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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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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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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Welcome to The Daily Californian Editor’s Blog! This being the first ever post, please take a moment to read about the idea behind this blog.

I will draw from outside sources as much as possible to get various perspectives and keep this blog interesting and informative. Hopefully, it will help familiarize people with different aspects of our organization.

We were all shocked when we learned about the Berkeley family that was found dead in a parking lot at Tilden Regional Park on June 18. In addition to publishing the initial crime story, our coverage also included an article on the memorial for the family.

A journalist’s job becomes very difficult during times like these. The public wants to know why or how such a tragedy can ever happen, but attempting to uncover such information usually requires asking the victims’ friends and family questions at an uncomfortable time.

The Daily Californian follows the Code of Ethics outlined by the Society of Professional Journalists. Two points covered in the second section, titled “Minimize Harm,” had particular relevance the stories written two weeks ago.

— Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.

— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.

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