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!

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

I have been highly impressed by what a huge leap the online section has taken with multimedia projects. The slide shows with and without audio are very well put together and have a very professional, NYT styled appeal. Multimedia mainly focuses on expanding what is on print. Question is, should they go beyond that? The photo department just created a new position (photo multimedia deputy) to help expand and give online (with emphasis on multimedia) more of its own identity. Alanna Vaughns, the person who was chosen to take on this new role that has yet to have a solidified identity, will provide photo’s outreach to multimedia projects since we are so involved in it. The question of identity is a bigger one now that we have people who focus solely on multimedia. For now I see multimedia as just continuing with expanding on print content with the occasional side project. But the future holds many possibilities for this section, especially since this format of reporting is where the future lies and has so much untapped potential. Hopefully with the addition of the new deputy, we can focus even more on multimedia and fully develop its respective personality as part of the Spectator, representing each section and maybe even beyond that.

Take a look at a bit of SpecBlogs growth:

Watch out NYT.com…

More seriously though, this growth is looking absolutely fantastic. I have a feeling that the rate will stick as well. Keep on blogging everyone!

Just to clarify, since we haven’t continually notified our readers about this, but our commenting on the Web site is currently - but not permanently - down. We’ve been performing a lot of maintenance and insodoing had to turn off commenting for a little while.

More soon on our exact policy and philosophy toward commenting, which can often become cause for heated debate in the newsroom (all that freedom of speech and press discourse intermingling..).