candidates from disqualification if they freely gave us the information that would disqualify them?

Do we owe candidates a chance to respond or revise their comments if we find out about the rule?

Are any of these answers contingent upon candidates telling us that they either do or don't know the rules?

As a reporter, is there a difference between a candidate telling us she doesn't know about the rule and her actually not knowing about the rule?

If a candidate knows the rule and still tells us about her candidacy, do we have an obligation to report their flouting the rules?

Do the rules change if we are told independently of the candidate that she is running?

Should we ever attempt to influence elections coordinators to bend the rules?

If it's not the place of the paper to publish information that could lead to people getting disqualified, what assurances would be necessary for the paper to receive to publish the information with a clear conscience?

While I won't get into my answers these questions, I can assure you we considered them all and several more before deciding to publish the article today. We do not take these decisions lightly, and it took about two hours and several phone calls to come to the consensus that we should, indeed, publish the article. And for what it's worth, I believe that given all of the information we had last night, everybody reading this blog would have agreed with our final decision.

Why We Don't Write Stories After Three Drinks

2007-03-04T15:09:00.000-05:00

As QuickSpec noted last week, the lead on my story about the John Jay Awards referred to flying wine. I was all set to blame it on the editing process until I looked up my original version:

"The money flew as freely as the wine as Columbia College’s faculty, administration, and—especially—alumni elite turned out to fete five of the school’s most prestigious living graduates for the 29th Annual John Jay Awards dinner, held last night at Cipriani 42nd Street."

As entertaining as the image of a massive money-and-wine fight in Cipriani 42nd Street is, the correct word was obviously "flowed."
Whoops.

John Jay Awards

2007-03-02T01:26:00.000-05:00

This job has some definite perks.
Beyond the whole "helping to shape the campus discourse while running a staff of 100 and publishing really cool things while getting your name in bold type in every issue and having something to put on your resume" thing, there is the access to PrezBo, the pride of knowing what's happening on campus, and the good Columbia catering cookies that come with every meeting with Robert Kasdin or David Stone.
And, on very rare occasions, there are nights like tonight. After my last class today, I got all dudded up in a tux and took cabs down to Cipriani 42nd Street with some four other MB-level editors and photographer Tina Gao for the John Jay Awards dinner. For those unfamiliar, the awards are a chance for Columbia College to raise a boatload of money for the school--an event that has gained in importance with the University's $4 billion capital campaign underway.
Money was certainly the theme of the night. Cipriani is in an impressive building that used to be a bank (You can still see the teller windows), two of the night's honorees were hotshot investment bankers, and the 700-750 people who RSVP'd raised $1.2 million dollars for the College. Not bad for a night's work.
And not bad for six college kids whose most-regular meal is the free pizza that is delivered every night to the office through an advertising arrangement with V&T. There were roast lamb and fresh fish for the meat-eaters, Eggplant Parmesan for the veggies, some kind of salmon appetizer, and a creamy dessert that nobody knew exactly what it was but everybody agreed was fantastic.
During dinner, the porters ensured that everybody's glasses were always full, and before and after there were at least three fully-stocked bars mixing. There are few things that make a group of reporters salivate more than their most important sources all in a single room with a never-ending supply of alcohol. It was an opportunity for me to shake the hands of a lot of people whom I had covered in some capacity but never personally met, including Norries Wilson (My God that man is huge), Frontiers of Science honcho David Helfand, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees Bill Campbell, CC '62, who earned my eternal respect by being the only person in the room drinking beer from a bottle. I also checked in with dozens of others--Alan Brinkley, Kathryn Yatrakis, Marcus Johnson, David Ali, Jerry Sherwin, Hillary Ballon--who I know in various capacities.
As for the event itself, David Paterson gave a phenomenally entertaining speech about his time at Columbia, Eric Foner spoke eloquently about the direction of the American government, and Charles Santoro gave what was perhaps the most intense acceptance speech I've ever heard--in which he expressed more affection for his days at Choate than at Columbia--that had everybody at the table looking uneasily at one another. In one way or another, every speaker--including the winners--subtly asked for money, and President Bollinger, who appears to have gained some weight, gave an address on what makes Columbia College "excellent." (Columbia “has a deep a respect for excellence. ... There is a sense that what we teach is excellence and that we try ourselves … to be excellent.” Awesome!) Got back around 10:45, the first draft of the story was in by 11:30, and I made it out of the office by 1.
All told it was a good night, which is nice because it will likely be the only time I ever get a chance to dine at the John Jay dinner.

