I am very pleased to announce that the summer-long Cavalier Daily office expansion and renovation project now is complete.

The annex, which added about 1,000 square feet to our existing office in the basement of Newcomb Hall, was finished in mid-August. In addition, the entire office was outfitted with new furniture, which not only makes the office look more professional, but also should serve to better streamline the production process.

The new office features a full conference room, and the advertising department now has an office of its own. A storage closet to protect our bound volumes, large workstations for the online department and a break area were also added. To better handle the hundreds of phone calls made to the office every day, each department was given at least one phone line with voicemail.

The first-ever director of information technology, Keith Moores, was especially helpful by overseeing the elaborate restructuring of our network and organizing the new phone system.

All of the work on our office will be paid for by The Cavalier Daily. In addition, we now are paying rent. This makes us truly independent from the University—which we are very proud to be. All of our revenue comes from selling both online and print advertising.

Because the expansion project represents such a positive step forward for The Cavalier Daily here at the end of the millennium, we feel that this marks a great time to launch a fundraising campaign. Visit www.cavalierdaily.com or call our business manager, Dan Cooper, at (804) 924-1084 for details.

In other CD news, we have hired a new ombudsman for the upcoming year. After interviewing seven qualified applicants, we chose Kelly Jolley, a graduate philosophy student. During her undergraduate days at the University of South Carolina, Kelly was a health editor, a features editor, and a production editor. Her journalism experience will serve both us and our readers well.

The Cavalier Daily web page will undergo a facelift soon. This summer saw the addition of online polls, separate pages for each literary department, and the ability to make more detailed searches of our archives. Operations Manager Sonia Karim will be working with the online staff to create a more visually appealing page as the semester progresses.