Ode to the City Side

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.