In the first Spectator issue of 2009, Elizabeth (Managing Editor) and I said that we’d provide more avenues for feedback and comments. We will be holding an event for that very purpose on Monday at 7 pm in Earl Hall Auditorium.

Come join us for dinner and dialogue at Spectator’s Town Hall. We  look forward to hearing your ideas for our Web site and our daily issues in an informal atmosphere. And don’t forget to introduce yourself!

As design editors, what the pages of the Spectator actually look like each morning is up to us.  We arrange stories and photos so that pages flow smoothly, and we design colorful and informative graphics to pique your visual interest.  You, the Spectator’s readers, may have noticed that the paper looks a fair bit different today than it did at the end of last semester, and we’d like to take time here to detail some of those changes.

First, the front page.  We’ve revamped our teaser system, eliminating those above the “Columbia Daily Spectator” banner, which we think gives the top of the paper a cleaner, classic look.  The teasers are now all displayed in a bar down the side of the page, and we feel the added color there makes the front page more interesting on the whole.

Second, the “Weekend” arts section.  We have a new banner on the first page, which brings together images from Columbia and the city and thus embodies the section’s goal of bringing New York to student readers every weekend.  On the back page, we took A&E editor Julia Halperin’s idea to run a package featuring a different area of the city each Friday and made the “Neighborhood of the Week” page.

We’ve made several other changes that are perhaps less noticeable, but that do a lot to give the paper a sleeker, more consistent look.  The sports section has regular graphics for stat boxes, schedules, standings, lineups, and profiles.  We now use “downcap” headlines, and have revised our “jump tags” and photo captions.  Each section now has standardized “series tags,” such as A&E’s “Fast Food for Thought” or news’s “Campus Housing.”  Our goal, ultimately, is to make the paper more consistent and cohesive.  Our use of the housing series tag as part of the banner during the last two weeks was a great example of this—we wanted to use the paper’s design to make an ongoing series as prominent as possible.

Our staff is larger now than is has ever been before, and with so many associate editors and staffers we see great potential for the section’s continued growth.  Hopefully, our emphasis on consistency will allow us to be more dynamic with graphics and multimedia going forward.

One final note: if any or all of this sounds appealing to you, we’d love to have you as a part of our team.  Just send us a note—no experience necessary.

—Ben Cotton & Yipeng Huang

After a month of tossing a PDF of each week’s Eye onto an apologetic online placeholder, on Thursday the Eye launched a real Web site. Previous incarnations of the magazine’s Web presence have been buggy, temperamental creatures, and so we’ve striven for simplicity this time. Dieter Rams, whose minimalist creations for Braun in the ’80s made him a sort of legend among designers, said famously that “good design is as little design as possible,” but he also said that “good design is durable.” A school like ours, which festers with technological dereliction (off-campus Flex, anyone?), doesn’t need another well-intentioned, but short-lived, high-tech enterprise. And so we’ve tried to put together a Web site that’s straightforward and functional.

The “we” in this case is really two people, both of whom deserve their names in print (and now, of course, online). First, it was Cindy Zhang, who industriously built from scratch a working version of the Web site, and did so under an ambitious deadline. Coaxing these finicky things to cooperate requires unflagging patience, and Cindy, who among other difficulties struggled to suppress the whims of a disappearing search bar, performed admirably. Second, it was Ryan Bubinski, who created the site’s back-end structure and polished the final design, who made Thursday’s launch possible. Over the past week, I met with Ryan a few times to make some final tweaks, and I think I made eye contact with him only twice, so focused was he on his enormous monitor spanned by lines of code.

Our new Web site probably doesn’t represent the future of online journalism (we don’t have a blog, let alone a practicable online-only business model), and it certainly doesn’t represent the future of the Internet (that would be thisiswhyyourefat.com). But for now, a modest, working site for the Eye—as little site as possible—is all we, and this world, really need.

—Thomas Rhiel

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who came to the Blue Pencil Dinner this past weekend. This year was by far the largest turnout in Spectator history. With 170 guests, we had almost twice as many as two years ago and 20% more than last year. The guests included the current managing board, 20 alumni joining the 108th managing board in celebrating their 25th reunion, 40 young alumni having graduated in the past 6 years, and 7 board of trustees members. Dean Baquet delivered a wonderfully realistic and inspiring speech about the difficulties and joys of a career in journalism, which was followed by an engaging question and answer session in which he discussed the future of not only the New York Times but of journalism in general. Perhaps the highlight of the evening was a hilarious yet incredibly touching tribute by Max Frankel to Professor Richard Wald, honoring him as he steps down as the chairman of the Board of Trustees after an almost 40 year tenure. We cannot thank him enough for his great dedication to the Spectator.

