Plugging the Gaps

Have you noticed any gaps in our coverage lately? Yes, it happens even here in the Spec news department (hard as it may be for you to believe) and we want your help in figuring out our weaknesses.

Easily the most difficult task in running any all-volunteer organization is keeping together a staff each semester. This is all the more the case at a student org like the Spec, which has a daily product to put out each and every day. Every September, we receive a training class for of eager freshmen, many of whom over the course of the year satisfy their curiosity about journalism and understandably gravitate to other interests. Unfortunately, we have nothing to offer recruits except the thrill of seeing their name in print and a steady supply of V&T’s pizza. By the spring semester, we’re left with a hardcore crew of new Speccies who love journalism enough, or perhaps are simply masochistic enough, to put up with late nights, a brutal production cycle, and the admittedly tempestuous nature of (at least one of) the news editors.

This flux over the course of the year has tremendous ramifications for the way we cover the news. While we wish every former newsie well on their Spec-less explorations of Columbia, we lament the knowledge that we lose each time we lose a writer or former editor, as well as the imbalance in our content that each gap leaves.

These gaps are more apparent at the beginning of the spring than any other time of year as the new news editors adjust to their new positions. To take one funny example, if you feel like you’ve been reading a lot about subways in the Spec lately, you’re right. It just turns out that one of our most productive rising star first year this year is new associate news editor Maggie Astor, our transit beat chief (meaning that’s her primary area of coverage), and she’s taken the beat position as a mandate to go nuts (if you still haven’t watched her multimedia project about riding all of New York’s subway lines in one day, look for it in our multimedia section now). Another of our tremendous new associates, Alix Pianin, has been closely covering a school, General Studies, which often in the past has fallen through the cracks of our coverage.

There is a darker underbelly to this phenomenon, which is that we lose the knowledge of those writers who we don’t retain. Our prolific SEAS beat chief stepped down at the beginning of the semester to focus on academics (boo!), leaving a noticeable void in our coverage of an important undergraduate college. In the ideal world, we’d also have a much bigger staff to keep us connected with both faculty members and student groups than we have so far this year. In the absence of staffers to fill those niches, the rest of our coverage also suffers as our writers and deputy editors take time and energy away from their regular pursuits to compensate.

Just to be clear, not all of these imbalances are inherently bad, especially when our prolific transit beat chief can make something interesting out of what could be a dry beat. However, problems emerge when we start to miss out on important stories simply because of insufficient staffing. Thus, as the novelty of our not-so-new jobs wears off, a major priority of those of us in the news section will be to evaluate and address the gaps in our coverage before we miss something too big.

Here’s where you–the loyal reader–can help us out. Have you noticed anything that we’ve covered insufficiently so far this year? Missed entirely? Drop me a line at jacob.schneider@columbiaspectator.com or just comment on this post and we’ll take a look.