The Daily Californian launched its redesigned Web site Sunday evening. It was another step in our efforts to increase our online capabilities. The redesign has been in the works since July, when we had our first online summit to brainstorm new features. In addition to having a much cleaner look and feel, we wanted the site to address several key issues:

1. Improve user navigation and interactivity of our content
2. Organize the many projects we’ve introduced such as blogging, photo reprints, multimedia, Marketplace
3. Increase our online revenue-generating capabilities
4. Better feature our articles and special issues

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Popularity: 17%

As you may have noticed, The Daily Californian Web site is undergoing a major overhaul. We realize there is still a lot of work to be done, and we ask you please be patient! Although we have many new features in the works, the most immediate concerns we are addressing are implementing our more advanced site search and improving our article organization system.

The purpose of the redesign is to ensure our organization’s online presence is competitive with other newspapers. The first sentence of the Daily Cal mission statement reads: “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.”

Most professional newspaper organizations are increasingly integrating podcasts, photo galleries and video to complement their coverage. The Washington Post’s summer internship application this year included a separate section asking applicants to “describe your multimedia experience or interest.”

A major focus of the Daily Cal over the past year has been on multimedia development. This semester, we are making an even greater effort to produce more audio slideshows and podcasts. When the bulk of our changes are implemented we will be able to more effectively display these features.

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Popularity: 30%

Two months since the launch of The Daily Californian Editor’s Blog, we’re making a few changes to better fulfill the original purpose of this project.

As part of our commitment to editorial transparency, this blog will now include posts by all Daily Cal editors. It will continue to explore issues on editorial decision-making, ethics and coverage, but the posts will now be from the people directly involved.

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I’m going to come out and say it: This is the year the Cal football team earns a trip to the Rose Bowl in January.

Personally, I do not believe in jinxing the thing. After all, Bears fans have tried every trick in the book for almost a half-century to no avail. Plus, it’s my senior year. One can hope, right?

Whether you agree with me or not, you must at least acknowledge the possibility of Cal playing in January, and with that in mind, the Daily Cal is poised to bring you comprehensive coverage of Bears football all season long.

There will be four writers on the beat—sports editor Steffi Chan, Steven Dunst, Ryan Gorcey and Gerald Nicdao. Chan said the extra personnel will mean more analysis and features on players who otherwise would not get as much coverage. This week’s articles included features on Jahvid Best and Shane Vereen, and Craig Stevens.

The special Saturday Gameday editions will again be passed out at all home games and at the Big Game in Stanford. We hope to generate awareness about the issues and devise a more efficient distribution plan, especially for the students attending the games.

It can either be a magical season or just another heartbreaking chapter for Cal, but we’re ready to bring you all the details. For the next four months, let’s savor all the memories!

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The beginning of a semester is always a challenging time for the Daily Cal. There are more than 100 employees working in the editorial department, and because all of them are students, we have to overcome high turnover rates inherent to being a student-run organization.

For those interested in joining the Daily Cal, this means there are going to be opportunities available. The first two weeks beginning with Welcome Week is the most important time for our recruitment. We had our first recruitment meeting Aug. 24, and we’ll have our final one this Friday at 4 p.m. at our office.

This summer, development editor Bryan Thomas redesigned the application, which was part of a bigger plan to improve how we track the status of our applicants. The application deadline this fall is Sept. 5, giving editors time to review before the Sept. 14 hiring deadline.

While section editors will hire based on the current needs of their sections, we stress that it is OK not to have previous journalism experience. The Daily Cal is looking for responsible and dedicated individuals who are looking to improve.

“Prior experience is a plus, but we all realize when we get here that we have a lot to learn,” said Thomas, who interviews applicants for the news sections.

Good luck to all the students out there on the new semester! For more information about our recruitment process, please visit apply.dailycal.org.

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Today, the Daily Cal published a special Welcome Week issue on the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Being on a campus with so much history, we’re fortunate we can revisit some of these events.

“Ever since I started at the Daily Cal I wanted to do something on the 1960s because it was so unique to Berkeley,” said Katlyn Carter, who edited the issue along with Julie Strack. “I thought it’d be a good access point to look at the late ’60s, which was a very pivotal time for the campus and the community.”

The edition gave the Daily Cal staff a unique opportunity to dig through archives, revisit the events and people of 1967, and most importantly from our perspective, examine the impact the movement had—and continues to have.

“It was inevitable that a portion of the issue would just look back, but we tried to compare it to what the campus and the city is like today and look at why that is,” Carter said. “We tried to examine the impact of the 60s not only on campus, but in the country today.”

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We’re a couple weeks away from the start of the fall semester, which is an important time for Daily Cal staff members as we prepare for the rigors of daily production.

But in addition to publishing a daily newspaper, The Daily Californian serves as a training institution for students interested in journalism. This is an especially important responsibility for us because UC Berkeley does not have an undergraduate journalism program.

Over the years, we’ve prepared many employees for careers in journalism. Currently, there are Daily Cal alumni working in places such as the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated and NBC. This summer, two of our graduated seniors—last year’s editor in chief Tiffany Hsu and former opinion page editor Amina Khan—landed internships at the Los Angeles Times. We’re very proud of their achievements, but we hope to do an even better job of training students in the future.

This fall we will debut The Daily Cal DeCal: Intro to the Practice of Journalism. It is an introductory journalism course aimed at providing students with practical experience to understand journalistic principles. Having a structured training program ensures students will get a view of the various components of a newsroom and how they work together. We will draw from the expertise of industry professionals, current editors and Daily Cal alumni for this course.
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Popularity: 11%

Last weekend I attended the Associated Collegiate Press summer journalism workshop in muggy Baltimore. More than 150 college newspaper editors and advisors met with professionals to discuss industry trends and explore ways to improve collegiate journalism.

Many of the newspapers were from smaller universities and community colleges that had very different publishing procedures, but some of the most significant comments came from the editors of these organizations who were trying to resurrect their newspapers. They shared stories of censorship by their university or disagreements between their publication and the student government over the allocation of funds.

According to the Student Press Law Center, “state and federal courts have decided over 60 cases in the last three decades directly involving censorship of the public college and university press.” There have also been several cases involving private universities. Last December, we editorialized on an incident that threatened the independence of the Daily Trojan.

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San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein announced last week that he had promoted former blogger Eve Batey to online editor. It is yet another sign of the increasing connection between newspapers and their online development.

Last year The Daily Californian introduced The Daily Clog and podcasting, and earlier this month we launched the Editor’s Blog. The toughest task for our online team is tackling larger online projects while addressing daily demands. Improving our online capabilities and increasing user interactivity will be major areas of focus this upcoming year.

“It’s difficult to keep up with new media and new ideas, with the limited resources we have,” online manager Jeff Bowman said. “And we have to do things right—our work may still be around years from now, and millions of eyes around the world will see it.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Last Monday, we published an op-ed written by a UC Berkeley student who is an undocumented immigrant. As stated in the column’s editor’s note, it is Daily Cal policy not to print unsigned letters or op-eds, unless the writer would feel threatened if his or her identity were revealed.

There was a post last week by Justin Azadivar, who uses the pseudonym Beetle Aurora Drake on the Berkeley blog Beetle Beat, questioning the omission of the writer’s name.

Given the writer’s status and the current contentiousness of the issue being discussed, opinion page editor Andrea Lu and myself decided to withhold the name. Though the submission appeared unsigned in print and online, the Daily Cal contacted the writer several times before publication to understand the reasoning behind the request. Publishing the writer’s name could have exposed the writer or the writer’s family to hate crimes and potentially made them more susceptible to deportation. Read the rest of this entry »

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