How Did That Happen?

2007-03-01T02:36:00.000-05:00

Tonight is possibly the flukiest night I've ever spent at Spectator.
Ever since hearing about fliers going up on Barnard's campus touting a Town Hall regarding the banning of laptops from classrooms, we had been planning for one of tonight's front page stories to be on the meeting, which we, being journalists, were hoping would be controversial, heated, and generally exciting. Having heard rumblings around campus all week and after opinion published an op-ed from the pointgirl on the SGA, we even wrote a preview of the Town Hall which touched on the background of the issue, a rare step we take to show our belief that a story is particularly newsworthy. (To the best of my recollection, the only other preview we have run this year was in preparation of the Columbia Coalition Against the War's Day of Action. )
At about 10:30, more than two hours after the town hall had ended, we were beginning to get concerned about where the article was, so we called the writer, and, after she didn't pick up, the deputy editor who informed us that the person we thought was writing the article actually wasn't. So we called the person she thought was writing it, who pointed to the first person. Meanwhile, a fourth person entered the discussion to point her finger at the second. (Are you confused yet, because we had to draw a diagram to keep it straight.) And after we had made all of our calls, we finally found that, while at one point or another four different writers had been assigned to the event, none of them had actually gone.
That was one of two stories today where we had a photographer but no reporter. At an event held by the Columbia University College Republicans, president Chris Kulawik turned reporter Laura Schreiber away at the door on the grounds that the participants in the discussion felt uncomfortable being quoted during the event.
After I argued from the office hallway (unsuccessfully) with Chris to get Laura into the event, fifteen feet away, Tom Faure couldn't figure out why he wasn't picking up his phone to answer questions about a report that we had confirmed moments before about the University refunding money to the College Republicans that they had paid towards Jim Gilchrist's Oct. 4 speech. (He would later decline to commment).
Kulawik, meanwhile, wasn't the only one picking up his phone. On any given night, Columbia University has one Public Affairs official on call to answer urgent press inquiries such as ours, but for some reason, calls and e-mails to the representative and others within the office--11 all-told--all went unanswered.
As a general rule, one late story can push a night back as much as two hours. With all three of these stories falling apart--two of them after 10:30, about four hours before our ideal PDF time--the night wasn't looking good and I was preparing for one of my latest nights of the semester.
And then, everything kind of fell into place.
After two minutes of panicking, I went into our front office where the spring class of new writers were enjoying cookies and soda at their graduation from the training period and asked if we could get a writer. Jackie Kazarian and Stephanie Turner raised their hands, I gave them a call sheet and left them to track down as many people as they could who had been at the meeting to write a story based on reaction quotes.
We struck a deal with Chris whereby Laura could collect quotes following the event -- slightly disappointing, but better than nothing.
On Tom's story, as we fretted over what to do if we didn't get a comment from Public Affairs, a source that we weren't counting on e-mailed us after midnight and confirmed the salient details of the refund, giving us a cushion on running the story.
I'm still dumbfounded by the whole experience, but praise be to the deities of PDF-Times, we put the paper to bed at 2:37, about 10 minutes behind our second-fastest time of the semester.
Off to study for the midterm in 9.5 hours. Good luck everyone!

