Flooding the Zone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow.... Yeah, Wow

So, to recap the last few days:

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


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


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


• A friggin' nine story issue!


• A flood in Carman?!?!?!


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


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

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

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

Sleep.

The E-Mail, The Quote, and The Decision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyways, that's the way it happened.

A word from our production editor about the redesign

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

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

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

Okay then. Back to fixing the Web site.

-John Davisson]

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Lana Limón

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

Student Groups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're Back Into It Now

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

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

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

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

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

Web site down

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

Blogging Orientation

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.