GW Hatchet Blogs - blogs.gwhatchet.com

This exact same post gets written once a year at around this time, but I’d nonetheless like to welcome you to The Hatchet’s 2140 G St. blog. At the moment, this blog’s best purpose is to tell you that we’ve ceased print publication for the summer until our CI guide comes out on June 11 (but we’ll continue to publish online throughout the summer.

Once next year rolls around, this blog will hopefully be a way to keep The Hatchet’s actions as transparent as possible. We’ll do our best to give you a sneak peak at what will be on tomorrow’s front page, highlight other content, and provide a forum for you to offer feedback.

Check back over the summer for some sporadic posts, but be sure to frequent this blog during the school year for more consistent blogging. Until then, happy summer!

Once a year The Hatchet staff gets a chance to stop reporting for a moment and lampoon some of the issues they cover. It’s a tradition that dates back to the early editions of The Hatchet, and has become an regular surprise on campus every spring. So the 2009 April Fools’ Issue has come. And this year, it takes the form of The GW Buzzkill.

We claimed in The Buzzkill that we’re no longer accepting letters to the editor. While that may not be entirely true, tell us what you think here in the online comments.

The staff of The Hatchet elected Alex Byers to be their next editor in chief on Thursday. Byers will take over the position on May 1, pending the approval of the The Hatchet’s Board of Directors.

A junior from Minneapolis, Minn., Byers has worked at The Hatchet since 2007, first as a sports writer, then as an assistant sports editor and eventually metro news editor. Some of his largest plans for next year involve more online content, so if you’re reading this post then get excited!

The discussion about arming UPD made its way into the local media this week when the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU invited both myself and local ANC chair Asher Corson to present some of the facts and viewpoints on the issue. Our coverage of this topic has been extensive, and the amount of phone calls on the show indicated that there is at least some interest beyond campus and Foggy Bottom.

I’ll let the show speak for itself, you can listen here.

It has certainly been a momentous year at The Hatchet.

This Sunday at their annual convention, The Associated Collegiate Press presented The Hatchet with two Pacemaker awards - for its print and online editions. The ACP is the largest organization dedicated to the student press, and a Pacemaker is considered one of the highest awards in college journalism.

This comes on the heels of an announcement last spring that The Society of Professional Journalists named The Hatchet the best non-daily student newspaper in the nation.

Both of these awards are major achievements, and they are a credit to the quality journalism coming out of this paper. This is also the first year that The Hatchet has received all three awards, which speaks to the growing stature of The Hatchet as both a newspaper and an online news source.

The Hatchet was one of 10 papers selected in the ACP’s non-daily newspaper category, and one of 5 selected in the non-daily Web site category. The Hatchet was the only paper to receive the SPJ award.

The high quality of journalism can be seen in each issue of The Hatchet, but I can tangibly show you how far our Web site has come in recent years. When we last won the online Pacemaker in 2006, our Web site looked like this. Since then we have completely redesigned the site, revamped our blogs, and added video, podcasts and other interactive features.

I wanted to take a moment to respond to several readers who e-mailed us about a front page story in today’s paper which said GW was no longer the most expensive school in the country. One reader pointed to a recent CNN article, which said GW still has the highest tuition.

CNN is ranking purely tuition, whereas our story was based on tuition and required costs (like room and board). In 2007, GW made national news as the first school to pass $50,000 in required costs, which are important given that room and board often amount to about $10,000. Today’s article was about how Sarah Lawrence is now leading that pack, according to a consulting firm that compares these figures.

To base a ranking solely on tuition is misleading, because students are actually paying a great deal more. So while the CNN article is factual, our coverage of this issue has concentrated on the entire price since you cannot enroll at GW - or Sarah Lawrence for that matter - without paying $10,000 for housing and food.

If you aren’t receiving our e-mail editions, it isn’t because we aren’t sending them out.

It appears our e-mail editions were delivered without difficulty this morning.  But for the last five weeks, our online publishing partner, College Media Network, has been dealing a range of technical problems affecting the hundreds of college newspapers they support across the country. Many e-mail editions were delivered after delays of a day or more, while some were never delivered. Others were caught by spam filters.

Rest assured, we’re still open for business.

We have a new issue every Monday and Thursday, we update our blogs often and we’ve been producing all forms of multimedia, ranging from videos to podcasts. In case you missed it, we blogged when we followed the College Democrats to Charlotte, N.C., and the College Republicans to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and we produced an audio slide show of each trip.

We appreciate your understanding and patience.  And if you’d like The Hatchet delivered in another electronic form, you may wish to also subscribe to our RSS feed.