Policy Change

2007-02-28T19:32:00.000-05:00

In the interest of full disclosure, I wanted to inform you all of a policy change occurring on this end of the screen. As the blog continues to gain interest--we've received hits from as far away as Washington D.C., Barcelona, and the Bronx-- Spectator is looking to incorporate this blog more into the mainstream of the paper. As part of putting their full weight behind the effort, Editor in Chief John Davisson and Managing Editor Amanda Erickson have asked--and I have consented--that beginning with this message, they approve posts before they go live.
This blog has always been conducted with the blessing of the editors and I do not anticipate that the approval process will lead to any kind of censorship. ~~(Of course, it's fully possible that I'm not writing this at all, that John and Amanda have tied me up, and are using the blog to manipulate you all into loving Spec. )~~ John and Amanda are wonderful human beings, God-like in every way.
I have appreciated all of the warm-wishes that I have received in the short time that this blog has been up, and I hope that you all submit comments, ask questions, give feedback, and help me to make this blog as useful as possible.
--Josh

The Case of the Missing Quote

2007-02-28T02:43:00.000-05:00

Every single story that is published in Spectator is read by no fewer than four and as many as nine members of the staff. This order goes

Writer

Training Editor (for trainees only)

Deputy section editor

Associate section editor

Deputy section editor (optional)

Copy staffer (before 1:30 p.m.)

Section editor

Copy associate

Managing editor (optional)

Editor-in-Chief (optional)

We use these all of these edits as a method of quality-control which, at its best, ensures that stories are legible, grammatically correct, factually accurate, and all that jazz. But at its worst, the sheer volume of editors can have the effect of too many cooks making a soup. One week ago, on a trainee's first story--a profile of a campus figure--the story made it through six steps before I saw it. I knew that the writer had sat down for a half hour with the interviewee, but when I read the story, there were no quotes from him. Turns out that each person down the line had trimmed one quote until there were none left. Fortunately, we caught it before the paper went to bed, copied down some of the quotes from the original version, and went to print.
Monday night, we were less fortunate. Relatively late at night, we got a Google Alert telling us about an editorial in the New York Post that revealed a piece of information that we hadn't been told before--that Columbia had sent a letter of regret to Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist following his October speech on-campus.
We considered holding the story for a day to get the full text of the letter and comment from University officials and representatives of the Minuteman Project, but after a half hour of discussion, we instead decided to run a brief telling what we knew and getting reaction quotes from people on both sides of the debate.
And so it came to be that, just before midnight Monday night, I spoke to Karina Garcia. She gave me the following quote:

"I haven’t seen the letter, obviously, so I can’t comment on specifics … but it’s ridiculous, it’s ridiculous, if it’s true, that the Columbia administration would apologize to an armed vigilante groups that came on campus. ... They decided to apologize to a group that cam on campus and assaulted us? It’s ridiculous!"

Sadly, only half of that made it to the final edition. The second part of the quote, beginning "They decided..." was cut at some point during the editing process. When I saw Karina in Lerner Hall today to thank her for helping us the previous night, she asked me what had happened, understandably upset about the lost meaning in her quote.
As I hadn't yet seen the paper and didn't know that the quote had been cut, I took a look, saw what was missing, and gave her my best guess: that it had probably be cut for space issues.
Tonight, I walked around the office to find out what had happened, and... nobody knew. We were able to determine that it didn't happen in the last two stages of the night, but we weren't able to track it down beyond that. I didn't save a copy of the original, so as far as I can prove, it was never included in the original draft, and with the sheer number of edits that happen in any given night, it's unlikely that we'll ever know exactly where the quote was truncated.
The case of the missing quote goes on.
In other news, I stumbled upon the most-entertaining journalism site I've found in a long time yesterday. Go spend cruising around. I'm sure you'll amuse yourself.

