In the last three years, and as far back as this staff can remember, The Cavalier Daily has seen immeasurable institutional improvements and new heights of content quality.

Thanks to strong, preexisting levels of staff leadership, financial security, and recruitment and retention, the 112th Managing Board hopes to maintain momentum and finalize some projects that have been floating around to-do lists for years now.

On the literary side, the paper’s content is more thorough and diverse than ever. Under Managing Editor Sam Le and the three Assistant Managing Editors, Rachel Alberico, Katie Dalton, and Erin Perucci, the interior pages, in particular, have blossomed.

Life and the weeklies often have stories that jump off the front page while news and sports usually provide well more than a full page of content. Sports has integrated a new weekly Game Day page that highlights a big game or match scheduled over the weekend.

Business and health and science have dumped Associated Press content and now derive full pages of stories wholly from University students—including some from graduate schools or abroad.

Besides tackling daily production duties, Sam set up a recruitment drive for the spring semester and is scheduling speaker seminars and writing workshops. The AMEs also are planning on rewriting our literary style book over the summer.

Executive Editor Jennifer Schaum has also been able to focus beyond her day-to-day duties of editing the opinion page and writing the lead edit.

She has successfully formed a 10-person edit board charged with producing one lead edit per week. Edit board members come from diverse sections of the paper, from production to opinion to news, and are each assigned a beat for the year.

These editorials still must be approved by the managing board, and they are still unsigned, but by letting more people write, we hope to better educate our staff about the duties of advocacy journalism.

The paper as a profitable, independent and responsible business will improve this year under Chief Financial Officer Jon Erdman. Jon already is well into developing a business staff.

The staff—which has existed for years in our constitution but rarely in practice—will analyze and foster a more thorough understanding of our advertising policies, budgeting practices, marketing tactics and circulation problems.

It will also, hopefully, serve as a training ground for future CFOs and lessen the learning curve for any staff member who takes the position in the future.

Operations Manager Adam Blumenkrantz is spearheading efforts to redefine the production department and, with it, the overall aesthetic feel of The Cavalier Daily.

Keeping with efforts that began under the 111th Board, prod will lead the daily layout process of the paper. It will work closer with the photography department and a burgeoning graphics department, making better use of info-graphics, modern layout styles and photos.

This summer, Adam hopes to lead a committee in completely redesigning the paper. He looks to bring a fresher, more colorful layout to the paper and promises to re-examine every "font, line and banner" in efforts to bring the CD’s look into the 21st century.

Jon, Adam and two-time Director of Information Technology Eric Hutchins have united efforts to go digital with the newspaper’s layout submission. Behind the times no longer, these three have met with our printer’s staff and have completed test runs to see if we can essentially email each night’s flats directly to the plant.

Getting flats to the plant up to an hour earlier each night will cut down on late fees and improve our ability to insert free standing advertisements into the paper.

The electronic submission also will improve the output process color. Everything looks good so far, and we hope to "go digital" by the end of April.

Eric has also been laboring to complete ATLAS 2.0. Eric authored ATLAS last term to help manage stories, headlines, cutlines and photos.

Among the program’s features is the ability to send story elements across the office to other editors with just one click. Soon, ATLAS 2.0 will be able to automatically post final elements directly to the online edition. It promises to be a time saving godsend.

The newspaper’s online staff is under a lot of pressure this term. After being recognized by the Associated Collegiate Press as producing one of the best online college newspapers in the country, the staff and Online Manager Sean Healey hope to keep up the winning record.

Sean hopes to diversify his staff by bringing in more students with literary and graphical interests. He wants to expand extended Web coverage and work more closely with the print side of the paper.

We’re also exploring ways to make the Web site more profitable. With over 200,000 hits per month, we’re considered a high traffic site. We’ve recruited online advertising reps to solicit ads nationally and from the local Charlottesville community.

The Cavalier Daily has a lot on its agenda this year. We’ll be lucky if we get to complete half of it.