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.

First and foremost, to my view, was the story of how the campus decided to deal with the hazing incident by calling for the quiet resignation of a student leader and placing the fraternity on a sort of probation. In addition, the campus asked the leaders within the fraternity to step down.

From this stemmed questions over of how administrators typically cope with incidents of hazing and how often such events occur. Should the punishment have been harsher; more targeted to the specific individuals involved in the incident; more procedurally based?

The second conflict that arose when investigating the story was over how the resolution was handled within the Greek community itself. Leaders said they felt trapped when the national chapter of Delta Tau Delta urged the fraternity to accept the campus’ settlement or face the revocation of their chapter’s charter. This sparked questions of how those within the Greek system dealt with such incidents and how the relations between national and local organizations functioned.

The story was organized to reflect these two threads in the order of importance. The final product was achieved after much cutting and pasting and prolonged discussion. What could be included and the extent to which we could explore it was also a consequence of space limitation–a constant plague for reporters and editors at the Daily Cal, where we are largely limited by how many advertisements our ads team can sell day to day.

The final product represents a product the newspaper strives to achieve as often as possible: an original and enlightening story. There is much follow-up to be done and ongoing reflection on how the attempt at balance turned out, but ultimately deadline calls.

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