Jump back to our home page

As we published Monday, the Society of Professional Journalists named The Hatchet the best non-daily newspaper in the nation.

This award was part of SPJ’s Mark of Excellence Awards for 2007, which honor student journalism. We were first named the best in the region in April, advancing to the national competition against the eleven other regional winners.

We previously won the award five years ago, in 2003. We were a national runner-up in 2004, and we have captured the regional title every year since 2002.

SPJ’s press release lists the other winners.

Ever since we relaunched The Hatchet’s blogs in January this year, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to improve them. Early this week, as some of you might have noticed, we made a few changes and added a few features. Our codebase (source code) has been rewritten, which provides better performance and a lot more flexibility. Some of the specific changes are:

• RSS: We consolidated posts to our blogs into a single RSS feed. We knew how cumbersome multiple RSS feeds were, but our old setup prevents us from combining them easily. And for those of you interested in just news from Newsroom, or sports from Courtside, or any of our other blogs, various separate feeds still exist.
• Design: Some colors changed, ever so slightly. If you didn’t notice, well, I suppose that’s a good thing — after all of the drastic changes we’ve made to our Web site this year, gradual change can be good (the eBay case study is a personal favorite).
• Our bloggers: We updated all of our contributors to reflect our new staff, and with that added author pages.
• On our sidebar: We added a useful search tool, and lists of most the recent posts and comments.
• The storefront: We also added a splash page, at blogs.gwhatchet.com, which gracefully brings our blogs together.

If you have any comments or suggestions, feedback is always welcome: please let us know what you think by posting them here or sending them to web@gwhatchet.com. And with the summer ahead of us, more new things are in store throughout our Web site, so stay tuned.

If you want to join our staff and have a chance to work on cool projects with high visibility, send me an e-mail.

Andrew Nacin
Web Director, The GW Hatchet

Our May 12 issue was the first issue of volume 105 of The GW Hatchet, coinciding with our May 1 staff turnover.

Here at The Hatchet, graduating editors are given a “30-piece” — thirty column inches where they can write anything they want. The Departing Editor pieces were published in our final three issues of volume 104 of The GW Hatchet:

• Leah Carliner, life editor: No longer saving the things left unsaid (April 21)
• Ben Solomon, senior photo editor: Four good years behind the lens (April 21)
• Sam Salkin, multimedia editor: It’s all in the family: finding the folks that matter (April 21)
• Brendan Polmer, arts editor: Obviously, not in it for the money (April 24)
• Lizzie Wozobski, opinions editor: Signed, sealed, delivered: I’m gone (April 24)
• Jessica Calefati, senior news editor: True life: I’m a journalist (April 24)
• David Ceasar, senior editor: Splicing commas and growing up (April 28)
• Jake Sherman, editor in chief: The Hatchet, with some college on the side (April 28)

A list of our new staff, led by Editor in Chief Eric Roper, is available here.

We publish again May 19 (post-Commencement issue) and June 12 (Colonial Inauguration Guide), before we resume publication in the fall. Throughout the summer, we will continue to update our blogs and publish articles.

If you’re still on campus, you might have noticed the sheer size of our Commencement Guide, which hit newsstands Monday. At 32 pages, it was the largest issue we have published in recent memory, and likely the largest in our 105 years.

Since converting to broadsheet two years ago, we have never published more than 24 pages, and we often publish only half that. In tabloid format, we do not believe we have ever published more than 32 pages, equivalent to only 20 pages in broadsheet.

Why so large? As we have previously said, we strive for a 50/50 ratio of ads and content. Our business staff sold about 16 pages worth of advertisements for this issue, leaving our editorial staff with a lot of space to work with.

It also made for a long, grueling day at our townhouse at 2140 G Street: we held a staff meeting at noon on May 11, and the production team left almost 16 hours later.

Over the past few weeks, we have gotten tons of e-mails, phone calls and blog comments about not covering an incident outside an Anchor Bowl event at Funger Hall. People are curious whether we are sitting on a story about a prominent student.

Well we aren’t.

As I have mentioned in other blog posts, we report on crime pretty heavily on campus. When we have an incident that results in an arrest, we obtain the police report and do a story. In this instance, there was no arrest. The subject was taken to a detoxification center and released. Hence the lack of a story.

Yesterday morning The GW Hatchet and mtvU hosted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on campus for a taping of the television show “Editorial Board.” MTV flew in three college journalists from across the country to Washington to participate in a Meet-the-Press style roundtable discussion. Lilly Lamboy, from the Smith College Sophian, Laura Plantholt from the University of San Francisco’s Foghorn and Mike O’Brien from the University of Michigan’s Review joined me on the panel, which was taped in a second-floor conference room in Gelman Library Tuesday afternoon.

