This quarter the leadership at The Daily Northwestern changes, as it does at the beginning of every spring quarter. An editor in chief serves three quarters, and his or her term starts in the spring. Abe Rakov has replaced Ryan Wenzel. Wenzel, gone from the Daily this quarter, is probably fact-checking restaurant listings at the Chicago Reader as you read these words. It is a tough world.

But the transition at The Daily has been smooth. Rakov is staying late, reading over every word and sitting on the couch in his office. (It is a modest couch. I don’t want to misrepresent the size of this office. It is actually pretty tiny, especially with the couch.) Sweeping changes in The Daily Northwestern and its business is not on his agenda.

“For me, it’s a three-quarter process,” Rakov said. “You might not notice anything on a day-to-day basis, but it’ll be a change.”

Rakov has served as Campus Editor and Deputy Sports Editor in the past, so in many ways this is the first time he has had to take a full-scale view of The Daily’s operations. (The other student positions that directly deal with The Daily’s scope as a whole are the Managing Editor and Public Editor.) “If stuff hasn’t been done in the past, then there might be a reason why it hasn’t been done in the past,” Rakov said.

But the changes that have been made and that will be made are significant. Play, the weekly entertainment component of The Daily released every Thursday as a pull-out section, has been cut down to eight pages. Last quarter it was 12 pages long.

“Last quarter the newspaper was always eight pages long on Thursdays and Play was 12,” Rakov said. “We had to put so many ads in Play that we couldn’t put what we wanted in the paper.”

“Instead of two pages for each section, there is one page,” said Deena Bustillo, who is returning as Play Editor. “Content is mostly the same, just less. Instead of two music features, there’s one. There’s no calendar on the back, there’s a pop culture panel instead of a music panel.”

She said there are still the same number of columns. The main feature is still there, but shorter too. “They are 500 words instead of 800 words, which is great,” Bustillo said. “People didn’t want to read them, and people had a hard time writing them.”

Rakov also wants The Daily to examine the variety of its own coverage more often. Last Saturday, he spent four hours coming up with categories in which the paper should examine itself. Among them were the types of front page stories, what types of stories were covered (meetings, features, analysis) and even where quotes came from. He then went through every story printed in The Daily the first week of this quarter, organized them in a chart, and made, for his analysis, pie graphs of the results.

He said some staff members made fun of him, and while it is pretty nerdy, it’s a great way for an editor to look at the type of coverage he and his staff chooses to print. I am actually a little bit ashamed that I didn’t have my own charts to show him.

I would like to start a project for my last quarter as the Public Editor. It probably won’t be a chart, but we’ll see. The Daily has a reputation on campus for misquoting as well as not correctly representing sources in its stories. As The Daily starts doing more ambitious reporting on a regular basis as part of its Special Projects section, this becomes even more of an issue. This is especially true when students are being profiled in-depth, as in the “Untold Stories” Special Projects series The Daily ran last quarter.

If you feel you have ever been misrepresented or misquoted in The Daily, please contact me at my e-mail address below. Even if you have e-mailed me in the past, or the incident happened a long time ago, I want to know again. Thanks.