GW Hatchet Blogs - blogs.gwhatchet.com

I have covered GW sports since September 2004 and have NEVER seen a news release this strange.

“WASHINGTON, DC — George Washington University men’s basketball head coach Karl Hobbs announced today that he plans to remain at the school and was never a candidate for the head coach position at Providence College. The announcement comes amid speculation by some media outlets that Hobbs is under consideration to replace former PC coach Tim Welsh.

“While I am flattered that my name has been considered for other coaching vacancies, I want to go on record that I am not a candidate for any openings at this time,” said Hobbs. “I am extremely happy and honored to be the coach at George Washington University. We have accomplished a great deal and we have a lot of work to do to prepare for the 2008-09 season.”

Hobbs signed a contract extension through June 30, 2012 prior to last season.

Hobbs, who has a career record of 123-82 (.600) in seven seasons at GW, has guided the Colonials to three NCAA Tournaments in the last four years and his teams have won the Atlantic 10 Conference title in 2005 and 2007. He was named the A-10 Coach of the Year in 2006, the only GW men’s basketball coach to be accorded that honor.”

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.

The D.C. Fire Department evacuated residents of JBKO due to a fire in the basement. Welders were working in the boiler room and lit insulation on fire, said Timothy H. Gerhart, a deputy chief with DCFD. The incident appears to be an accident but the fire department is investigating. The building’s occupants were evacuated to Marvin Center, said Michelle Sherrard, a University spokesperson.

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.

Wanted to clear up some confusion. I spoke with a few University sources about the donation and they said the following:

• GW needs to raise $10 million on its own to get Smith’s $10 milion. They said it won’t be a problem at all. They can take unrestricted gifts given to GW and put them toward Smith Center. OR they could ask people who gave gifts to redirect them to Smith Center.
• Jack Kvancz is not in charge of this fundraising. He is helping with people he knows will give money but it’s mostly advancement people.
• Perspective donors, despite what some may say, cannot yet see any plans. They are not in the athletic director’s office on display. The Hatchet will have them as soon as the Smith and Kogod families give the final OK. But maybe if you are a big enough donor, things can be done.
• Plans will begin to circulate around the District’s fine arts commission relatively soon. This is the first step.

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.