This was kept under wraps for security purposes and also because we didn’t have a live-studio audience. I will expand upon this in Thursday’s paper, but it was really interesting to see how prominent politicians are taking time out to talk to college media and appear on television shows that will only air on college campuses. She was relatively candid for a politician, which was nice to see.

Blogs are an interesting beast. While many of them provide good, biting commentary, some are so horribly off base that it is disturbing. As the editor in chief of the only campus newspaper, it is important to read things that others write that pertain to campus. But I felt it was extremely necessary to respond to a GWBlogspot.com post that is so horribly off base.

Now, I understand how they can make baseless assumptions. We try to be transparent but it’s extremely difficult to make people understand how we do everything we do. I certainly don’t understand how the New York Times does everything it does. I will concentrate on answering some questions from a recent post by “Sarah,” whose ideas and thoughts are so baseless, they require a response.

Sarah tells her readers that The Hatchet missed the story on a girl getting arrested at the Health and Wellness Center because we did not inquire, “whether this has happened before — is HellWell being overrun by people sneaking in? What happens if I leave my Gworld in the lockers downstairs, but go outside to take a phone call and then try to get back inside? Is there a new crackdown on security taking place? Have students complained of a lack of rule enforcement?”

These are certainly questions that could be asked but many people who have the answers are not permitted to answer questions. Essentially there is one person who can speak for the University so answers often take hours, days and more time than we have to turn a story around. We did a thorough job of reporting the story, which included a trip to the Second District police station to retrieve the police report. A trend story on security in HelWell may be well worth it. But we needed to report the news.

Sarah continues to surmise that this may have been a slow news week, which is the reason it is on page 3, which she chides for being ad-heavy. Sarah said the heavy concentration of ads is bad news judgment.

“The appalling lack of news judgment here makes me think the Hatchet cares more about making its advertisers happy than it does telling its readers what’s going on in their world.”

Oh Sarah…how I wish life were this easy. Here is how ads work. On Friday and Tuesday, the business office gives me a sheet that has the amount of pages of advertisements. So if there were no stories in last issue, the ads would have fit on seven pages. Because we care so much about the news and keeping the paper financially viable, we typically strive for a 50/50 ad to news ratio. So we printed 14 pages. We didn’t cave to our advertisers. Ads must be laid out a certain way based on our contracts with advertisers. I wish we could print 28-page issues every week. Unfortunately that’s not feasible. We have a budget, a staff of more than 30 people, travel expenses, rent, utilities and other expenses that require us to be financially responsible. Our first priority is putting out a great product, which I work very hard to do.

I wanted to make a place to comment on the story that I wrote that ran on the front page of Monday’s paper. As I wrote in the story, the University Police Department has all of the privileges of a normal police department but is not required to open its records. The story is here.

What does the student body think of this? I’m interested in knowing. I find this to be a particularly interesting topic.

On Thursday night the staff of The Hatchet selected its next editor in chief: Eric Roper. Roper is now the paper’s metro news editor. Some of his most exciting stories have been this story about administrators using Facebook and this piece about high school students and their reservations about GW.

He is a skilled writer and a careful editor and has big plans for the paper. Roper is a junior from Manhattan. He went to the Taft School in Connecticut and enjoys…well I think he only enjoys The Hatchet.

In the summer of 2005, Michael Barnett went to an editor in chiefs conference in Georgia. When Barnett, the former editor of The Hatchet, came back, he wanted to create blogs for this newspaper. So add that onto the things that Atlanta produced: The Allman Brothers Band, Coca-Cola and a place for self-righteous GW students to opine and talk about life.

Over the past few years, the blogs have faltered. Editors stopped posting – we forgot about Barnett’s love child. This year, I had the genius idea to restart them. I told staffers they’d need to post and they have. But I haven’t. So tonight, at 12:28 a.m. as I sit in The Hatchet’s production room on the other side of the wall from Kyle Cannon, our production manager, I am blogging.

Tonight’s topic: the production process. Each Monday and Thursday, this paper comes out and it’s a truly remarkable procedure. It couldn’t be done without Kyle, Tim Gowa, Erica Steinberg and Alex Abnos. (you guys owe me). They are the unsung heroes who sit in front of big-screen Apple computer screens and lay out the paper that you read twice a week.

For anyone who cares, they use Adobe inDesign. All I know is that it’s expensive and has a lot of buttons that I tend to mis-press with eerie frequency.

