The Cavalier Daily is about to get bigger and fancier, both in the basement of Newcomb Hall and in cyberspace.

I am very proud to announce that The Cavalier Daily signed a rent agreement with Newcomb Hall. While we have not received direct funding from the University in many years, we continued to receive office space. Now we are truly independent—our first payment will be made in September.

Along with our rent agreement, The Cavalier Daily will be expanding its offices. Plans for the new office space were approved in the beginning of March; construction is slated to begin by the end of this semester. We are taking over part of the Game Room currently located behind our office in the basement. There, the production, web and advertising departments will get the space they desperately need. After the new office space is completed in the beginning of the summer, our current office will be renovated, thus making better and more efficient use of our space.

Jay Conti, last year’s editor-in-chief, deserves a tremendous amount of credit for helping make these dreams become a reality. I will be in Charlottesville this summer supervising the construction efforts. I strongly encourage any interested CD alumni to visit and offer suggestions.

While our physical space will be larger and will receive a much-needed face lift, The Cavalier Daily is growing in other ways as well. We began circulating off-Grounds, at area supermarkets, Bodo’s Bagels and the Downtown Mall. With that, we are committed to providing more news of interest to Charlottesville residents.

Still on the expansion theme, February’s Constitutionals saw the addition of several positions to our booming web staff. We now have an online manager, Portman Wills, and a director of information technology, Keith Moores. The web staff is now rewriting our web software. This will give our online edition, which can be accessed at www.cavalierdaily.com, a fresh, new look. We now have an online advertising representative who is soliciting advertisements from many national companies.

I cannot emphasize enough how important and useful our online edition can be. Not only does it provide every article dating back to 1995 for all University alumni and, for that matter, anyone interested in the University, but it also allows us to do things that are just not possible to do in print. Examples of this are putting lists of faculty salaries on our site and providing readers with an interactive poll. (Plus, with our roughly 200,000 monthly page views, our web site could provide an amazing untapped source of revenue!)

Other projects for the upcoming year include hiring a new ombudsman. Our current ombudsman, Michael Zarkin, will graduate this May from the University’s Law School. His insights and criticisms have kept us on our toes this year and provided a needed forum. I will soon begin the search for next year’s ombudsman.

Because we serve the University as its only daily information source, it is vital that we listen to our readers. I would like to see The Cavalier Daily host roundtable discussions several times each semester to hear concerns from the University community. Our first such discussion took place several weeks ago. We received many valuable comments and suggestions.