This week I am glad to pass the pen over to Ross Brenneman, Publisher for the Campus Times, to shed his thoughts on current CT affairs:

The Campus Times consists of just under 19 editors, 40 regular staff writers and fills at least 16 pages of content each week, distributed to over 10,000 people weekly either electronically or in hard copy. A lot of people have little time to do a ton of work.

Every semester, I can tell when my friends in performance groups are getting near to performance time. Their attitudes sour, their patience wanes and they tend to smell. Yet every week is a performance for the Campus Times, and it’s not always easy. And for any student with at least 16 credits, homework, sleep, etc., putting together a newspaper weekly can get the better of us; more than a few editors have resigned because they couldn’t manage the schedule.

This lack of time means that editors can’t always pursue the stories they want, and they can’t find a writer with enough time or interest to do it for them. If it were up to us, we’d have every aspect of everything that happens at UR covered. But we have neither the staff nor the advertising revenue to do that.

For instance, the last time that the CT covered BPG was in 2008. The dance ensemble’s president noted this when requesting coverage for the upcoming show this week. They had a point worth making, if still a somewhat misguided one — with over 241 student groups, there are a number we have never covered at all. I used to complain constantly about the amount of space devoted to the a cappella groups (I’m quieter about it now) because they’re not inherently more deserving of coverage than anyone else. But those groups, like all performance groups, have shows each semester on a big stage and that merits coverage. Other groups, like the academic councils (I used to be on one, for the record) and honor societies, offer just as much value — and probably more — on an individual level than any performance organization. But it’s harder to find a writer for that kind of story (the one that, frankly, is more likely to get a Pulitzer).

It is sad that the Campus Times net does not, despite our best intentions, extend far enough to catch every group. Yet to best of our ability we cover every request (see this week’s A&E section). But even if we can’t always get the writer, we need those requests. We need to be told what’s going on out there. We put forth an extraordinary effort, but we’re not enough in number to find every story.

Beginning next week, the Campus Times will be making an even more concerted effort to reach out to groups and seek those interesting stories. It begins by reminding people about the tool that’s always been available to them: editor@campustimes.org.

While we serve the entire University of Rochester community, our main audience has been and probably always will be the College of Arts & Sciences. But it takes some effort from everyone to make that universal coverage happen.

Meliora,
Ross Brenneman
Publisher, Campus Times

Hello everybody and welcome to another lovely week at the CT.

It is with a heavy heart and a weighted soul that I write this. After tasting the sweet fruit of Eden that was last week’s online only edition of the paper I am bittersweetly torn in announcing to you all that the Campus Times will no longer be publishing a print edition.

Sure, we all knew it was coming. With the invention of the Internet, iPods and those funny new iPad devices, it just seems silly to keep wasting so many trees.

It also made sense fiscally. Now having been independent from the University and SA funding for several years, moving only to online content will allow us to more evenly spread out our resources. At a small research university, there is no need for us to continue printing and wasting resources that could be devoted to true investigative journalism, pretty Web polls and even exclusive videotaped interviews with our editors.

Instead, the CT will now plant a tree every week and sing our own rendition of “Kumbaya.”

Rest assured readers, the CT will still provide you with the best up-to-date coverage that you have come to know and love. In fact, I am expecting the quality of stories to increase now that editors can spend more time working with writers, now that they don’t have to dedicate time to a print edition.

Each section will still have weekly stories, but with the ending of a sole production night as well, stories will now go up when they break. This also allows us to actually break news, something that we don’t get to do very often.

So yeah, you won’t have to wait for news to just come out on Thursdays. You will also be able to set up RSS feeds to make sure you don’t miss a single breaking story.

With this change, all of our overworked staff can now enjoy being students, have fun and just sit back and enjoy journalism.

It was a hard decision, and one that I took a long time on before ultimately deciding. While I have long thought of myself as a firm supporter of print journalism, and I am sad to see the print edition of the CT be gone like dust in the wind, it was the right decision that had to be made at the right time. If you have any questions about this change of policy, please feel free to submit a Letter to the Editor or e-mail me at editor@campustimes.org.

Enjoy this final print edition of the Campus Times, and we will see you all in the digital age. Rock it, Rochester.
-Willie Clark
Campus Times Editor-in-Chief

Hello everybody and welcome to another lovely week at the CT.

This is our last issue before spring break, and also will be our last issue until March 25. We originally had an issue planned for March 18, the week we got back, but after discussing it with staff we decided to not publish directly following a break. In past years we have had that week off, and last year we ran a awesome 28-page issue since we had the two weeks of news build up, so we decided that taking that week off was better than trying to put an issue together in only a few days of being back on campus.

But fear not CT readers, as we have come up with a 21st century idea that will help still bring you news that week. With the invention of something called the internet, we are taking advantage of our Web site to create a unique way to still deliver news during our first week back from break.

Our solution is this: The CT will be publishing some online only stories the week of the 18th. This allows us to still write stories and help deliver news, and also helps us from having three full weeks where we would be publishing no new content. We will also be sending out an online newsletter that week, so everybody on the mailing list will still get their weekly email full of the best stories from each section.

