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.