By Brandon Almond
Cavalier Daily Editor-in-Chief
It’s hard to believe the first term of
the 113th staff of The Cavalier Daily is nearly complete. This semester has
been a dream transition for us, with our staffers maintaining enthusiasm and
motivation daily. It’s safe to say everyone has taken to his or her new
roles with rigor, and will continue to produce a quality paper, all while
having a genuine good time with their friends in the basement.
Our enthusiasm was recently boosted with
the announcement that we had not only won a record 23 Virginia Press
Association awards and taken second place overall for our category, but also
won 10 Columbia University Gold Circle Awards. That’s not all, however. On
April 27, The Society of Professional Journalists-Mark of Excellence will
honor The Cavalier Daily with the award for Best All-Around daily college
newspaper in Region 2. These are proud times for our staff, and our
excellence is sure to continue.
The literary content has continued to
grow above and beyond what is expected of it. Under Managing Editor Emily
Roper and Assistant Managing Editors Abby Curran and Josie
Roberts, each page has grown in both amount of content and variety of
coverage.
Life has added several new features,
including weekly columns from students studying abroad, and publishes two
full pages of content twice a week. The department published its
second-annual Charlottesville supplement ("The Big Picture") April 24.
Sports covers a broad section of our community athletes in its new Club
Sports Roundup.
The news department’s talented writers
and associates have shown a commitment to diversifying coverage. We’ve seen
the return of the weekly crime box and special series, and look forward to
what lies ahead. Our weekly pages continue to shine and spice up our
content, offering reliable and interesting additions to the paper.
In addition to keeping the news room
running smoothly, Emily has worked with CDAA Program Director Sarah
Lindenfeld Hall to host a guest speaker from the Raleigh News &
Observer, and plans already are underway for the fall journalism conference.
She also is organizing the Sept. 11 supplement, sending writers and
photographers to New York and Arlington to cover what has changed since the
terrorist attacks. The AMEs are overseeing and helping out various writers
with long-term projects, showing keen interest in each writer’s development
and growth.
Executive Editor Jeffrey Eisenberg
has reconfigured the editorial board, giving members a more hands-on role in
assisting with the researching and writing of the lead editorial. He will
continue to demand first-rate, crisp and intelligent writing from columnists
as the rest of the year unfolds. He also is working with the graphics
department to raise the bar on editorial cartoons.
Chief Financial Officer Justin Bernick
has sound business sense and cares for the behind-the-scenes workings of the
ads department. He has committed to scheduling regular meetings with our
courier to improve distribution, working with the online department to
implement online advertising, and maintaining professional relationships
with our local and national advertisers.
He also recently worked with Advertising
Manager Shelly Hartsook to set new rates, a new online advertising
policy, and a new system of advertising discounts to promote higher ad
volume. They also recently completely restructured the back room of the
office, creating a more open and communal atmosphere.
Over the past few months, Operations
Manager Peter Jackson has overseen the production, photo and graphics
departments as they have put forth tremendous effort that has translated in
a professional and attractive newspaper. Under Peter’s supervision, photo
has teamed up with the online department and David Chu, the director
of information technology, to build an online picture-archiving system that
will improve storage of file photos and make them accessible to other
departments.
Along with providing creative and
attractive graphics daily, the graphics department is cosponsoring with the
photography department an Adobe Photoshop workshop at the end of this
semester.
The new design that debuted in September
has given the page designers in the production department the ability to be
more imaginative by using larger pictures and graphics and drawing more
creative headlines.
With Peter’s help, these three
departments act less like autonomous units and more like one collaborative
group. The skills that exist in these departments separately have been
harnessed to produce a product day after day that has continued to impress
the managing board and the readers alike.
Director of Information Technology David
Chu is our resident computer expert who keeps our systems running smoothly
so we don’t have to attempt to fix them ourselves. He has set up redundant
database servers that mirror each other; if one stops serving, the other is
ready to take over duties.
He also in the process of setting up
backups of the fileserver, webserver and domain controller that are ready to
service the network if their primary goes down, as well as setting up an
antivirus infrastructure that protects all systems from a centralized
console.
He plans to redesign and rewrite software
solutions for the newspaper production process to improve integration and
efficiency of current operations, as well as write a portable and
maintainable version in Java that can serve the needs of the Macs in the
production department. Without David, we would not be up to scale
technologically.
The online staff continues to perfect the
fine art of creating a workable and efficient web space. Online Manager
Aaron Gussman has expanded the offerings of our web site by adding an
online database of Arts & Entertainment reviews, as well as Life’s Style
Files, Out of Bounds and Sound Bytes. He and his staff also have increased
potential web traffic by adding www.cavdaily.com to our existing web
site of www.cavalierdaily.com.
Be on the lookout for several new online
features in the next few months: Hoo’s on the Lawn, an online section
covering Lawn residents and how they got there; a "New Major’s Guide"
addition to U.Va. 101; an article response message board; a photo database;
the often requested "E-mail this Article" feature; and, last but not least,
the all-new online redesign. Aaron has us up and running on into the 21st
century.
Our board has livened things up down here
in the basement, and we see an energized staff ready and willing to take The
Cavalier Daily to new heights.
We are committed to making this a family
of people who not only work hard to produce the paper, but have fun doing a
time-consuming extracurricular activity. Look for wonderful things on the
horizon.
