If you haven’t had a chance, read our supplement on the Spring of 1968—and also check out the Online supplement. Then, take a break from all the other events planned for the anniversary and come to the Spectator office to hear former Spec reporters reminisce on their time covering the protests.

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Mark your calendars! On April 25th, we are holding an informal gathering in the Spec office in light of the commemoration the 40 year anniversary of 1968. Come to the Spec office to hear 1968 alumni speak about their experiences, to mingle, and to enjoy free food! To recap:

WHO: YOU and alumni reporters who covered the 1968 protests (bring your friends, too!)

WHAT: 1968 commemoration, featuring Spec alumni speakers (including Jerry Avorn, Rob Stulberg, and Michael Stern)

WHEN: April 25th, 2008, 6-8pm

WHERE: Spec office, 2875 Broadway (SW corner of 112th Street), dial #11 to come in.

Ah, presidential debates. What a great social indicator for the political culture of our time. While I don’t want to take sides here, nor really do I care to get down and dirty (for it is dirty) and wade through the varied and banal ads, spin, blathering, condescending posturing, rhetoric, counter-rhetoric, meta-rhetoric, and who knows what else kind of rhetoric, I can take a politically neutral stance and point out that this Frank Rich op-ed piece has some interesting comments about the recent debate on ABC.

Most students of Columbia probably don’t need this blog to learn about Frank Rich, he’s popular and reliable. The reason I link to it here is because it’d be easy to pretend that the media doesn’t play favorites, and that the media doesn’t get submerged in the harmful political discourse it pretentiously and complacently believes to hold accountable. When the L.A. Times somehow intimates that Edward Said, a scholar of near-Olympian proportion especially at Columbia, is, to put it mildly, shady—and Obama’s in the story, so ohhh!—I don’t have a politically oriented reaction so much as just feel embarrassed for the journalism industry I wish to enter post-grad. (for stronger language re: the hackery, see our friends at Commentariat)

As Rich writes, you can remain politically neutral and still agree with the “viewers of all political persuasions [who] were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we’re losing in Afghanistan. Those minutes were devoted not just to recycling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bosnian sniper fire and another lame question about a possible “dream ticket” but to the unseemly number of intrusive commercials and network promos that prompted the jeering at the end.”

This is nothing new, or original (perhaps some will find it interesting that the editor of an Ivy newspaper can be something other than naively idealistic about journalism…naive and idealistic, maybe?) but the least I can do is post that I’m “mad” and wish I could “not take it anymore.”

“But that remains on hold while we resolve whether Mr. Obama lost Wednesday’s debate with his defensive stumbling, or whether Mrs. Clinton lost it with her ceaseless parroting of right-wing attacks. The unequivocally good news is that ABC’s debacle had the largest audience of any debate in this campaign. That’s a lot of viewers who are now mad as hell and won’t take it anymore.”

Hell, I hope he’s right.

Last week was a busy one! Spec’s editorial board endorsed candidates for Columbia College Student Council and General Studies Student Council. We’ve tried to outline beforehow the editorial board—to be distinguished from the managing board (the newspaper’s editors)—arrive at the final argument each issue. But readers may like to know that for student government elections, we have a bit of a special process. When writing an editorial, we usually have one boardmember make phone calls, do some reporting and fact-checking, etc. For the elections, though, we interview all the candidates, grill them on policy views, and then try to reach a consensus. Sometimes, that consensus is easily achieved. Other times, it takes more research, discussion amongst the board, and sometimes a formal vote. The eventual editorial then tries to accurately represent the board’s full view—not only in the choice of the candidate, but in acknowledging the pros and cons regarding each, as well as commenting on the issues themselves regardless of whom we endorse.

Endorsing can be difficult. If two candidates seem similar, should we really choose between one or the other, and how so? As we noted in this editorial, we sometimes feel a lack of faith in the council elections. Ultimately, we opt to endorse because, especially if two candidates are similar, an editorial can help us and potential readers distinguish the subtler differences between them. With that as a mission, in the end…endorsing can just be difficult.

