A Look Forward – Note from the EIC and Publisher
Since our last discussion with you, we’ve embraced much change in the newsroom as we respond to the phenomenon of technology that has shaken up traditional media and its products. After a long and intensive re-design, our new website has a fresh new feel and we encourage you to explore its new contents. We understand that in some ways the newsroom is moving online, and are therefore excited about the potential that our website offers in being able to expand our content so as to reach a broader audience and stay on the cusp of technology.

Speaking of the tech wave, and in response to feedback, we will be initiating a couple of projects this year to ensure that we keep up our dialogue with you, the YDN alumnus. We have just created a new alumni website at alumni.yaledailynews.com which is intended to help you keep in touch with your friends and colleagues from your days at 202 York. For those of you connected to Facebook, we have a new Facebook application that allows you to have YDN headlines on your “profile page.” Given the wonderful turnout from last year’s OCD Spring Student-Alumni Mixer in New York City will be happening again this year at the Yale Club on March 7. A big thank you again to all those who came; students really enjoyed the opportunity to share stories with past editors and we would like to continue those conversations and to make them more regular than they have been in the past. Our board this year grew in comparison to last year, and so we have been updating the software and computers to make sure that we are properly equipped in the digital age. We hope to keep in touch more regularly this semester by leaving postings on the alumni website, and hope to see you in March!

Website
The past several months have been very exciting for the Yale Daily News online. On November 8th, 2007, we launched the latest iteration of the Web site. It featured a brand new professional design and many new features, including tagging articles with keywords like Football or Alumni and comments on articles, among many others. We’ve expanded our online content with blogs like Yale on the Trail to cover the 2008 Election and “scene&heard” to allow for more music coverage.

We’ve also launched a YDN Facebook application, and we’re readying an alumni Web site to help our alumni reconnect and stay in touch. Finally, we’re in the beginning stages of significantly expanding our multimedia coverage with YDNtv and YDNradio. Video and audio files have been available on our site for some time now, but improvements and additional functionality are definitely in the works. The most important thing to note is that the Yale Daily News Web site is now run by students in-house. It is both a learning experience and an opportunity to produce and maintain a Web site that reaches people around the world. It’s been a fantastic year, and I’m looking forward to what we’ll be able to accomplish in the coming year.

YDNtv and Radio
For the first time in seven years, the Yale Daily News has a dedicated online editor without other duties (last year’s online editor was also a photography editor). In another first for the Yale Daily News, the Online desk is becoming a full section of the paper with its own staff, along the lines of traditional desks such as News or Copy. In its brief existence so far, the Online desk has recruited nine active staffers, with another dozen staff reporters already interested in participating. The desk is also the editorial home for YDNtv, a video journalism effort that was originally formed under Yale’s closed circuit TV network and has its own staff. This semester’s goal is to publish one new video each day. YDNradio has started to produce weekly podcasts, including programs focused on sports and living coverage in addition to a main news program similar to NPR including panel discussions with reporters and in-depth interviews. A third area of focus for the Online desk is blogs; we have already launched an election 2008 blog and a music blog. Other ones in the works will focus on the University, New Haven and specific niche areas such as food/dining and architecture.

From the MEs
The fall of 2007 was a rewarding — and exhausting — time to be involved in producing the content of the Oldest College Daily. In addition to maintaining and continuing to improve our regular coverage of student life, academics, admissions, Yale’s administration and the politics and culture of New Haven, among other topics, we on the Managing Board have sought to bolster both the print edition and the Web site with expanded in-depth coverage.

In November we launched a new weekly page designed to give readers a look at the entrepreneurs — both students and local businessmen — who make New Haven’s economy run and at the interesting ways Yalies past and present are involved in the world of business. Since its launch, the “Business & Enterprise” page has featured articles about how the 19-story luxury high-rise being built as part of the College Square Development project has affected nearby merchants; New Haven’s “gourmet” sneaker artist, Brian Spar, and his GourmetKickz shoe business; and the Union League Café’s contribution to the rebirth of the Chapel Street shopping district. Other features that have appeared on the page have explored Yale graduates who have been drawn to Google’s unorthodox business environment and the ways in which the lethargic economy have altered the job market for recent alumni. Following the addition of “Arts Tuesday” last year and “Science & Technology” the year before, this new page marks the News’ continued efforts to expand our areas of coverage.

In addition to more breadth, we have also focused on achieving greater depth, especially through the addition of special investigative series. This fall we introduced the “Fourteen Colleges” series, which looked into the ways that the possible addition of two new residential colleges would change life at Yale. In one feature, we examined how the University would cope with finding enough new teaching assistants to deal with the addition of several hundred more undergraduates; in another, we looked at how the number of recruited athletes would change if the new colleges were to go up on Prospect Street. Other potential series planned for the spring will take a focused look at the dynamics of socioeconomic diversity at Yale and the differing impacts New Haven’s cultural renaissance has had on various demographics. These series are both informative to our readers, we hope, and useful in training our reporters to dig deep and approach a topic from a number of different angles.

Another area of coverage to which we have devoted significant resources is the 2008 presidential election. Beginning with a multi-part series in October that profiled the candidates’ supporters and organizations on campus, we have sought to highlight the myriad ways in which Yale’s notoriously political students are getting involved in the election. Over winter break, we dispatched reporters and photographers to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina to report on Yalies’ experiences on the campaign trail and to contribute to our election blog, “Yale on the Trail,” with updates and analysis from the early primary states. Our reporters will continue to cover the election — especially as Connecticut’s Feb. 5 primary approaches — right up until the final voting in November, contributing content to both the print edition and the Web site. In December, in the lead up to the Iowa caucuses, we used our own polling software to survey the entire undergraduate student body about its presidential preferences and posted a detailed analysis of the results online. Through our extensive coverage, we hope to highlight the ways in which this seminal event is impacting students — and Yalies in particular — and others in the Yale community.