GW Hatchet Blogs - blogs.gwhatchet.com

Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a history of cardiac problems, visited GW Hospital this morning for his annual checkup. His press secretary told the Associated Press his heartbeat was normal and cardiac status was “stable.”

The 67-year-old has had four heart attacks, two artery-clearing angioplasties and quadruple bypass surgery. He has a defibrillator surgically implanted in his chest to regulate his heartbeat, which was replaced in July 2007.

Cheney last visited GW Hospital in November for an irregular heartbeat, determined to be atrial fibrillation. Doctors delivered an electrical shock to his heart to restore it to a normal rhythm.

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.

An air conditioning unit caused the May 2 fire on Schenley Hall’s second floor, a D.C. Fire Department incident report confirmed.

The May 5 report stated that the fire started when electrical wiring ignited due to a “spark, ember or flame from operating equipment,” and that the flames spread due to curtains and other fabric. Fire department spokesman Alan Etter told The Hatchet Friday night that the fire was caused by an air conditioner that caught fire.

The fire investigator’s report estimated the fire caused a loss of $75,000 — 60 percent of all property and contents — including $20,000 in damages to the room’s contents.

DCFD responded with 21 units, with the first arriving within three minutes of the 9:29 p.m. dispatch. Firefighters quickly extinguished the fire, which was contained to the second-floor room. The third floor received some smoke damage.

The report stated that the “cause of ignition was unintentional” and there were no human factors that contributed to the fire.

The Hatchet live-blogged the second annual Hatchet-SA Debate tonight, from Jack Morton Auditorium. This blog post is for the executive vice presidential debate. For the preview, click here. For the live-blogging of the presidential debate, click here.

Analysis | 10:09 p.m. The only SA outsider running for president (Tarek Al-Hariri) fared better than Burnett, the only outsider running for EVP, who found herself at odds with both of her candidates on a few positions. She stumbled at times and appeared nervous, but positioned herself strongly as an outsider, a younger candidate and a candidate for change, which could help her in the election.

Boyer and O’Neil agreed on many points. Boyer was very articulate while championing and defending his work on reducing Metro fares — looking to use that experience to his advantage — while O’Neil was more bolder with his ideas, such as proposing a more dynamic Vern shuttle and changes to the use of study rooms in Gelman.

This is a young field – two sophomores and a freshman. In a race with two SA insiders,

The Hatchet live-blogged the second annual Hatchet-SA Debate tonight, from Jack Morton Auditorium. This blog post is for the presidential debate. For the preview, click here. For the live-blogging of the executive vice presidential debate, click here.

Analysis | 11:45 p.m.
The only outsider and the only sophomore, Tarek Al-Hariri, fared well against three senators, all juniors. He received good reactions from the audience on his positions, and his rhetoric was well delivered. He wants to build an internship database (similar ideas were proposed by other candidates, whether for jobs, housing, sponsorships, etc.), explore other sources of funding (also emphasized by Aswani) and do something drastic with

Tonight’s Hatchet-SA Debate starts at 7 p.m. in the Jack Morton Auditorium (in the Media and Public Affairs Building.) Doors open at 6:30 p.m., with light refreshments to follow the event.

The participating presidential candidates:

• Sophomore Tarek Al-Hariri
• Junior Vishal Aswani, SA Senator (SEAS-U)
• Junior Kevin Kozlowski, SA Senator (U-At Large)
• Junior “OG” Oyiborhoro, SA Senator (CCAS-U)

The candidates for executive vice president:

• Sophomore Kyle Boyer, SA assistant vice president of community affairs
• Freshman Raven Burnett
• Sophomore Ted O’Neil, SA Senator (ESIA-U)

There will also be a video shown tonight: “On Leadership: Advice for the Future, from the Past,” produced by Sam Sakin, The Hatchet’s multimedia editor. The debate will be moderated by The Hatchet’s senior editor, David Ceasar, and the panelists are

• Andrew Ramonas, campus news editor of The Hatchet
• Mallory Thompson, news director of WRGW
• Lizzie Wozobski, opinions editor of The Hatchet

Student Association President Nicole Capp confirmed she will not run for re-election today in a podcast recording for The GW Hatchet, to be published Monday.

(Capp with SA Executive Vice President Brand Kroeger earlier this year. Tim Gowa / Hatchet photographer)

The Hatchet’s multimedia editor, Sam Salkin, asked, “Nicole, I know that you’re a junior and you could run again for president. Have you made any decision about you’re plans for next year?”

Capp: “I will not be running for next year.”

I hope that quells any rumors of a re-election situation, for Capp anyway.

Tune in to our award-winning GW Hatchet Podcasts this Monday, Feb. 4, and hear the rest of the interview.