The Scariest Word in Journalism

2007-02-27T04:43:00.000-05:00

At Spectator, we subscribe to a number of our peer papers, including The Dartmouth, The Cornell Sun, and The Michigan Daily.
Being from Michigan, I have a special spot in my heart for the Daily, especially considering that their former editor-in-chief and current photo editor both went to my high school. But beyond that, we have respect for any group of students that put out a quality paper and they are undeniably one of the better college dailies in the country, serving a university population substantially larger than that of Spectator, and probably the best paper in the two-paper town of Ann Arbor.
All of these things together added to the shock of opening up last Wednesday's issue to find an Editor's Note publicly admitting to and apologizing for four acts of plagiarism conducted by freshman Devika Daga. (He posted another four instances on his blog yesterday.)
In his letter to the readers, Editor-in-Chief Karl Stampfl announced that he is forming a committee to look into the issue of plagiarism on the paper, noting that this is the third time that plagiarism has been found at the Daily in as many years and that past attempts to keep plagiarism out of the newsroom have clearly fallen short.
I don't know what a committee is going to find nor do I understand the motivation behind somebody plagiarizing as part of an elective club, but from my own experience, I will say that what has struck me most about plagiarism is how little it is understood by a staff. What makes plagiarism the scariest word in the dictionary to editors is that 98 percent of the time, it doesn't through any sort of willful deception on the part of the writer, but arises because they didn't understand the process of sourcing. Basically, every word in an article must be independently verified to be true and cited to a source, which is an easy concept to hear, but one that is much more difficult to fully grasp and put into practice--especially when it isn't always a crystal-clear line. Further, as the number of media outlets easily available to student journalists increases, plagiarism has become easier to do and harder to catch.
While, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ripped off an entire news article and passed it off as his or her own during my time at Spec, there have been a handful of incidents where facts, statistics, and even quotes have been found during the editing process to have been lifted without attribution from another source. To the best of my knowledge, only one person has been suspended from Spectator for a particularly egregious act of plagiarism--one that, fortunately, was caught before going to print.
While I don't know the facts, as somebody who has seen how difficult it can be to stop plagiarism, my sympathy goes out to the editors and staff of the Daily. This week must be hell for them.

Nearly-Horribly Offensive Things

2007-02-26T04:44:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, Spectator does horribly offensive things simply by mistake. Far more often, we avoid doing horribly offensive things just in the nick of time. The last two Mondays have been examples of the latter.
Today, we ran the above story on a Lunar New Year celebration held by the Chinese Students Club with the above photo. The story, written by former associate news editor Sandeep Soman, while not about to set the world on fire, was solidly written, but what really made the article is the accompanying photo--Asian women with parasols against a nice green backdrop, green being one of those colors that really draws readers into the page.
That photo was placed on the page at about 1:45 in the morning. When I first looked at the page at about 11:30, in that place was this photo. I said "Hey, our front page is showing a little leg today" and went back to editing. When I looked at it a second time at about 1:30, I noticed that it was probably a little bit weird to run a photo of two 7/8 naked white people for a story about Asian New Year festivities. So I asked the office to look up, explained the situation, asked how many people, when told the context, would find it horribly offensive, and after every hand in the paper shot up, we went back into the archives and pulled up the new photo.
That's actually not quite so bad as the error that almost ran last week. Without giving too much away and having you all think less of us as people and as a paper, I'll simply say that we probably should have been more careful on the first draft of a headline regarding a story on testing spaces for disabled students, including those in wheelchairs.
The daily miracle limps on.

Weekend edition

2007-02-25T16:05:00.000-05:00

An editor's job is never done.
This weekend, I have slept for about 22 hours because I'm coughing so much that my friends are afraid that I'm dying. (Health Services, in their infinite wisdom, told me to pick up some Sudafed. Thanks, Health Services.)
But last night, I was pulled out of bed for Spectator's annual fund raiser, the Blue Pencil Dinner, where we invite our alumni to pay lots of money for a greasy steak and wine and to hear a speaker.
Due to an issue with seating arrangements, I ended up at a table with several former managing editors, none of whom I knew. The nice thing about talking with alumni is that you can hear all of the dirt that institutional knowledge has failed to pass on about people like former president George Rupp and Austin Quigley. I got a chance to talk to the Managing Editor from 1984 about Barack Obama, the ME from 2001 about reporting on Sept. 11, 2001, and also had a conversation about possible future career paths for students who spend 40 hours per week on Spectator (not one was unemployed--good sign!).
After former Spec Editor-in-Chief Steve Moncada talked about the state of the paper (in case you're wondering, our Web site sucks, our content is good, our new magazine is phenomenal, and our paper is an important voice in the campus community, so sayeth Steve), Janice Min, Editor-in-Chief of Us Weekly, gave one of the most interesting speeches I've heard in quite some time about the tabloidization of culture. Her argument was two-fold: First, the entertainment industry is one worth $29 billion per year, and as something that is that important, it makes sense to scrutinize its leaders as much as we would any other multi-billion dollar industry; Second: Just as it's the job of Vanity Fair and Us Weekly to scrutinize the entertainment industry, it's the job of CNN and co. to scrutinize politicians and politics, but when they fail to do so, the country is made worse off.
Made it back to bed last night at 11:30 for tea and West Wing reruns. Tonight, gonna be on until the paper goes to bed. Yay.

