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.

• 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.