By Matt Weir
“I’m sure we have the smallest staff in the Big Ten,” said Ryan Wenzel, The Daily Northwestern’s editor-in-chief. We were discussing how most of the paper does not necessarily feel strained by the small size, but inevitably every quarter there are a few holes in the staff.
The Minnesota Daily, of the University of Minnesota, has a staff of at least 80 students who work on the editorial side of the paper – editorial does not include advertising or the business end – on a regular basis. The Daily Illini, of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has an editorial staff of at least 100. And The Michigan Daily estimates 110 students are a regular part of the paper.
Our Daily? Pay checks for this quarter so far put our number of consistent contributors at 53. When I told the staff member of The Minnesota Daily that number, she asked, “So are you a weekly?”
When I said daily, she said, “Ouch.”
The news desk and the online team feel the ouch the most, but conversely the campus and city desks have their largest staffs in recent memory.
The news desk tries to have three news editors on staff, but so far this Winter Quarter they have been coasting with two. Michael Beder, managing editor, has done double-duty as a news editor on Sundays and Thursdays. They also only recently got a pool of copy editors – staff members who make first edits on a story and fact check – large enough to make news nights run smoothly.
Stories are supposed to go through copy editors, slot editors, the news editors, and then Wenzel and Beder. But when a link in the chain isn’t there, duties get pushed back and everyone has to do more.
To get a third news editor, The Daily has taken an unusual measure. Alex Pegg, a former staff member and 2006 graduate, will work Thursday nights now so that Beder doesn’t have to do both managing editor and news editor duties at once.
And the online staff is only one man: Ryan Reeh. Reeh works from 11:30 p.m. to 2 a.m., usually, but sometimes until 3:30 a.m. and once even until 6:15 a.m. He posts finished stories from the print version online. He does this every night of the production cycle, Sunday through Thursday, alone. “I think overall there’s a lot of interest in online journalism,”Reeh said. “But I don’t think anyone wants to do these late nights.
“And to be honest, I don’t know what they’ll do if I leave because I don’t think there’s going to be someone else who puts up with it as much as I do.”
But there’s good news in staff size, too. Matt Presser, the campus editor, oversaw the training of new reporters in the fall. That quarter The Daily trained 45 new staff members. About 30 students went through the development process during the entire 2005-06 school year.
“We were just responsive to e-mails, supportive to writers and just more successful in recruiting,” Presser said. “(Freshmen) are making up a majority of our staff right now.”
These students can be found on the campus and city desks mostly, where the desks have more writers than usual thanks to these recruitment efforts from last quarter. City Editor Elizabeth Gibson has 14 beat reporters and 6 general assignment reporters. “That’s like a world record for the city desk,” Gibson said. They’ve been able to have two arts and culture beat reporters for the first time ever, have a reporter to cover each of the two districts in Evanston and revive the discarded state and national government beat.
So while the staff at The Daily is smaller than most, it gets by. “Sometimes I’d like to see more competition,” Wenzel says. Wenzel was the only applicant for editor in chief last year. Abe Rakov, the next editor in chief, was similarly the only applicant.
“That’s not to say I’ve been disappointed,” Wenzel said. “I just think the paper wins when people compete.”
Public editor Matt Weir serves as the readers’ representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. He can be reached at [email protected].
