The Weekly: New editors recap year, share goals for coverage

Anavi Prakash, Leah Schroeder, Shun Graves, Madeline King, and Audrey Pachuta

January 7, 2025

The Daily Northwestern · The Weekly: New editors recap year, share goals for coverage

The Daily Northwestern’s campus, city, arts and entertainment and sports desk editors review the year and preview the headlines they’re keeping their eye on.

ANAVI PRAKASH: Academic freedom, a battle between Mayor Daniel Biss and Jeff Boarini, student theater shows and Northwestern’s lacrosse team’s legacy are just some of the storylines Daily editors are delving into in the new year.

From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Anavi Prakash. This is The Weekly, a breakdown of our top headlines from the past week.

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ANAVI PRAKASH: Today’s episode is a special one, where some of The Daily’s new editors discuss the last year of coverage and what they’re looking ahead to in the coming months.

First up, we have Campus Editor Leah Schroeder. Welcome to The Weekly, Leah. To jump right into it, campus had a big year. What are the headlines that stick out to you?

LEAH SCHROEDER: I think the obvious is the encampment. That was a crazy time on campus, and I think we had to do our best to cover everything that was happening.

ANAVI PRAKASH: The encampment impacted a lot of policies that are key in current campus coverage. What are you keeping an eye on this quarter?

LEAH SCHROEDER: The big thing is talking about academic freedom and where do you draw the line. I think especially with these new demonstration policies that were released after the encampment, that’s been a big thing, like you know, what does that mean, what does that mean for academic freedom?

Professors are grappling with that, like what can they say, what can they not say? And I think students are as well.

ANAVI PRAKASH: What other key storylines are you looking at in the coming months?

LEAH SCHROEDER: Another big one is obviously we had the election last fall, and we’ll have the inauguration this quarter. Looking a bit about what that means for students, how people are feeling about it and whether we’ll see any of those effects pretty quickly after Trump is inaugurated. I think especially how that affects international students or students who are immigrants.

ANAVI PRAKASH: And what are your goals for your team at the campus desk and your overall coverage?

LEAH SCHROEDER: Another big thing I’m focusing on is really accurately representing the student body and the issues that affect them because it’s easy to focus on these really big crazy stories, which are obviously important, but I think also focusing on what day to day life is like for students, that’s another big one.

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ANAVI PRAKASH: Thanks so much, Leah. We’re going to turn city-side now, with city editor Shun Graves. What happened in Evanston this year?

SHUN GRAVES: Well, there were a lot of victories and losses and not necessarily political ones.
But I think it’s interesting to just look back at the political year in Evanston. Jeff Boarini emerged as the sole challenger against Mayor Daniel Biss. Daniel Biss won a landslide victory in 2021, and since then, he’s maintained a huge war chest. So he’s entering at a huge, at least fundraising and name recognition advantage right here. So Boarini has a steep task in terms of trying to win over the rest of Evanston.

But he has a bold plan. He’s telling Daniel Biss to slow down his Envision Evanston rezoning project. He’s drawing on his ties to the City Council with his romantic partner, Clare Kelly, who represents the 1st Ward.

He’s drawing on that experience and also the experience of going into politics. He’s a political newcomer to present a completely different vision for Evanston. It’s not just a referendum on Daniel Biss.

He’s arguing it’s a referendum on the direction of the city. So that’s going to be an interesting race to watch.
Now, not everything was political.

Business owners downtown celebrated the vanquishing of the rodents. The famed rattiest block downtown is apparently no more.
The city employed a new tactic of injecting carbon dioxide into the ground where the rats lived. So, that was a victory for business owners, not for the rats, though.

ANAVI PRAKASH: Along with Biss and Boarini’s battle, what other storylines are you following for the April election?

SHUN GRAVES: We have a very interesting situation at the schools in Evanston. Evanston/Skokie District 65, really not in a very good financial shape. So we’ll be watching what happens through that.

So, it’ll be quite the Tuesday tilt on Apr. 1.

ANAVI PRAKASH: Thanks, Shun. Next up is Arts and Entertainment Editor Madeline King.

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ANAVI PRAKASH: So, what did arts and entertainment coverage look like last year?

MADELINE KING: I think we did a great job of covering a lot of the different things that people were really passionate about in terms of the arts.

Some stories that stick out to me, one of which was written by Lexi Goldstein, one of our current managing editors. And she wrote a piece on Mee-Ow’s 50th anniversary and interviewed a lot of alumni, and then we also covered their 50th anniversary show.

