There’s this great line from a song that everyone sings at baseball games in America.

“Root, root, root for the home team. If they don’t win it’s a shame.”

Lots of people around campus think that it’s a shame whenever the Daily Cal bags on a team or the performance of an athlete here at Cal. Hypothetically, these people would say, “But you’re the school newspaper. You’re supposed to support our student-athletes.”

While we may root for the Bears in our hearts, we cannot explicitly root for Cal when we’re on the job. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 55%

With an extra 1.5 inches of height starting this semester, our new paper size calls for a redesign of the “A Look Inside” element of our front page.

Some features we have implemented so far:

1. A consistent color scheme. Black for text, and red and blue for teasers.
2. Overlapping of images and rules to provide more visual interest; for example, photo cutouts to break away from the traditional boxy look.
3. Better photo crops to grab readers’ attention.
4. Texture. The design team is currently building a library with textures, such as paper and fabric, to use as background images.

Hopefully our new “A Look Inside” will make you stop and pick up our paper when you’re hurrying to class. Please send me your comments and suggestions at design@dailyal.org. After all, our readers are the reason why the design team is working so hard.

Popularity: 56%

At 1 a.m. my phone is still ringing—things to double-check, photos to re-edit. I’ve learned that this job is not one you leave when you walk out of the office. Always keep your phone on and always be prepared to answer calls. 

Walking home from the gym, sitting in class, while I sleep. I should always be expecting a call. And not just from my photographers or other editors. All day I think about photographing and editing, and then I go to work for a five-hour shift at night. Up the next day for class at 9 a.m. and ready to go again.

On days when big protests happen or important people come to the Bay Area, I have to listen extra hard for my phone–call after call. E-mails pile in, text messages too. I need to coordinate “X” number of photographers to go to “Y” place by “Z” time, while I sit and listen to my professor talk about Incan and Aztec architecture.

And though this may sound hellish, it is a great job. The adrenaline rush when I go on a new assignment is such a high (not that I get to go on assignments very often anymore). It may be a 40+ hour-a-week job, but to be an editor you have to love what you do, and however much I may gripe about being tired and overworked, I wouldn’t trade my job for anything.

So the calls at 1 a.m., or later, are worth it if I know I’ll see a good paper on the stands in just a few short hours. This job may never sleep, but it is important that, once in a while, we do.

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The piles of applications have been sorted and saved, having been considered by the various editors at the Daily Cal. We could only accept so many candidates, and it certainly isn’t fun to let fellow students know that they will not be working for the Daily Cal this semester. But the development editor’s position should not be to turn people away from working for the Daily Cal or away from the field of journalism.Instead, the development editor should help students produce the best application possible.Having looked through nearly half of the 200 applications received this semester and many of the 300 applications last semester, I would like to share a few impressions on what makes a strong, memorable application.

1. Write unique cover letters. If you have done something fun or unusual, if you have experienced something different from other people, include it! It does not matter if these experiences are directly related to journalism. Doing something out of the ordinary makes you a better journalist simply because you can relate to more people and have more to draw upon in your writing. Read the rest of this entry »

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Our dear Clog is going through a lot of growing pains this semester. Not only did we start the year off with a new editor, but we’ve also had to work with a tiny staff while adjusting to a whole new blog design.

If you take a glimpse at the Daily Clog right now, you’ll see a clean, attractive interface–the kind you’d want to show to your mom. Beautiful, yes, but the transition did come with various technical difficulties. Since the semester began in mid-January, the Clog and its resident tech have been working hard to fix a wide spectrum of flaws in the new design, whether they be lost comments or broken links. We still have a lot of work to do, so bear with us.

Speaking of lost comments: Where have all the commenters gone? The last time we checked, blogging was supposed to be a highly interactive medium.

Don’t get us wrong. We do get comments, and we very much appreciate them. The occasional gripe about our writing abilities is nice, but we love what you think about the actual post topic even more. According to Lifehacker’s guide to weblog comments,

“Leaving a comment on someone’s weblog is like walking into their living room and joining in on a conversation … (g)ood blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly and engaged.”

Why not jump into the Clog’s lively conversations?

Geek to Live: Lifehacker’s Guide to Weblog Comments [Lifehacker]

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