GW Hatchet Blogs - blogs.gwhatchet.com

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.

In the spirit of tonight’s Oscars and the suspense that builds up around not knowing who won, we’re posting our Editorial Board’s endorsements before our online and print editions come out. Without further ado:

• SA President – No One, with Vishal and OG being better two choices
• SA Executive Vice President – Kyle Boyer
• Program Board Chair – Tiffany Meehan

So, why? How did we arrive at our decisions? I’ll give a quick overview, first with PB, then EVP and lastly the more difficult decision of president.

PB

Both Tiffany Meehan and Kate Prescott are excellent choices, and both would likely do a good job running Program Board next year. Out of the three groups of candidates we met with this past week, we were most impressed by the qualifications of the two ladies running for PB chair. Both have experience in the organization in recent years, both are organized and both hope to improve on this year’s successes and shortcomings.

We chose Tiffany over Kate because the former showed more interest in doing what it takes to bring bigger musical acts to campus. Managing a band in New York, working at the 930 Club and having a relationship with a D.C.-based production company, Tiffany has the experience and connections to improve campus entertainment. The days of having John Mayer and No Doubt on campus are long gone, but perhaps equally prominent headliners can come to Foggy Bottom next year.

EVP

The decision was basically between Kyle Boyer and Ted O’Neil. Raven Burnett is a good person, with her heart in the right place and a drive to realize change; however, she lacks the necessary experience to get much done. O’Neil has a very ambitious platform, which unfortunately might be a bit too ambitious to work on in office. His accomplishments thus far center around Senate rules and bylaws which are undoubtedly of little import to the average student.

Boyer, as assistant vice president of community affairs, is also lacking in the tangible accomplishments department as of yet. But his work on student-discounted Metro fare has been in the works for a while and should hopefully see results this semester. Taking on a small handful of achievable – albeit time-consuming – projects has worked well for the executive this year, so Boyer’s smaller list of goals (in comparison to O’Neil) is prudent. Also, Boyer conducted himself in a serious, yet relatable way, that would serve himself well when conducting senate meetings.

President

Reaching the decision of endorsing no one for the SA presidency was not an easy call. After meeting all the contenders for this position on Saturday and deliberating in great depth, we slept on it. On Sunday, it became more clear that this year’s crop of candidates wasn’t stellar, and not one single person rose above the others as a clear choice. Endorsing someone for the sake of saying you have an endorsement isn’t productive. Here are some of the determining factors of our decision:

Tarek al-Hariri has minimal experience in campus leadership, having run a non-registered student organization and contributed nothing to student government. Additionally, he missed his endorsement hearing and showed up a half-hour late only after our editor in chief called him (not to mention his excuse for being late was lacking in creativity at best, and deceitful at worst).

Kevin Kozlowski spouted off more taglines for platform initiatives than tangible results of his senate tenure. In the video portion of our endorsements, he used the phrase “tangible results” to describe how he’s the only candidate to have brought them to the University. When asked which ones, he could only say that he contributed to Elliott School advisers having an AIM screen name and to passing a non-binding resolution in the fall. Probably over-coached, Kozlowski used expressions such as “being the change you want to see” – an uncited rip-off of Gandhi.

Ogheneruemu “OG” Oyiborhoro, on the other hand, has actually done things during his time in the senate. He brought The Onion newspapers to campus, has helped get 3,000 pounds of food to the D.C. Central Kitchen (according to his estimates) and tried to promote awareness of hatred at GW. The problem is that the way he has spearheaded some of these initiatives has been mired in controversy. The GW FEED funding problems, walking out of a senate meeting when upset with legislation being debated and the improper handling of his candidacy petitions all point to one common theme: OG has a penchant for skirting the rules and being combative.

Vishal Aswani is much more affable in his temperment and likely has a better reputation among administrators. He has worked to mitigate problems in the engineering school, which he represents on the senate. Many of his ideas show research that extends beyond GW to the operations of other universities. Unfortunately, his privatization of J Street goal seems a bit too unrealistic to be a major part of his platform, and his interactions with the Editorial Board about this issue rubbed some the wrong way.

Many candidates had similar ideas about improving the University. From improving campus dining to improving communication among members of the GW community to creating useful databases, bold initiatives abounded. The problem is that, despite the successes of this year’s SA leaders, not much has been achieved by GW student government in recent years. And what has been achieved often isn’t on candidates’ platforms; it comes from collaboration between multiple people while in office. Thus, what is of chief importance in choosing a candidate is not their platform initiatives, but rather their experience and leadership skills.

That in mind, we found no single candidate worthy of our endorsement.

After the Editorial Board reached its joint decision, there was talk about whether we would do a disservice to our readers by not advocating for anyone. Our editorial concludes with a call for students to make their own individual decision and – very importantly – vote. We don’t want our disappointment in the candidates to spur on apathy and dissuade voting. Rather, we want to express our reservations about all four but give special consideration to Vishal and OG: the lesser of the four evils (metaphorically speaking) in this race.

Please let us know how we got it wrong or right this year in our endorsements, or lack thereof. Post away!

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.