The Weekly: Spring Quarter recap

Dov Weinstein Elul and Lily Ogburn

June 2, 2025

The Daily Northwestern · The Weekly: Spring Quarter recap

What has been the biggest news over the last 10 weeks? What has The Daily been doing differently this spring? What can we expect for the summer? On this special episode of The Weekly, The Daily recaps the past quarter of news with Editor in Chief Lily Ogburn.

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: This week on The Weekly, a spring quarter recap. As spring comes to an end, I wanted to cap off this quarter’s coverage of The Weekly with one final special episode. I sat down with The Daily’s editor in chief, Lily Ogburn, to recap the biggest and most important news of the past month, learn about some things The Daily has been doing differently and get a sneak peak into summer coverage.

From the Daily Northwestern, I’m Dov Weinstein Elul.

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DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: So, you’re coming to the end of two quarters of being editor in chief. This quarter in particular has been a sort of hectic quarter news-wise, from the federal funding freeze, to Evanston elections, to all the spring sports.

Why don’t you just start by telling us about some of the top headlines from the past quarter.

LILY OGBURN: Yeah, totally. We’ve had an interesting quarter to say the least. It all started on our first day, which was the Evanston election day. It was our first night publishing for this quarter. Our then brand new city editor, Hannah Webster, led the charge on election coverage on April 1, and there were some pretty crucial races that got called that night — not quite decided until later when we got the official results, but Mayor Daniel Biss was defending his seat as the city’s mayor, and he was reelected. And then we had some really interesting council races, including Parielle Davis won the 7th Ward seat, which was a pretty contentious race, and she’s very kind of anti-Ryan Field and has started a lot of campaigns against Biss in the sense of like starting the “Better Than Biss” website and organization to look for a challenger against Biss. And then Matt Rodgers beat incumbent Devon Reid for the 8th Ward seat, which is a really interesting race considering Devon Reid has been on the council and Rodgers kind of came out for the election and won, and it wasn’t a very close election either, which was interesting.

And then there was also a bunch of new school board members elected, which is pretty consequential given the different states that (Evanston Township High School) D202 and (Evanston/Skokie) D65 are in right now. The new council, school boards has since taken over, and they’ll have a lot of, you know, major oversight into coming issues including Envision Evanston 2045, the Foster School construction, stuff with Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies, and the city’s responses to the Trump administration. They’ll all be facing a lot of stuff with the Trump administration, including stuff related to DEI, funding cuts, all that.

Kind of on the note of the funding freezes and funding cuts, and speaking of the Trump administration, about a week after our crazy night of election coverage, we had our first print night of the quarter, and that’s also when we found out about the funding freeze. That’s when The New York Times broke news that the Trump administration had frozen $790 million in funding for NU. That wasn’t something that we were expecting necessarily, I think that we had an idea that we could be one of a few universities that was being targeted for this, but we didn’t know at the time, and at that time, the University had not been alerted either. It was just The New York Times that broke that, and we kind of went from there.

A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson confirmed the freeze was related to some of the investigations going into NU about antisemitism on campus. And so, over the course of the quarter, we’ve now seen around 100 stop work orders, lots of grant terminations and then we’re seeing everything as a result of those that goes from, you know, centers at Feinberg being closed or merged to undergrad summer research and internship programs being cut. And so Campus Editor Isaiah Steinberg really stayed on top of things and led our campus coverage amid all this chaos. So kudos to him.

And, you know, beyond the funding freeze itself, we’ve also done a lot of coverage on NU’s attempts to sort of, I guess, comply with the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion. I would say most NU websites at this point have been scrubbed of a lot of the mentions of DEI. For example, Assistant Campus Editor Laura Horne recently reported on the scrubbing of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center’s website, and then kind of the re-publication of that website after it had originally been taken down. And you know, they scrubbed a lot of the LGBTQ+ language from that and gender affirming care resources from that website. So we’ve seen a lot of that, and then just in general, a lot of students, faculty and administration members are really outraged about the results of the funding freeze and Trump’s anti-DEI orders. And so, we’ve been covering that and we’re going to continue to cover that.

I guess on a lighter note, our Arts & Entertainment desk has had a lot of interesting coverage this quarter. First of all, I think our biggest event was the 53rd Dillo Day. It was a couple of weeks ago, a great day of music and activities on the Lakefill. We published some great photos and coverage, including a breaking news story about BigXThaPlug’s last minute cancellation. Despite not really having BigXThaPlug in the lineup, it was still a great day and Mayfest was able to get iann dior, and he was an awesome replacement. So I would say Dillo Day was a big success.

On top of that, A&E Editor Emily Lichty produced The Daily’s first Summer Style Guide. So that was in our last print issue of the quarter. It includes everything from internship outfit ideas for students this summer to coverage of local fashion brands and other stuff, so it’s a pretty, pretty great issue. Everyone should check it out, especially if you’re interested in fashion.

On the sports front, our women’s programs have seen some incredible success this spring. Some pretty crazy developments, covered a lot by Sports Editor Charlie Spungin, and he led the coverage of NU’s sports this spring. This included our women’s golf team winning the national championship — the first in program history — so it’s pretty insane. It came for an upset win and, and got it. There’s some great putting that happened there and it was pretty exciting to watch. We even had some watching going on in the newsroom, which was pretty fun. Our lacrosse team also made it to the national championship. I think a lot of us expected them to lose in the Final Four against Boston College, but they were able to best Boston College and win in that upset and get to the championship. Unfortunately, they did fall to North Carolina, but you know, they played a good game, they had a great season, and it was good to watch them. And yeah, I would say it’s just a continuation of our women’s sports, just having some great, great success.