I’d blog about the process but it’s disturbingly boring. If anyone wants to read about the process, post a comment here. I bet Kyle $10 no one cares.

Keep on reading.

We get a lot of questions about our handling of crime reporting. Some readers ask why we choose to put a student’s name in a crime story. Some ask why we hold names out of the crime report. There are a few factors that go into crime stories and when we decide it is newsworthy to report the name of a student.

Each newspaper has its own policy on reporting on crime. The Hatchet never had a clear-cut policy until last year, where our editorial staff sat down and discussed the merits of naming names. The argument arose from this story, a story I reported as the paper’s sports editor about a water polo player arrested on marijuana charges. After dissent arose around the newsroom, I called journalism experts who all concurred that it is The Hatchet’s obligation to report on charges filed with the Metropolitan Police Department. I spoke to the standards editor at The New York Times, other college newspaper editors and ethics experts at the Poynter Institute. After that, the staff decided that it would name students involved in crimes if they are arrested by MPD. In that case, the arrest records are public information and pertinent to the student body.

It is The Hatchet’s obligation to serve as a running history, a chronicle, of GW, and thus covering crime is important. The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s daily newspaper, has a wonderful column that encapsulates most of our feelings on the issue of naming names. I stumbled across this after our policy was created last year. When students complain that their name will be forever linked to this crime because of a news report, many forget that the records The Hatchet used will likely be used by future employers as well.

We have a different policy when it comes to crime that is handled by the University Police Department. UPD records are sealed and not available for public consumption. UPD is required, by federal law, to release a crime log in a timely manner. It does so, but does not include names. Generally, The Hatchet will not report names of campus crime that stays within campus police.

The Hatchet-Student Association debate is Tuesday night at Jack Morton Auditorium. It is an effort between The Hatchet and the SA, an effort we began just last year. David Ceasar, the senior editor who is in charge of campus outreach, organized the event along with SA President Nicole Capp and others.

The Hatchet, as an independent student newspaper, does not cooperate with University groups too often but this is an instance where there is no downside. We have the opportunity to give candidates a chance to speak and students an opportunity to listen. We are very careful to maintain our independence, which was given to us by the University in 1993. But throughout my time at The Hatchet we have done things with the University and student groups.

One example was in 2006. I was the sports editor and covered the men’s basketball team. At that time, we made a conscious decision to own coverage of the basketball team. We wanted every story first, which wasn’t an easy task because The Washington Post and the Washington Times covered the team daily. Also, the Wall Street Journal followed the team for the year for a feature. But we attended every game and when it became clear that it would be one of the best years in University history, some administrators approached us and asked if we would be interested in producing a magazine for the University. GW paid and we retained editorial independence and oversight. It turned out to be a great product, for which we won a few awards.

The debate is something slightly different. But on the same token, just because we organized it with the group does not affect our coverage of campus politics in any way. Anyway, enough insider baseball. Please come to the debate. It’ll be a lot of fun.

It is an early evening here at The Hatchet as we close out a 20-page issue. We had the opportunity to print a big paper for Feb. 11 because of our Valentine’s Day content. We do special issues several times a year and it gives a chance for our Life and Arts departments to chip in with some creative material. This year, we have involved our News team and urged them to contribute content as well.

We have a particularly strong issue (I think) tomorrow, with tons of interesting stuff. Staff writer Danielle Meister gave a great look at the happenings at the Board of Trustee meetings with two strong front page pieces. Bryan Han, a senior staff writer, did an in-depth analysis of Federal Election Commission campaign funds to see who at the University is giving to whom ¬¬– a must read this campaign season. Sarah Biggart, a staff writer on our Metro team, took a look at the D.C. primary and its widening influence. Emily Cahn, a staff writer on the Student Association beat, gives readers an interesting angle of the Ann Coulter event. And Ben Solomon, our venerable senior staff photographer, contributed some awesome art of Rob Diggs, a GW basketball star, from the team’s Saturday night upset.

Breaking news became an issue late Sunday evening when Metro Editor Eric Roper learned of a tree falling down and causing power outages on Foxhall Road near the Mount Vernon campus. He and Ryder Haske, an assistant photo editor, headed up around 10:45 p.m. to check it out. From his BlackBerry, Roper filed a blog post which talked about the impact. We decided keep it out of the paper and place it online. Roper said he did not think it would prevent Vern students from getting to Foggy Bottom and vice versa. Only time will tell if his predictions were right.

Again, I urge anyone and everyone to contact me at jsherman@gwhatchet.com. Post on the blog, e-mail me or send us a letter. Please let us know what’s on your mind.