An unrelated note: Commenting has returned! However, we had some slip-ups. The new commenting policy will use a security question system to help keep out spam (the original reason we took commenting down). But the new system in our first week turned out to be a bit too sensitive, so some comments that initially were accepted somehow were lost. Since a few of these were about a contentious opinion submission on Tibet, a few readers wrote in asking why their (critical) comments had been removed. We apologize but it was unintentional. The piece, incidentally, was written based on faulty information, and we formally retracted it, removing it from the Web site and issuing a note of explanation.

Comments should, now, remain published once they pass our anti-spam system. So comment away, and thanks for bearing with us.

The online edition of the Spectator will now see commenting on all of its articles once more. 

We made the decision to remove article commenting at the end of the Fall 2007 semester due to severe SPAM attacks on our website. Unfortunately, due to restraints within the online section and the complexity of our Drupal content management system, we were not able to address the issue until recently. However, we now have strong anti-SPAM systems in place along with new controls against anonymous commenting. All commenters must now answer a security question which — ideally — will only be answerable by humans. We’re currently in our test week, so there still may be many wrinkles to iron out.

Here’s a bit from our web developer as well:

After days looking at the archives, I think it’s wise to ban all comments with “Cool site”, “Good site”, “Nice site” and “* syte [sic]”. Of note, however, is that because 30% of the SPAM was actually gibberish without any links or advertisements, I’m led to believe your site was actually attacked without aim for commercial gain. This differs from the rest of your SPAM, that while malignant, has a commercial aspects besides just causing harm. Most of this purely malignant SPAM was posted on 1/17/2008…

Comment away!

Spec A&E has a huge advantage over the Arts pages of most other college newspapers: we’re in New York. We have the benefit of being closer to so much of the art/entertainment scene that it’s pretty daunting. But in the frenzy to appreciate (and, of course, cover) as much of the New York art scene as possible, it’s easy to forget that the Spec is first and foremost Columbia’s newspaper. So where does that leave A&E?

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I haven’t posted much lately. I haven’t merely been sitting around reading about journalism in The New Yorker. There was the tragic news of Minghui Yu, which demanded a lot of attention both as a concerned student and as a journalist trying to figure out what happened. There’s been a lot of late breaking news, too, like the Teachers College story and the empty but momentarily street-freezing bomb threat. When news breaks late, we have to decide whether to delay our printing of the paper, change the front page’s layout, spend time reporting, and finally have the paper come out later. It’s a case-by-case call, but what I look for in this case is to measure how much time reporting will take, how important the news is–and with that, how much will we lose by having the physical newspaper hit stands later–and, finally, whether we have enough original reporting (as opposed to citing the New York Times or Associated Press) to merit foregoing a simple update of the web site and reworking the physical paper. I originally wanted to comment on the NYer piece when it came out, but then the breaking news delayed that. I feel like the piece is a few years late anyway, so why not dive into it a little late?

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A commenter responding to my last post made an excellent point about reporters taking a hard line with sources. I wanted to acknowledge that comment and clarify that I didn’t mean to sound like we have a hard and fast rule on taking the hard line. Especially since we’re a local/campus newspaper, we’re often talking to sources that are students just like us, who have housing registration, tough classes, CUID swipe problems, etc. The point of my last post was to clarify the most basic division between off/on-the-record and ‘on background’ and to explain that we can’t grant a priori retroactive off-the-record requests. In my time as a reporter I don’t remember ever not granting such a request though–or at least asking for another comment in the same vein. It’s a question of balancing the public’s interest in the short- and long-term (to put it in grandiose, well, terms).

Reader’s comment after jump:

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A recent mishap by an Obama campaigner brought an interesting question to my desk. When a source tries to place a snippet of conversation off-the-record retroactively immediately after having spoken, what should a reporter do? Can sources do this, particularly after emitting some blunder (or non-blunder) that will likely have important consequences? Managing Editor Amanda Sebba sent me a Washington Post article that brings up this interesting issue. In theory, the source and reporter must always agree beforehand that what is being said is “off the record,” in which case nothing stated is up for publication or to be relayed with attribution directly to other sources. We teach our reporters during training that there are three basic ways to speak to a source:

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We put in a lot of hours at the Spectator, and sometimes we find that we haven’t sufficiently advertised to readers some of the products we’re most proud of. So, allow us a moment to describe one of those products:

As we are all coming upon spring break and getting ready for a bit of relaxation before the second half of the semester sets in, I wanted to take the time to reflect upon how many times my jaw has dropped looking at the amazing multimedia pieces we have created this semester. The introductions, the transitions, and the sound quality have been second to none within the college-daily “world.” I mean, can you honestly find the difference in quality between this multimedia piece on Obama from Spec to this New York Times video piece on Hillary?

