As the gubernatorial election in Virginia nears, Columbia Democrats road trip to Manassas, Virginia to help campaign. The Democrat running for Governor is Creigh Deeds, who has been slipping in recent polls.

Friday

At 8:30 in the morning, the  CU Dems are congregated in the center of college walk with a hoard of New York Times and bagels. Patiently waiting in the cold, they discuss Hilary Clinton’s front page choice to wear a head scarf in Egypt. Finally, three vans roll to a stop in front of the group. They pile in, ready for seven hours of driving, hunkered in with the various luggage.

Amidst signs promoting both their candidate and his Republican counterpart, Bob Mcdonell, as well as “NoBama” signs and the NRA building, the Dems get ready to take on Virginia. Despite political tones, outlandish to New Yorkers, the Dems feel welcomed. Junior, Tom Breen CC’11 remarked, “People are really appreciative that we come all the way from New York to campaign with them. Some of the people we visit say things like, ‘way to go, youngster.’”

After dinner, the Dems chanced to stop by one of Deeds’ campaign headquarters. They were received very enthusiastically by campaigners hard at work and were even supplied with token campaign stickers that would allow free enterance to the carnival taking place outside in the parking lot.

The preparations of bagged lunches and wake-ups are finalized-tomorrow the work begins.

You might have had the chance to explore the Darkroom, the recently launched Spectator photo blog. This project is coming to completion at an exciting time for visual journalism.

The internet made images from all around the world more and more visible. Only weeks ago, amateur cell phone photos from the midst of the Iran uprising gained as much attention as coverage from the major news outlets like the AP or the New York Times. Photographs contribute to an increasingly complex common conscience. It is not yet clear where the line between citizen and journalist will be drawn. Or in Spectator’s case, between student and journalist.

Photographers come to Spectator for a variety of reasons. While maintaining a style of their own, they all share a knack for telling stories. Through their photography, they engage Columbia and New York in new and unique ways, and have turned Photo into one of the paper’s strongest departments. (more…)

In the first Spectator issue of 2009, Elizabeth (Managing Editor) and I said that we’d provide more avenues for feedback and comments. We will be holding an event for that very purpose on Monday at 7 pm in Earl Hall Auditorium.

Come join us for dinner and dialogue at Spectator’s Town Hall. We  look forward to hearing your ideas for our Web site and our daily issues in an informal atmosphere. And don’t forget to introduce yourself!

As design editors, what the pages of the Spectator actually look like each morning is up to us.  We arrange stories and photos so that pages flow smoothly, and we design colorful and informative graphics to pique your visual interest.  You, the Spectator’s readers, may have noticed that the paper looks a fair bit different today than it did at the end of last semester, and we’d like to take time here to detail some of those changes.

First, the front page.  We’ve revamped our teaser system, eliminating those above the “Columbia Daily Spectator” banner, which we think gives the top of the paper a cleaner, classic look.  The teasers are now all displayed in a bar down the side of the page, and we feel the added color there makes the front page more interesting on the whole. (more…)

After a month of tossing a PDF of each week’s Eye onto an apologetic online placeholder, on Thursday the Eye launched a real Web site. Previous incarnations of the magazine’s Web presence have been buggy, temperamental creatures, and so we’ve striven for simplicity this time. Dieter Rams, whose minimalist creations for Braun in the ’80s made him a sort of legend among designers, said famously that “good design is as little design as possible,” but he also said that “good design is durable.” A school like ours, which festers with technological dereliction (off-campus Flex, anyone?), doesn’t need another well-intentioned, but short-lived, high-tech enterprise. And so we’ve tried to put together a Web site that’s straightforward and functional.

The “we” in this case is really two people, both of whom deserve their names in print (and now, of course, online). First, it was Cindy Zhang, who industriously built from scratch a working version of the Web site, and did so under an ambitious deadline. Coaxing these finicky things to cooperate requires unflagging patience, and Cindy, who among other difficulties struggled to suppress the whims of a disappearing search bar, performed admirably. Second, it was Ryan Bubinski, who created the site’s back-end structure and polished the final design, who made Thursday’s launch possible. Over the past week, I met with Ryan a few times to make some final tweaks, and I think I made eye contact with him only twice, so focused was he on his enormous monitor spanned by lines of code.

Our new Web site probably doesn’t represent the future of online journalism (we don’t have a blog, let alone a practicable online-only business model), and it certainly doesn’t represent the future of the Internet (that would be thisiswhyyourefat.com). But for now, a modest, working site for the Eye—as little site as possible—is all we, and this world, really need.

—Thomas Rhiel