Being a student journalist at the Daily Cal involves performing a master balancing act. As an individual, you must balance your responsibilities at the paper with your classes. As an editor, you have to balance you time and attention among multiple writers and stories on a daily basis. And most fundamentally, you must guarantee a balance between the views and facts within each and every story.

It was the latter challenge that came into sharp focus with a recent story on the resignation of Interfraternity Council president Nikhil Bhagat, which was prompted by a hazing incident involving members of his fraternity, Delta Tau Delta. The story, written by the student communities reporter Vincent Quan, was a delicate one to report and an even more sensitive one to edit.

Running the story in itself was a decision made based on our duty to our readers. It is our belief at the Daily Cal that we must report what we know when we know it—as fairly and accurately as possible. We are not out to be sensational but instead it is our purpose to report news that students and community members have a right to know.

This story represented an opportunity to reveal the details of how campus administrators dealt with a serious situation and also to present readers with the truth behind the resignation of a student leader.

Once the decision to pursue the story was made and the reporting was done, it became evident that there were multiple layers to the story. The editing process drew out a few debates over how to organize the different aspects to most accurately convey the situation.

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Popularity: 59%

Let me get a little Brechtian on you for one second: A good arts section is, in my humble opinion, about more than just telling you what to spend your lunch money on this week. Sure, it’s handy to know whether or not a new movie like “The Kingdom” is any good, but what’s really worthwhile is to take pieces of culture we’re handed and then pull them apart—to examine what values and ethics they’re really presenting us with, reconciling it within a wider context and cultural climate and then finally deeming its worth.I use “The Kingdom” as an example because Daily Cal writer Ryland Walker Knight recently used most of his 12 inches of newsprint to focus on the troubling racial politics that had been slipped in under the big Hollywood sheen in that particular film. If you’re looking for a simple, thumbs up or down kind of rating, this may frustrate you, but a good review section will put a bit of dignity back into that colorless term “consumer.” Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 59%

Everybody and their mother may have blogs now, but it’s still hard to integrate the blog vibe with a professional newspaper. Many major newspapers–such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle–boast multiple blogs. Besides this blog, we have the Clog, and it’s not even a year old. We’ve struggled to fit in this step-child of journalism and often irreverent whining, to make it a part of the paper, to box it into some sort of ethical code.

Hence The Daily Clog’s correction policy, which stipulates all incorrect facts must be corrected in a timely manner. Corrections usually involve strikethroughs, notes at the end of a post or a parenthetical citation. It is also policy to leave evidence of the previously incorrect statement to preserve transparency and honesty. Our most recent correction, however, did not leave in the original text–this was partly due to miscommunication between blogger and editor. Normally, the error would still be visible in the post.

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Popularity: 69%

The first sentence of the Daily Cal’s mission statement is as follows: “The Daily Californian exists and functions to provide an opportunity for the students of the University of California to receive training in journalism and all aspects of newspaper production.”

We take this role seriously. There is no undergraduate journalism program here at UC Berkeley, as Stephen wrote about earlier when introducing the Daily Cal DeCal, but that doesn’t mean there is no demand. The Journalism School offered five freshmen or sophomore seminars this semester, with spots for fewer than 100 students. We had enough interest in the Daily Cal DeCal to fill more than double our original capacity of 40 students.

But what makes us qualified to teach journalism? While the Daily Cal as an institution has been around since 1871, our most experienced editors have only been around for three or four years and may have no professional training experience. At the Daily Cal we treat this training as more of a cooperative experience. No one, in any position, pretends they know everything about their jobs, and we regularly seek out expert advice.
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Popularity: 18%

One of the goals of the Daily Cal news desk is to improve its coverage of breaking news, delivering important stories immediately via the Web and then following up with more detailed articles in the print edition.

An aspect of our coverage that really benefits from this accelerated news cycle is crime reporting. This came into play for two recent crime stories:

On the night of Sept. 10, just after editing our regular stories for the next day’s issue, we received several calls about a rumored shooting on campus. A few writers immediately went to the North side of campus to chase down police officers, while others called emergency dispatchers from the office.
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Popularity: 15%