It was really neat and it’s also such an influential comedy group on campus. Everybody knows Mee-Ow; everybody goes to see Mee-Ow.
Within the last year, we’ve also started our own Arts and Entertainment Daily Instagram account. That was started by Lexi Goldstein, and I’m hoping to get that back up and running this quarter. I think that’s been a really great way for us to increase our outreach to people and especially reach people who aren’t necessarily interested in other parts of the news, but just want to go to the arts and entertainment side.

ANAVI PRAKASH: You can follow the arts and entertainment Instagram @thedailynuentertainment. What else are you looking forward to this quarter?

MADELINE KING: Personally, I’m a retired theater kid, so I have a special love for live theater. For the first time in a while, this winter, we’re going to have a designated theater critic, which I’m really excited about.

We are planning on sending our theater critic to maybe one show a week. She’ll write a review, we’ll publish it, hopefully, Thursday, and then that way we’ll be able to garner a lot of interest for the show, help them reach a broader audience, in turn solidifying our relationship with student theater on campus.

Overall, I’m really looking to continue to expand the variety of what we cover. We do a great job of balancing out coverage of the big broad categories as in visual art, theater, music, the list goes on, but I think where we can improve in terms of coverage is getting better, broader coverage over those smaller categories within. Like, within theater, what different theaters are we profiling? Are we focusing on improv? Do we have enough representation of musicals to straight plays?

ANAVI PRAKASH: Thank you, Madeline. Rounding out our print desks is sports. Here is sports editor Audrey Pachuta.

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ANAVI PRAKASH: Audrey, what are some of the big Northwestern sports storylines that stick out to you?

AUDREY PACHUTA: Well, I think people have a tendency to focus on the sports that people watch a lot, like football and men’s basketball, and while there’s a lot of success there, I mean, last year, our football team had this unlikely success where we went to a bowl game and then our men’s basketball team, two years in a row, went to March Madness.

There’s such good storylines in some of the other, less-watched sports. I mean, our best sports here at Northwestern are lacrosse and field hockey. They won the national championship and then lacrosse came in second.

ANAVI PRAKASH: And the lacrosse season starts up next month, so are there any specific storylines you’re looking out for?

AUDREY PACHUTA: One of the coolest things with lacrosse is it’s a legacy, great lacrosse program, but it’ll be their first year without Izzy Scane, who’s their all-time national lacrosse scoring leader, the most points scored in all of lacrosse in all of the country, and without Erin Coykendall, so it’ll be interesting to see what this team looks like without those two stars and who kind of steps up and becomes those new storylines.

ANAVI PRAKASH: What are some of your goals for coverage of the other winter sports?

AUDREY PACHUTA: Fencing, we’re continuously like one of the best teams in the country. That’s something that I’m looking forward to exploring more. In some of my reporting at The Daily so far, I haven’t been able to sort of tap into fencing or to swim and dive, but I’m looking forward to, you know, having my eyes on all of those things and we have some reporters who are more knowledgeable about those sports, so I’m super excited to listen to them.

ANAVI PRAKASH: Along with this coverage, do you have any other goals for the desk?

AUDREY PACHUTA: There was a picture taken a couple months ago when all the different news organizations went to a football game at Iowa, and it was our team from The Daily and Inside NU and WNUR and NNN, and it was a great picture of all these reporters who were super passionate about covering football, and there was not one girl there. A lot of reporters, alums, things like that were like, ‘Where are all the girls?’

And it’s tough because I’m not being like ‘Oh, this industry is against women.’ I totally don’t think that, but I think there is a way that we can work better to try to pull more people in.

So I think that one of my goals for the quarter is to reach out, especially to devos, and be like ‘This is a cool desk.’

ANAVI PRAKASH: ‘Devos’ are what The Daily calls new reporters who are completing the development process before becoming full-fledged Daily staffers.

AUDREY PACHUTA: And our men’s basketball beat this year, I mean I put a lot of people on the beat because in the past, it’s just been like three people who are constantly writing about men’s basketball. I have five of us on the beat for right now, and three of us are girls, so excited about that.

ANAVI PRAKASH: Awesome, thanks so much, Audrey.

AUDREY PACHUTA: Yeah, of course.

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ANAVI PRAKASH: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Anavi Prakash. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Weekly. This episode was reported by Anavi Prakash, Leah Schroeder, Shun Graves, Madeline King and Audrey Pachuta and produced by Anavi Prakash.

The Campus Editor of The Daily Northwestern is Leah Schroeder, the City Editor is Shun Graves, the Arts and Entertainment Editor is Madeline King and the Sports Editor is Audrey Pachuta. The Audio Editor is Anavi Prakash. The Digital Managing Editors are Kelley Lu and Jillian Moore, and the Editor in Chief is Lily Ogburn.

Our theme music is “Night Owl” by Broke for Free, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License and provided by the Free Music Archive.

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