Photo courtesy of MediaBistro.

Two Versions of the Same Story

2007-02-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

On Thursdays, we run two "New York City News Briefs," usually hitting a total of about 300 or 400 words summarizing articles reported by other city news sources that may be interesting to students but which probably aren't published in the Times and may otherwise evade the notice of Columbia students.
But on Thursdays, we also tend to get a little bit punchy and often find that the office is the latest it is all week, the slowest it is all week, and, either in spite or because of those things, the most creative all week.
With that introduction, I present both our published draft and our first draft--which we tried to write entirely in the titles of songs by Busta Rhymes--of one of yesterday's NYC Briefs.

Busta Rhymes Likely to Avoid Jail

It appears as though rapper and actor Busta Rhymes is going to avoid jail time regarding his alleged beating up of his former driver and a former fan, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
After rejecting an offer that would have landed Rhymes in jail for six months, Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Tanya Kennedy offered him a separate deal consisting of three weeks of community service, six months of anger management, and three years of probation, of which two will be spent talking to young people about “the perils of violence,” the Post reported.
Rhymes’ attorney Scott Leemon told the Post that, while he and his client denied that Rhymes ever committed the charges, “We will consider it [the deal].”

Busta Busts Outta Jail

It appears as though rapper and actor Busta Rhymes is going to "Bounce" after telling an attorney in the prosecutor's office "You Ain't Fuckin' Wit Me," rejecting a deal that would have put him in jail for six months for some "Street Shit" that he is accused of doing "All Night," beating up his former driver and a former fan, the New
York Post reported Wednesday.
"Against All Odds," the paper said that he could see the "Finish Line," likely with a "Get Out!!" of jail free after a Manhattan judge offered him a separate deal consisting of three weeks of community service, six months of anger management, and three years of probation.
Rhymes was not quoted as saying, "Bladow!! … It's All Good," but we wish that he had been.

Society of Columbia University Graduates

2007-02-22T18:32:00.000-05:00

Last night, myself, Erin, Editorial Page Editor Oriana Magnera, Managing Editor Amanda Erickson, and Alumni Director Amanda Murphy traveled down to midtown to speak before the Society of Columbia Graduates at the Columbia Club (which, sadly, rents out space from the Princeton Club ).
The purpose of the event was to "highlight current issues on Campus and on Morningside ... without the filtering that takes place by the time we read about them in the New York Times," according to event coordinator Michael Garrett, CC '65.
The conversation centered around the usual subjects--Manhattanville and Minutemen--but the main thrust of the conversation actually came from the alumni reliving their glory days as anti-war protesters and decrying last week's anti-war strike. "Three hundred protestor?" they scoffed. "Why, in our day we had 3,000, in the snow. And we didn't have these newfangled copy machines for our fliers--we had to mimeograph them. Barefoot. In the snow. Insert old-geezer quote here."
Kidding aside, though, they basically called this new crop of student activists pansies. Also on the minds of alumni: changes to the core (it's nice to know that some things never change) and the use of four-letter words in print (nice to know that some things do, as well).

