We received a total of 24 awards for excellence in print and online content as well as advertising. The awards were announced Saturday evening at the organization’s annual convention at San Jose State University. Last year, we won 23 CCMA awards, 11 of which were for first place.

Last week, the Daily Cal also won three awards from the Society of Professional Journalists in Region 11 (California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii): first place, Sports Writing (Large) — “Lights, please” by Jack Wang; second place, Best Affiliated Website (Large) — dailycal.org and third place, Sports Photography (Large) — “Cal leaves Lehigh high and dry” by Michael Tao.

None of this would have been possible without feedback and support from you, our readers. As an independent, student-run newspaper, we pride ourselves on consistently producing award-winning content while serving the student body and surrounding community at large, but we cannot do it without your help.

If you would like to contribute to the student staff of the Daily Cal, we encourage you to make a tax-deductible donation and support independent student journalism.

Thank you for taking the time to engage with our content in print and online and to contribute to our opinion pages. We appreciate your support and encourage you to continue to share your thoughts by emailing me at editor@dailycal.org.

Sincerely,
Stephanie Baer
Editor in Chief & President

Below is a full list of awards presented to the Daily Cal at the CCMA awards ceremony:

1st place, General Newspaper Excellence
1st place, General Website Excellence (dailycal.org)
1st place, Best Use of Social Media (Elections 2012 coverage)
1st place, Best News Story (non-breaking) (“Tracking UC Berkeley’s former chancellor Chang-Lin Tien” by Soumya Karlamangla)
1st place, Best News Series (Megan Messerly, Gautham Thomas, Alyssa Neumann, Alex Berryhill)
1st place, Best Headline Portfolio (Alex Wolinsky)
1st place, Best Online Promotion (advertise.dailycal.org, Eugenia Ho and George Syrop)
1st place, Best Audio Slideshow (“Moving pictures — Softball” by Anna Vignet)
2nd place, Best Multimedia Presentation
2nd place, Best Sales Promotion Materials (Eugenia Ho and George Syrop)
2nd place, Best Feature Story (“Lights, please” by Jack Wang)
2nd place, Best Headline Portfolio (Rupa Subramaniam)
2nd place, Best Infographic (“California Grown”, Jill Wong)
2nd place, Best News Photograph (Derek Remsburg)
2nd place, Best Photo Illustration (“Eshleman Hall to be demolished months later than projected” by Michael Tao)
3rd place, Best Editorial (“A civics lesson for UCSA” by J.D. Morris)
3rd place, Best Video (“Compiling the Programmers” by Alice Oh)
3rd place, Best Sports Column (“Don’t look back in anger” by Jack Wang)
3rd place, Best News Page Design (“Empty seats, empty coffers” by Emily Smith)
3rd place, Best Overall Design
3rd place, Best Blog (The Daily Clog)
3rd place, Best Group Promotion (Gloria Yen)
3rd place, Best Back to School or Orientation Issue (Freshman Orientation)
3rd place, Best Special Section (Big Game 30-year anniversary)

Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president. Contact her at editor@dailycal.org.

The post Daily Cal named top daily college paper, website in California for second year appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The Daily Cal is one of 12 finalists for the ACP’s Online Pacemaker Award for 2013 in the category of campuses with enrollment of more than 20,000. Winners will be announced at the organization’s annual convention in October.

In 2012, the Daily Cal was one of six winners of the Online Pacemaker in its category, also winning first place for Multimedia Feature of the Year for Dream State, a project that examined the role of California’s DREAM Act on the UC Berkeley campus. The Online Pacemaker is the organization’s highest honor for online college student publications.

Since a complete redesign of our website in May 2011, we have continued to make improvements while also expanding our online coverage and social media presence. Development of the site over the last two years — such as the integration of the Daily Cal’s blog, The Daily Clog, into the main site as well as the redesign of our sectional blogs and homepage —  have been spearheaded by online managing editor Kelly Fang, online  manager Roger Chen, former online managing editor Javier Panzar, former online manager Karoun Kasraie and senior Web designer Persia Salehi.

Still, further changes are on the horizon as more of our readers move from print to online. According to a survey conducted last year, about two-thirds of our readership is online. This year, we have seen a 55 percent increase in visits to the site and an 83 percent increase in unique visits as compared to the same time period last year.