Thanks again to everyone who joined us in making it a truly wonderful night. We appreciate your generous support and we hope to see everyone again soon at one of our events this spring. Stay tuned and check back on the alumni website soon for pictures for the evening.

Chances are if you’re reading this post, you’ve already noticed what might appear to be Spectator’s most recent online facelift. But the changes are considerably more substantial than a traditional site “redesign.” As one of the chief architects of the site and Spectator’s web space in general, along with my co-online editor Lara Chelak, I am here to speak to those changes.

I promised specifics, and here they are: the site is built upon a custom template applied to the Drupal 6.9 CMP system with custom modules to handle page layouts and content relation while memcache is heavily utilized for page caching. In-browser animations and applications are coded with the jQuery UI framework. Once our Drupal install is finalized we plan to release our code to the Drupal depository as a customizable newspaper template tailored to the needs of a collegiate newspaper. 

The launch of the new Columbia Spectator website is the first of many improvements to the Spectator web space. Later this week the Eye will launch a new site also based on the Drupal content management platform, the Commentariat is undergoing a redesign, and there are great plans to leverage the web to extend alumni outreach efforts.

It is Spectator Opinion’s pleasure to introduce to you our eleven outstanding columnists this semester. They disagree in their politics, they are diverse in their academic affiliations, they view Columbia through varying lenses, and they all don’t even take their roles with the same gravitas. Yet, despite their differences, the columnists share an important common trait: they will question your beliefs and challenge your suppositions through their biweekly columns. We hope you will enjoy reading their opinions as much as we do.

Sheri Pan and Amin Ghadimi Read the rest of this entry »

It’s an exciting time to be at Columbia.

Crowding onto the steps of Low Library, members of the University gathered to witness alma mater claim its own piece of history as Barack Obama, CC’83, became the first College alumnus to take the presidential oath.

Stepping out of the Spectator newsroom, and reaching beyond our typical area of coverage, we stationed reporters in Washington, D.C., on campus, and around New York City to convey the moment’s pulse as it resonated with the community in and around Columbia. Alongside the inaugural issue of the Spectator’s 133rd year, the debut of our multimedia and broadcast coverage inaugurates new strides into new media to complement our written stories.

So in the spirit of introductions, we’d like you to meet the news section’s broadcast associate, Simone Foxman.

Simone, readers. Readers, Simone.

Simone is bringing an entirely new platform for journalism to the Spec by presenting webcast news coverage. Look out for her updates, and get ready to know and love the sign-off, “this is Simone Foxman with the Columbia Daily Spectator.”

So here’s to 2009, a year for change across the country and around the newsroom.

Your News Editors,
Betsy Morais and Joy Resmovits

To view our inaugural webcast, click here!

On the brink of a new president’s inauguration, change seems to be the word. This is also true at Spectator—as we look forward to the year ahead, we are optimistic about growing our staff, continuing to reach out to our readership, and, of course, covering the inevitable batch of campus controversies. But most of all, we hope that whether you are one of our readers or on our staff, you take an active role in making our paper your own.

Despite a struggling economy and a transitioning journalism industry, Spec is alive and well. To kick off the semester, we have cleaned up our paper’s look with a redesign and will soon be launching an entirely new, dynamic Web site. As the year progresses, we plan to vastly expand our multimedia offerings as well, giving our readers more choice about how they wish to access Spectator. By taking a fresh approach both in terms of content and presentation, we aim to be a part of the exciting and challenging evolution of modern journalism.

Ultimately, though, we can only best serve our community—Columbia, West Harlem, and Morningside Heights—if you let us know how we’re doing. There will certainly be times when we trip up, and we encourage you to send us criticism or suggestions. Throughout the year, we aim to increase the avenues of feedback available to our readers, and we’ll let you know as we do. Each day, we have the chance to present you with the latest in news and entertainment and seek to help you become more informed, thoughtful participants in a campus known for its activism. It is a thrilling role that we hope to live up to in the year to come.

Melissa Repko, Editor in Chief
Elizabeth Simins, Managing Editor

After almost 80 straight hours of sleep, I had not yet officially relinquished control of this dear Editors Notes blog. I hope it proved useful and interesting this year, and I hope next year’s editors will use it more, and to discuss concrete campus- and Spec-related things more often.

This has been nothing short of a mesmerizing year. Despite a recession, the advent of new competition in campus publications, and a declining print industry, Spectator continued to produce excellent products this year, and even added a few products to its lineup–including online multimedia, podcasts, and a beautiful blog network.