Earliest Night of the Semester

2007-02-22T00:46:00.000-05:00

Once a month, all thirteen editors on the news board come together to talk about issues affecting the whole section. Two nights ago, we had our second such meeting of the semester and the main focus was PDF times--the time at which the print edition is saved in its final form and ready to be sent to the printer in Queens. The progress that we saw during the first three weeks has slowed down as the associates are now getting the hang of the job, and with breaking news happening late in the night for the past few weeks, our average time of completion has been getting later and later. So with Editor-in-Chief John Davisson, we spent half of our meeting discussing strategies for making the night earlier.
This wasn't one of the suggestions.
At 10:00 on Tuesday night, I got a call from the associate news editor for Wednesday night saying that several stories had been delayed on the story list over the previous 24 hours and as a result, we only had a total of three stories and one photo for today's paper, all of which were only about 400 words. As a general rule of thumb, we look for a minimum of 7 articles and 3200 words to be mildly comfortable, but we can't run less than a page and a half of content, which translates roughly to 5 stories and 2300 words (not including events calendar and daily Off Lead features) as a bare minimum. Three stories is a big hole on the front page and another one on page two or three.
When this happens, Erin and I look reapproach stories for which we couldn't get writers the first time, look to see if there's anything we can push up, try to find events, and see what else we can do. We got on the horn, started making calls and found that we did in fact have some wiggle room. We pushed a feature story up a day, adding 500 words and a photo to the sked, reassigned a story that had fallen through every day for a week about a committee working to draft Jeff Sachs for president for another 450, got some facts about breaking news that we been hearing rumblings about that we figured we could pull together 350 words on, added an event story on a woman from Democracy Now! coming to speak for 500, and we remembered that there was a fireside chat at Barnard that we had forgotten we had assigned that would give us 500 words and a strong photo. In essence, we pulled 1800 words and two photos out of our asses, got us above our threshold, and went home for the night feeling pretty comfortable.
Then, all hell broke loose. The reporter on the feature that we had moved up a day fell through, couldn't pull together the breakingish news, lost one of the initial three stories and realized we had the wrong day on a second one. For those of you liberal arts majors out there having trouble with the math, that meant we had 4 stories, 1750 words, one story short of what we needed.
The second time that stories fall through, we scour Facebook, fliers around campus, and any other events listing we can find and pray that we can find somebody on our staff willing to bail us out. Praise be to Allah, we found an intriguing event as part of Black Heritage Month and a writer, the up-and-coming Julie Appel, who was willing to cover it, and one of our Off Lead features came in 100 words over word count. Five stories, 2300 words, breathing normally.

...

And then, at nine p.m. a second of the original three stories fell through.
If the first time we scavenge and the second time we scour, when stories fall through for the third time, Erin and I usually start to swear.
If you're looking at today's paper, obviously we don't have a big hole on the middle of page three. We had received a press release four nights ago saying that the Columbia Mock Trial had pulled out a win in a regional tournament and was going to nationals. We didn't think that the win merited a story as of yet, and told Evan Daar, the team's secretary, that we would cover them at the finals. Nothing makes you reevaluate newsworthiness quite like being three hours after deadline and confronted with a chasm of nothingness. I called up Daar, talked to him for 15 minutes, did some background reporting and pulled together 317 words and a stock photo in about 40 minutes.
The daily miracle continues, and, since it doesn't take very long to edit 2200 words, we PDF'd at 1:47 p.m., the earliest time all semester by a good 40 minutes.

JTT and Other Reasons to Go to Class Five Minutes Early

2007-02-21T10:38:00.000-05:00

So last night, I forgot that I still had one problem to do for my stats class which meant that I had to wake up early this morning to get the book, finish the problem, and get to class. The long and the short of it is that I ended up in class five minutes early, meaning that I got to talk to the people in my class.
Within five minutes, one girl in the class--who turned out to be the sister of a guy I knew from a past CCSC election--had told me three things I didn't know about which could lead to stories.
Without getting into two much detail--newspapers aren't news if the information they give you was reported days ago on a blog--the girl told me about some fliers on Barnard's campus which I hadn't heard about before that had gotten people talking across Broadway. She only had the basics, so I'm going to head over there after class to read the fliers and maybe make some phone calls.
Second, she gave me an idea for an angle that we can take on our continuing coverage of the Nexus construction.
But finally, and certainly most importantly, she told me that apparently Home Improvement dream boat and the voice of Young Simba from The Lion King Jonathan Taylor Thomas has joined Columbia as a student in the school of General Studies. (As one of Spec's deputy news editors now tells me in one of our epic internal e-mail chains, "yeah, this news was soooo last week...")
So moral of the story: Go to class! You might just walk away with a third-of-a-day's worth of story ideas.