With this step in the digital direction, I am hoping to continue to publish such online only stories for breaking news, or for updates of stories that may change direction or pace in the middle of our production cycle. We aren’t a daily, but we do have complete access to an online forum whenever we need it, and I really am hoping to take further advantage of that in the future, and using our Web site for this vehicle after spring break is only a first step in fully utilizing our online content to the best of our ability.

And not to get completely on my personal soap box, but I do want to stress that the CT is still a print product first, and this new look at online is by no way a means of looking less at the print edition. I personally feel that the print medium, while struggling globally, will somehow find a way to adapt. That being said; I think there is a lot the CT can do online, but first and foremost feel that the print edition should be my greatest concern and the most prominent.

Enjoy the week off from the print edition, and make sure to check the Web site the following week for updated stories from each section!

Enjoy this week’s edition of the paper (and spring break!).Until the next two weeks. Rock it, Rochester.

-Willie Clark
Campus Time Editor-in-Chief

Hello everybody and welcome to another lovely week at the CT.

This week I’m going to dive head first into a problem that often happens at any weekly newspaper: The news doesn’t stop just because we have a production night, and news doesn’t just happen early in the week.

One of the most important aspects of developing news stories is timeliness. A story that breaks on Monday may no longer be interesting or worthwhile as front page news by the time we get to Thursday.

But with our weekly publication cycle, the flip side of the coin can hit us to. This happened for two stories this week, both of which ran on the front page and both of which didn’t occur until Tuesday.

Now, we can’t stop the news from happening. But our normal timeline is to try our best to work ahead of the game. Ideally we assign stories to each section by our staff meeting on Friday, with then each section setting individual deadlines for their writers. This gives the writes time to writer and the editors time to edit, and everybody is happy.

News happens every day though, and many times it will happen later in the week and still deserve coverage. And to quote a great journalist, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

However, that does throw off our regular reporting cycle. For “Presidents approve Duffy’s Plan” story that broke on Tuesday this week we took a divide and conquer approach. While one person was working on a skeleton draft of the story, another was phoning people, rapidly sending off e-mails and working to get enough information so the article could be complete.

The second breaking story happened in the untimely death of ex-UR professor William Fals-Stewart. My best wishes go out to the Fels-Stewart family. Covering death is always a topic for journalist debate, and not the easiest of events to cover, even with a great amount of time. At the paper here we weren’t made aware of the incident until Wednesday evening, and as I tried to get a hold of police officers and contacts at SUNY University of Buffalo, I hoped that we would be able to get enough information to give the article the weight it deserved.

I feel that in both instances we were able to give both stories the appropriate attention that they each deserved (or you probably wouldn’t have seen either article this week), and I have to say that there is an enjoyable journalist rush that comes with working on news breaking and developing stories.

And as much as I wished that UR would learn to make press announcements on the CT’s schedule, we are a ‘news’paper, and must cover the news as it happens. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Enjoy this week’s edition of the paper. Until next week. Rock it, Rochester.

—Willie Clark
Campus Times Editor-in-Chief

Hello there. Another Thursday and that means another exciting production night for the Campus Times.

This week I want to take a chance to focus on one issue that comes up every so often here at the CT, and one that came up several times over the course of this week.

As a college newspaper, we often have interviews with various members of the faculty and administration. Sometimes we run these as part of our Administer This in the News section, or perhaps for a Teacher Feature in Features. Or sometimes it may be to get a few nuggets of good information or quotes for a story.

But every once in a while there will be an interviewee who will ask to read a whole article, or in the rare occasion a whole editorial board piece, after the articles’ completion but before publication.

A reasonable request from their end. They don’t want to be misquoted, and as a newspaper we don’t want to get facts wrong; Any check on our reporting is a good thing, at first glance.

However, journalistically and ethically speaking, any professional newspaper would never allow a source to read a story before publication. And while we are a college/student newspaper, we still hold ourselves to professional standards.

That being said, I want to bring up what I suggested to the editor who came to me this week with questions about our policies on this issue. Writers, and newspapers, have a responsibility to get facts and quoted material right. I have no problem with letting quoted sources read their quotes, and there is nothing that says a writer can’t ask for clarification of facts or allow a source to confirm facts in an article. But letting a source read a completed article before publication is just asking for trouble.

And, I’ll stress the same advice here I would to any writer or editor starting out in journalism: Always, and I mean always, make sure to have really, really, really good notes, or a voice recorder running during interviews. It will make your life easier, and also help if there is ever a discrepancy in what the interviewee thinks they said (or what they wish they hadn’t) and that they actually said. They might not like what they said, but if they said it, don’t let them back out.

Enjoy this week’s edition of the paper. Until next week. Rock it, Rochester.
-Willie Clark
Campus Times
Editor-in-Chief

Hello everybody, and happy Thursday. Hope the snow that seems to be finally hitting Rochester hasn’t hit you all too hard.

This week I have found myself in an interesting situation, and one that I didn’t expect to find myself in for a few weeks. It looked very promising that the production of the paper would finish tonight before I got a chance to sit down and write my blog entry.