I’m signing off now and will try to resist too much more sentimentality. Go make us proud, 133, and keep your heads up when things get tough. They don’t call it a daily miracle for nothing. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

Here is the 133rd Spectator board. Problems still exist at Spectator, in which our Work-Study Initiative can only put a small dent. The proposals this year spoke to the breadth and creativity of the staff and how far along we came this year.

Editor in Chief – Melissa Repko
Publisher – Julia Feldberg
Managing Editor – Elizabeth Simins
Eye Editor – Thomas Rhiel
Eye Managing Editor, Features – Melanie Jones
Eye Managing Editor, A&E – Hillary Busis
News Editor – Betsy Morais and Joy Resmovits
Online Editor – Ryan Bubinski and Lara Chelak
Photo Editor – Angela Radulescu
Head Copy Editor – Dino Grandoni
Production Editor – Ben Cotton and Yipeng Huang
Opinion Editor – Sheri Pan
A&E Editor – Julia Halperin
Sales Director – Gizem Orbey
Finance Director – Akhil Mehta
Alumni  Director – Christina Patterson

DEPUTY BOARD

Multimedia Deputy – Nilkanth Patel and Alanna Vaughns
Photo Deputy, Sports - Jenny Hsu
Photo Deputy, A&E - Ian Kwok
Photo Deputy, News - Lila Neiswanger
Photo Training Deputy – Mira John and Joey Shemuel
Online Senior Editor – Zach Sheppard, Zach Sims, Cindy Zhang
Copy Deputy – Marissa Grossman
Eye Features Deputy – Raphael Pope-Sussman
Eye Senior Design Editor – Meredith Perry
News Deputy – Maggie Astor, Alexa Davis, Kim Kirschenbaum, Alix Pianin, Lydia Wileden
Editorial Board Deputy – Abigail Lowin
A&E Deputy – Shane Ferro

ASSOCIATE BOARD

Design Associate – Jin Chen, Hannah D’Apice, Rebecca Eis, Peter Lee, Steven Tsz Yiu Wong
Commentariat Editor – Noah Baron and Mary Kohlmann
Opinion Associate – Shira Borzak, Neil Fitzpatrick, Amin Ghadimi, Sophia Merkin, Elaine Wang
Photo Associate – Malya Schulman, Joey Shemuel, Matthew Sherman, Colin Sullivan, Tianning Mary Ye
Sports Associate – Michele Cleary, Jacob Levenfeld, Edward Bartolo Lopez, Sara Salzbank, Michael Shapiro
Associate Copy Editor - Anna Arons, Marissa Barbaro, Wesley Birdsall (Eye), Libby Brittain, Marissa Grossman, Lucy Hunter, Emma Manson, Katrin Nusshold (Eye), Lusia Zaitseva
News Associate – Danny Ash, Jessica Hills, Madina Toure Liza Weingarten, Tabitha Peyton Wood
Alumni Associate – Ding Ding, Julia Kantor, Emily Lampert, Xu Shenjun, Danfeng Wu, Yu Xiao
Finance Associate – Ryan Chae, Andrew Colvin, Aditya Mukerjee
Sales Associate - Cristina Astigarraga
La Pagina Editor – Ana Bobadilla
La Pagina Associate – Carolina Martes
Books Editor – Yin Yin Lu
Film Editor – Peter Labuza
Theater Editor – Ruthie Fierberg
Food and Drink Editor – Devin Briski
Music Editor – Rebecca Pattiz
TV Editor – Christine Jordan
Art Editor – Hannah Yudkin
Interview Editor – Zach Dyer
Style Editor – Helen Werbe
Eye Photo Editor – Kristina Budelis
Eyesites Editor – Carla Vass
Spectacle Editor - Kevin Ciok

All the best,
Tom

Here at Spectator we like to try out new things - a lot. We’ve borne the brunt of the Splogs jokes and put together a respectable domain of blogs with bright potential, and we’ve dived into the sleek world of multimedia. We also are beginning to think about less journalistic web initiatives, as evidenced by our early work with Columbia Classes. Regardless of our lack of tech and web cred (which we humbly admit to) we understand that information sharing has changed, and we want to be a part of that. Not only that, but Spec is an ideal breeding ground for students to try new things - and we let them. We sent a reporter and photographer to Chicago for Obama’s victory, and we also had a reporter join the polar bear’s club for a frigid morning.  Fun stuff.

The latest addition to the Spec lineup is podcasting. I’m not going to pretend that this is a foray into unknown technology - podcasting is nothing new. But as Spec develops a better understanding of the web, and with that a better technological groundwork, we can now experiment with podcasting and try to make our content available in yet another medium. There are thousands of podcasts available on iTunes and podcastbunker already, but the technology is so simple it’s worth throwing our hat in too. Listen to NPR or TNR, then catch up on Spec.

Next up: video.