Bwog Birthday Column

2007-02-21T04:11:00.000-05:00

This week, we were posed with an interesting question. As a paper, we knew that we wanted to cover the one year birthday of the Bwog, the Blue & White's campus news and gossip blog. In just 12 months, they have had a serious impact on the status of debate at campus. They were the first to broke the news about the mayhem at Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist's speech last October, received 40,000 hits a day, were prominently featured in The Varsity Show, and have served as a forum for hundreds of students per day to discuss campus goings-on. They argue that we haven't given them the coverage they deserve--an argument that every group on campus could make--and it not having an article would have been proof positive that they were right, not to mention a sign of pettiness and unrepresentative journalism.
The question then became how do we want to cover the closest thing we have to competition on campus, people who criticize us on a daily basis but who are, in many cases, our friends. (Two of Spectator's campus news deputies are also frequent contributors and both the creator and current editor-in-chief of Bwog are Spec alumnae.)
As I saw it, there were three different options. The first, and by far the simplest, would have been to cover their birthday party. More than 115 people showed up at the West End last Saturday for drink specials and revelry to celebrate the "Bwoggiversary." We could have gone to the party, interviewed the guests, spoken briefly to the editors, taken some photos, and called it a day.
But that was never a serious consideration. Our second idea, and the one that we were planning on for a week, was an in-depth analysis. We would talk to the editors and creators, get some numbers and quotes, talk to their competitors including our own Editor-in-Chief John Davisson, talk to Columbia Public Affairs officials and other major sources on campus, and come up with a piece really looking at the effect that they have had on how they have changed the process of campus news coverage.
When somebody has an idea for a story, one of three things happen: that person says they will write it himself, an editor assigns a writer to it immediately, or it goes up on "Piana"--an internal Web site accessible by writers who can take the story. We decided to put this analysis pitch up on Piana, and there it sat for a week without any takers. Sometimes, articles are allowed to wither and die on the story list because nobody wants to write them, but nobody in the office felt comfortable doing that with this story.
And so we arrived at option three. As news editor, I write a whole lot less than I have in the previous five semesters. The one exception is Technically Speaking, a biweekly technology column that I debuted 15 months ago and that I absolutely love writing. News columns--as differentiated from opinion columns--are designed as a forum to analyze issues without advocating or condemning them. By writing the news as a column, it became a freer piece, allowing more latitude and discretion in approaching the tricky subject.
So that's how we got to today's column. Today's QuickSpec bemoaned that they had become "establishment" but when I saw DePillis briefly in the street, she said that she thought the piece was good.