At the beginning of the new year and the new 132nd Managing Board’s tenure at Spectator, the online section was the largest it had ever been, with nine total staffers. At the moment, we have grown to a total of five associate editors, five deputy editors, and myself, along with two new potential recruits to be interviewed after spring break. This means a lot for a section which only had one staffer this time last year. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most exciting things about working on the news staff of the Spectator—and I say this as a campus wonk myself—is getting the chance to cover the wide world of New York City. There is no more interesting place in the world to follow the melodrama of local politics or pound the pavement in search of an interesting city feature. But there is also no media market more oversaturated than New York, so I thought it would be a good idea to break down what we see as our niche within the Big Apple.

But first, a quick primer on the structure of the news section. There are two news editors, one whose primary focus is campus news (this year, that would be me) and one who concentrates on city news (this year, Melissa Repko). Each of us also has two or three deputy news editors who focus on specific sectors of coverage within each of our spheres. But while our focuses may be separate, the city and campus news staffs are hardly independent of each other as we share a staff of writers and collaborate nightly in the production of the paper.

One question which we get a lot at is: why should a student newspaper cover the city at all? Here’s where I think the Spec reflects the unique character of Columbia, where so much of student and campus life is tied to New York, from the subway that runs right to the doorstep of the dorms to the complex zoning maneuvering inherent in any new construction by Columbia. It should also be noted that off-campus coverage is hardly unprecedented among student newspapers. While some—an example is NYU’s Washington Square News—restrict themselves almost exclusively to campus news, in my hometown of Berkeley, Ca., the Daily Californian is the only daily paper. We believe that we serve a similar role as the paper of record not only for Columbia University but also for Morningside Heights and West Harlem.

I’d also like to add as the campus—not city—news editor that I believe that the city news section adds a tremendous amount of value to our campus coverage by contextualizing every action that Columbia takes within the wider world rather than just the insular university community. A perfect example is our coverage of the Manhattanville expansion which could simply be a story about space concerns on campus but has brought to life with complimentary coverage from our city colleagues about the impact of a transformation on the West Harlem community.

We consider the Spec to be first and foremost a campus and community newspaper. Thus, the breadth of our city reporting is strongly defined by our geographic coverage area, which is a rectangle contained by 96^th St. to the south, Central Park and Frederick Douglas Blvd. to the east, 135^th St. to the north, and the Hudson River to west. Our focus is on the stories and people within that area, which contains almost all of our newsstands and the entirety of Columbia and Barnard’s Morningside Campus as well as the neighborhoods of Morningside Heights and West Harlem. This line is not hard-and-fast—we will occasionally venture out of our coverage area for a particularly relevant or interesting story (and, a major caveat, campus-side coverage often takes us up to the Medical Center campus at 168^th St., the Columbia Club at 42^nd St., or any number of other city locations). But wherever our reporting takes us, it always has to come back with relevance and importance to our home base.

Here are a couple of examples from this year of that principle in action. When we first heard last Tuesday evening that a building collapse in East Harlem had impeded Metro North train service, our first impulse was to send our transit beat chief to the 125^th St. station to cover it. But since the calamity was several blocks east of our normal coverage and didn’t necessarily directly impact Columbia, we passed on it. On the other hand, when last year the city took a look at rezoning the entirety of 125^th St. from the Harlem River to the East River, our coverage looked beyond our coverage area to place the portions of West Harlem that would be redeveloped in the context of the greater city.

No one at the Spec is under the impression that we’re necessarily the paper of record for New York as a whole, but we do think that we’ve carved out a niche for ourselves covering our own corner of Manhattan.