Now usually I sit down and write the blog during production night during the down time before pages start to get to me, giving me time to go back and forth between it and various other paper duties during the night.

But as only Styx could put it, production night really sailed away, I found myself reading pages instead of having large slots of time spent where I would normally write the blog. But out of all the problems to have, this is one I would never, ever, complain about.

There were several reasons for such a productive production night (pun intended) and it just wouldn’t feel right to pin it on one sole reason. Now on our fourth issued for the semester, editors are finally getting comfortable with InDesign, copy editors are starting to argue over exact comma placements and less questions come up about fitting articles or placing them on a page and more spring up about content or the depth of an article.

And with this added time, I hope, will come better articles and a better paper. We also ran 16 pages this week due to a small advertisement load, which also has the benefit of giving sections room to hold over articles to polish them more next week, further strengthening our content.

Now, I don’t want to make a habit out of picking out one article from each week, but I do suggest that everybody check out the Features Front this week. Conor did a great job of capturing the life of refugees in Rochester, and if you check out one story this week, be sure to check out that one.

And, sometimes it really is the little things. Nothing blew up this week. We had a couple people battling illness and early morning Thursday tests, but all in all is was possibly the smoothest moving production night yet.

And I’ll also get more than just a few hours of sleep before my 3 p.m. class tomorrow. It’s been a good night.

Enjoy this week’s edition of the paper. Until next week. Rock it, Rochester.
-Willie Clark
Campus Times Editor-in-Chief

Bad goes first.

Everybody who opened up the print edition of last week was bound to find several small hidden surprises. The Features Front, a mainstay in the Features section, printed missing the background that was designed for it. A&E had several floating black boxes, which were originally the music review boxes.

No words can really express my feelings when I first flipped open the paper last week. After the time and effort that we put it, mistakes like this hit hard. Especially when the mistakes weren’t out fault. As of press today, I am still waiting on an explanation from the printers as to exactly why this happened. But que sara sara.

And for this week, despite how efficient each section ran during production, a slight technical error from our online provider for our Web site, College Publisher, kept us from putting stuff online until Friday. But, each section was our in record time tonight, which leads me into the good news.

This week you will notice several new changes to the paper. Opinions finally has a masthead it can call its own, and also has a brand new redesigned page. This page updated the older Editorial/Editorial observer page, and allows for one editor a week to now write a more in-depth Editorial Observer instead of splitting the space between two writers. It also returns the masthead back to the Opinions section, where it once sat for many a years. Feel free to comment on the new page, as we would love to hear feedback on it.

This week you will also find a two page spread in the A&E section, focusing on the beloved series that returned this week, “Lost.” Now I will admit to never have gotten addicted to the show, the final season of this television mainstay features a rare opportunity to do a great design in the A&E section.

And last, but certainly not least, for all of you football fans out there, we ran a special one-page design on one UR student’s predictions and breakdowns for the big game to come this weekend.

Oh yeah, and the Features Front has puppies. A lot of them. And boy, are they cute.

Enjoy this week’s edition of the paper. Until next week. Rock it, Rochester.
-Willie Clark
Campus Times Editor-in-Chief

I am proud to present to you the first edition of “The Editor’s Desk,” a weekly blog that will attempt to brush away the cobwebs and transport you into the inner workings of all the glory, fame and glamor that is the Campus Times. As we go through the semester, the blog will serve as an outlet for me and the editorial staff to offer explanations why and how the Campus Times makes the decisions that it does.

And we have criticized many an administration for its lack of transparency, so we might as well hold ourselves to the same standard.

From time to time I will also pass the pen over to other editors and allow them the chance to shed some light on their individual sections and their week-by-week process of putting together the best, and only, completely student-run newspaper at UR.

As I write this during our second issue, I can’t help but already be amazed at just how well the first issue, and this one, has been going. The time commitment and the energy that the new staff has shown has been nothing short of impressive. Really, the CT works unlike any group I have been a part of. Most of us (me excluded) aren’t English or journalism majors. People aren’t here because they want to go into the dying print industry (again, me excluded). For most of the editors it comes to down to one simple thing: passion.

But what that passion means for each editor can vary. For some, it’s a love of television, a love of sports or just a love of getting free food and sitting on the coach once a week. To others it is a deep passion to making sure every participle is in place, every semicolon is perfect and that we managed to get rid of every possible serial comma.

But really, regardless of why people are here, how they got here and how much they knew about journalism, each editor puts in myriad hours of work making sure that their section is as perfect as it can possibly be. And for a group of people, who for the most part have never met outside the CT, the fact that everybody can put in that much time together in one office working toward one goal (putting out the best newspaper each week possible) is nothing short of amazing. I’m humbled and proud to be able to lead such a group.

But at the end of the day, or in the early morning when the ink is finally dry on each issue, we are a learning newspaper. And sure, we get things wrong. But we get a lot of them right, and we have a lot of fun doing it.

Enjoy this week’s edition of the paper. Until next week. Rock it, Rochester.

-Willie Clark
Campus Times Editor-in-Chief