Election Kickoff

2007-02-20T15:00:00.000-05:00

There are few campus-side stories that are as much fun to report as those for Columbia College Student Council Elections. It has the same macabre interest as any good popularity contest, a cross between choosing teams for dodgeball and homecoming queen. Players begin scheming well before the game, positioning themselves as either "popular" or "unpopular," attempting to gain prominence, balancing their ticket between people who are well liked and people who know what they are doing. There is backstabbing, conniving, manipulation, and the last 24 hours at the end of the months-long run-up to the election that began at the beginning of the semester, still nobody has any idea what is going on.
This year was no exception. The weeks running up to the election were filled with rumors and pettiness as hyper-sensitive sources and super-ambitious students work to position themselves and their friends before the deadlines. One night last month, I found myself making calls for nearly two hours into the early hours of the morning, debating with potential candidate George Krebs, CC '09, on phrasing regarding his potential interest. We ended up saying "Krebs hinted at a possible run at president of the CCSC executive board" with the quote "I'm going to explode onto the scene in my own way should I decide to run." There were at least two communications regarding the more-direct phrasing "Krebs said he was considering a possible run...," a wording that Krebs objected to strenuously.
In any case, as the time ticked down to the deadline, it looked as though it was going to be a one-woman race--Michelle Diamond, VP of CC '08, was running for the presidency, the president of CC '08 was going to stay on in that position, Krebs decided he wanted to stay on as class president, and nobody else was stepping up. We have been told from several sources, though, that a few seniors basically decided that they didn't want Diamond to to be president. (Seniors Dan Okin, president of ESC, and Keith Hernandez, president of ABC, who were both fingered in the allegations, denied them).
We began hearing concrete rumors late on Sunday, 26 hours before the filing deadline, that two candidates--Will Snider and Felipe Tarud--were considering runs at the presidency. This meant couple of things for us: First, that the race probably wasn't going to be unopposed, meaning that we would have actual conflict to cover (if you will all flip to your copies of The Interplay of Influence, you'll remember that conflict is good for stories.), but second--and more importantly to me--both potential candidates were courting one of my best friends, Paula Cheng, to run for a position as vice president.
Now, brief review--Erin Durkin and I are both news editors. As a general rule of thumb, we split up stories so I take all those articles about things occurring within the gates, and she takes those beyond. If Paula had decided to run for VP, that would have meant I couldn't have read any stories about the E-Board elections, which, depending on how you look at it, is either great because I get more sleep or awful because I don't get to take part in one of the more-exciting stories each year.
Candidates burned the midnight oil and worked all through the next day, but even by 8:00 p.m., when we decide what stories are going to be on our front page, nobody was sure who was going to be running. We knew that our best photo was likely going to be of the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification's demonstration regarding the blight study within Columbia's proposed expansion area, and we weren't able to get an interview that we needed for a story on a new tapas bar (read today's issue for more on that), so we decided to make CCSC lead.
As the story finally reported, the last-minute maneuvering had produced a ridiculous slate of candidates. Four people initially declared--the most in institutional memory--quadruple the number that had been expected as little as two hours before. Of the candidates, we had only heard rumors regarding one beforehand, and, fortunately for Erin's sleep schedule, Paula decided not to run.
The last-minute nature of the declarations--and, in the case of the Revolve party, subsequent withdrawl--meant that we were up late reporting. The story finally came in at 2:20 a.m., meaning the paper went to bed at 4:30 and I got to bed at 5:30 which is why this post is coming out so late.
Time to go to bed again. I'll try and get these updates up earlier in the future.

Hello World

2007-02-19T18:43:00.000-05:00

It's been said that people who publish newspapers work in the business of the daily miracle.
In any given week, Spectator's staff of more than 300 writers, designers, editors, contributors, and business staffers put in between 1,500 and 2,000 man-hours across nine departments. All that work gets you over 60 pages of content and advertisements, with roughly 200 stories quoting 600 sources. Each issue pays for itself in advertising, and with publishing costs ranging from $1,200 and $2,000 per day, Spectator approaching a million dollars in revenue annually. This is completed by full-time students who are undertaking one of the most rigorous college experiences that this country has to offer, the most-dedicated of whom spend over 60 hours per week on the paper and up to 18 hours in a given day.
We cover a University community of 60,000 students, faculty, and staff and a 160 square block section of the Upper West Side and West Harlem where more than 100,000 people live, and we strive to cover the most pertinent issues affecting them all.
And even if everything goes right on our end--something that never happens--we still have to deal with all of the factors that lie beyond our control. Sometimes news gets postponed or doesn't happen, people lie to us or misrepresent themselves, sources don't return our calls, and our internal servers shutdown. As one example of the nightly unexpected happenings, last night, our printer decided that they were taking off for President's Day without telling us. It's these moments that make Spectator a daily miracle.
The paper's impact is far-reaching. The more than 130 issues published every year are read more than 25,000 times every day, and when the paper breaks national or international news, that number can be many times that much. And on our best days, like last Thursday and Friday, our papers offer breaking news, in-depth features, insightful analysis, and an open forum for student voices, all laid out in a clean and attractive way. At our worst, as was the case today, we fall prey to the worst stereotypes of college journalism with articles that contain factual inaccuracies, miss the underlying importance of a story, and misrepresent or under-represent parties affected by the stories.
Yet, much of Spectator's goings-on occur beyond the public eye. It will be the goal of this blog to rectify that. As co-news editor for the paper's 131st Managing Board, I have an inside understanding of how the paper happens, from the initial pitch to the final printout, and I will try to spread that knowledge to the best of my ability through this blog. Every day, I will tell at least one story behind the story, and as happens with the best of blogs, this will be an interactive experience, answering any questions, comments, or concerns that you may have.
Enough bloviating. Let's get started.