The Forum desk has its own blog now, and if you have any questions for me they might appear in the blog instead of this column.
Andrew Sheivachman, the online editor, has worked hard making several blogs for every section of the paper.
“The Daily needs to have more of an online presence,” Editor in Chief Abe Rakov said. “Right now it’s just the newspaper on the Web site. But with the blog, people will have a reason to go to it.”
And some stories do work better on a blog. ASG beat reporters Paul Takahashi and Elise Foley will live-blog the ASG funding meeting tomorrow night for the Campus desk’s blog. “Live-blog” means bringing computers to the meeting, logging on to the wireless and updating the blog as student government determines funding.
“People can see, as of Wednesday night, what funding groups got, and Thursday’s story will compare the funding,” Foley said. Besides the timeliness element, though, there is the size of the blog: limitless. Foley said in the five-hour meeting there will be 38 groups who compete for funding. The 400 to 500 word story that will appear in Thursday’s Daily cannot represent the decisions made for each of those groups.
As the Public editor, this gives me Public Tingles. Too many times during my tenure, I have heard complaints from students who wonder why club sports, fraternity events, etc., cannot be covered. The answer was always that the Daily did not have the space. Now it does.
Nitesh Srivastava, the campus editor, came up with the idea to live-blog the event. “In coming years I feel like the Daily will use blogs more and more and more, and I’m trying to be more pro-active,” Srivastava said. “It gives the reporters a chance to have fun and use their voices because a lot of them do have opinions about their own beats. You’re working on these same 10 questions and issues for three months. You’re going to form opinions.”
Too much Medill coverage?
When I first saw Monday’s “Medill Changes Three Course Names To Reflect New Curriculum,” I thought I was reading an unnecessary piece about the school where most of the Daily’s staff studies. The words renewed my interest in a question whispered often enough to make noise: Does The Daily cover Medill too often?
I looked through the archives because I thought they would prove the point, but I did not find an inordinate amount of stories. I found an old public editor piece by David Spett, written on Oct. 18, 2006, where he said, “Given that Medill’s dean unabashedly says he wants to explode the curriculum, there is no reason for The Daily to cut back its coverage of this issue.”
John Lavine, Medill’s dean, is the most controversial figurehead of any school on this campus at the moment. What he does deserves coverage. But there is something else, and Rakov pointed it out. He has thought about this topic a lot.
“Medill articles are usually about Medill as a whole, while when we write about other schools we tend to write about specific programs and professors,” Rakov said. So basically when The Daily covers Medill, they say Medill a lot. And that opens them up to criticism.
With individual aspects of schools taken into account, Medill coverage looks more balanced. For instance, PLAY, by covering theater events, gives the theatre department more coverage than The Daily gives its journalism school.
Medill knows what makes a story. “Medill is very public about its changes,” Rakov said. “They sent out an e-mail about these changes, so we knew about it.”