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: This was your second quarter as editor in chief, so I’m wondering if you could give us a little insight into something maybe The Daily did a little differently from your first quarter, and also just generally during your time, something that The Daily has done differently from previous quarters before then.

LILY OGBURN: Yeah, definitely. Last quarter when we did this little recap, I talked a lot about our features desk being a new, a new kind of implementation this quarter and we kept that going this quarter. And then I would say some new things we started this quarter, our polling editor, Scott Hwang, came back and did a spring poll, first annual spring poll, where we got some new data, did some new questions. We learned a lot about like student relationships, kept up with some, with some data about University President Michael Schill and kind of students’ thoughts on him, campus activism, and the current state of politics, and just got some really interesting data that we plan to use throughout our coverage until we have our next poll, hopefully in the fall. And yeah, it’s been great having Scott to lead the charge on this new desk, and we hope to continue his legacy after he graduates this quarter.

So then some other things, just kind of more internal policies for The Daily. We updated our opinion policy and kind of really codified our whole opinion policies so that it’s easier for our editors to know what submissions to take and, you know, establish some greater guidelines for our contributors so that they know kind of what to expect and what our editing process looks like. Also just, you know, formalizing a little bit more with our style guide and how we implement that with our opinion pieces.

And that kind of goes into my next thing, which is about our D&I chairs, it used to be more of an internal role that would work on like making sure our metrics were on top of things for sourcing and in the newsroom. But it was more of a small role in the newsroom, and we’ve kind of elevated that to be D&I editors, which is pretty cool that they’re now doing more editing and hands-on stuff, making sure that we’re following our style guides and really getting to edit stories.

On top of that, they’ve been updating our style guides to make sure that they are, you know, fitting with the times, you know, using everything from (the) AP style guide to the Trans Journalist Association style guide to help us, you know, make sure that our coverage is the most representative and fair and uses the correct language. So that’s been really cool. And, you know, in combination with the opinion policy, I think it will make our coverage stronger and more foolproof.

And I guess just overall, I think that throughout my time as editor in chief, we’ve also just tried to make the newsroom a pretty welcoming place and host some bonding events, whether that’s with freshmen, our devos,or with (the) Edit Board. I think it’s been like a pretty good experience to just get to know everybody a little bit better at The Daily and make it a welcoming place for just everyone who wants to report for us. So, yeah, I think it’s been a really great two quarters and we’ve introduced some new ideas, and I hope that our next editors in chief, David Samson, who’s our summer editor in chief, and Emily Lichty, who’s our Fall and Winter editor in chief next year, will keep the ball rolling.

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: Though I know you’re going to be in New York City this summer, I’m curious if you’re aware of any big or exciting news that might be taking place over the summer.

LILY OGBURN: That’s a good question. The Daily actually won a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network. It’s called the Student Media Challenge, and it’s a grant of $7,500 to report on student and youth mental health in our area. And that money will be going toward travel expenses and staff stipends, other things like community engagement events, to help us report on those topics and kind of get our solutions journalism started here.

For anyone that doesn’t know, solutions journalism is a kind of reporting on solutions to big problems in the area and specifically like in, you know, local settings, when a lot of times we often just like as journalists dive into an area and then kind of report on bad things happening and then leave. And so, solutions journalism kind of takes a lens where you’re looking for the solutions in the community. You’re not necessarily only focusing on the solutions — you want to highlight the problems too and you know, make sure that that you’re giving a lot of context of the situation, knowing that solutions aren’t always going to be perfect — but we’re really excited to focus on NU students’ mental health, as well as the mental health of the youth in Evanston and Chicago using this grant. So, we’re going to start doing some preparation for that over the summer, which will look like kind of putting the team together and getting some meetings started, and then next year we’ll kind of dive into that.

Beyond that, I think summer news will be interesting with city council will still be going on. There’ll be lots of city stories to follow along with, even though all of our NU students are off campus. And, I think that Evanston and Chicago communities have been particularly vocal about being against the Trump administration, and there’s already, I know a lot of protests scheduled for the summer and I think that we’ll see a lot of that.

In addition, Pride Month. So there’ll be tons of things from, you know, Chicago Pride to Evanson’s Pride events, I know there’s like a car parade coming up. And yeah, I think there’ll be a lot of interesting coverage to follow along with The Daily over the summer. And obviously a lot to look forward to in the future with our new leaders coming in, and I have a lot of faith in them to lead the staff and really just craft excellent coverage.

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: Lily Ogburn, thanks so much for being here and thanks so much for your work as editor in chief. It’s been great to work under you.

LILY OGBURN: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been an honor.

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DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: Here are the other top headlines from the week:

Northwestern nears completion on Cohen Lawn, Deering Library, other projects.

Illinois lawmakers introduce Chicago area transit reform bills as fiscal cliff looms.

Northwestern advises international students, warns of travel risk following U.S. visa policy changes.

Lexa Gates announced as 2025 Philfest headliner by A&O Productions.

And Nick Martinelli withdraws from NBA Draft, will return to NU for senior season.

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DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Dov Weinstein Elul.

Thank you for listening to another episode of The Weekly. This episode was reported by Dov Weinstein Elul and Lily Ogburn and produced by Isabella Jacob.

The audio editor is Isabella Jacob. The multimedia managing editors are Anavi Prakash, Misha Manjuran Oberoi and Danny O’Grady. 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.

We’ll see you in the fall!

Email: [email protected]
X: @dov_w_elul

Email: [email protected]

X: @LilyOgburn