If you have any suggestions for improvement to our website, we encourage you to contact us at editor@dailycal.org.

Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president. Contact her at editor@dailycal.org. Twitter: @dailycaleditor

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At the time, the paper was facing a substantial structural deficit. The potential for new revenues was dim, as was the paper’s future.

We decided to turn to our peers and placed a referendum, the V.O.I.C.E. initiative, on the 2012 ASUC general election ballot asking students whether they approve of a $2 semesterly fee to support the newspaper. Students passed the fee, with 5,977 voting in favor and 4,054 voting against, guaranteeing the Daily Cal an estimated $93,800 annually for five years.

In June 2012, the Daily Cal signed an agreement with the campus describing the process for the transfer of V.O.I.C.E. funds for the fall 2012 semester. Recognizing the ASUC’s interest in distributing all student fee funds used by registered student organizations, we signed the agreement with the intention of signing a new one with the ASUC for the remaining four and a half years of the initiative.

Last week, we signed an agreement with the ASUC that fully protects our independence and ensures the student fee money will continue to directly support the newspaper that students have enjoyed for more than 140 years.

Due to the student fee funds and other cost-cutting measures — including the elimination of professional staff, the move to a rent-free office and a deal with our printer that is saving us around $10,000 annually — we are no longer grappling with a sizable structural deficit. Our latest financials from February show an operating deficit of just $8,000.

But our future is still unclear.

During my tenure as editor in chief and president, it has become increasingly apparent that, at the Daily Cal, we can no longer sustain our print and online products in their current form due to a serious decline in print advertising in recent years. It is time to change the way we operate as a news outlet, and thanks to V.O.I.C.E., we have the time to do so.

Since September, the Daily Cal’s board of directors and current student employees have been working together to construct a Strategic Plan to guide the paper over the next three to five years. My hope is that through this process, we will be able to create a sustainable business model in which we will no longer depend on V.O.I.C.E. money, all while continuing to deliver information that the students and our surrounding community deserve.

Feel free to contact me directly at editor@dailycal.org with any questions, concerns and feedback about the agreement or the newspaper. Our door is always open to you.

Sincerely,
Stephanie Baer,
Editor in Chief & President

Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president. Contact her at editor@dailycal.org.

The post Daily Cal, ASUC sign agreement for remainder of V.O.I.C.E. fee appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Much of the content that you read in this section is solicited, meaning one of the section editors sought out a particular person in the community to write on that topic. But a significant portion of our content is also unsolicited, published after the writer sent in a submission to our department without our asking. That could be you.

First, you should know a little information about how the opinion section operates. The op-eds, letters, columns and cartoons printed here do not reflect the opinion of the Daily Cal as an organization nor the personal views of the section editors. Op-eds and letters, which allow non-Daily Cal staff members to write for the paper, are selected based on what is happening in the news and the amount of content we receive. Columns (which, in the print edition, always appear on page 3 because we run a column every day) and editorial cartoons are produced by Daily Cal staff members and, once again, do not represent the organization’s viewpoint.

Editorials constitute the other major portion of the opinion section. Those are based on discussions held by the Daily Cal’s Senior Editorial Board — currently composed of 10 section editors in addition to the editor in chief and the managing editor — and are written by the opinion page editor.

So how can you get published in this section? And what kind of submissions are we looking for? Before submitting anything, please remember that all content sent to the Daily Cal’s opinion section must be original and unpublished. If you read an article or opinion piece in the Daily Cal and would like to respond to an issue raised there or react to the piece in any way, you can write a letter to the editor. Those should be no longer than 350 words and can be emailed to opinion@dailycal.org or filled out using our online form at dailycal.org/opinion.

Op-eds provide a space for longer commentary. Topics generally cover local news or issues affecting UC Berkeley or the UC system as a whole. We do publish op-eds regarding national or state issues, but they should appeal to the Daily Cal’s primary audience: UC Berkeley students and Berkeley residents. Though op-eds frequently cover topics that are “in the news” (like UC tuition or the local election), they can discuss more abstract or less-mentioned concepts. All we ask is that an op-ed submission present a coherent, well-written argument on a topic with which the writer is familiar. Op-eds are typically no longer than 800 words, and submissions should include links or citations to aid in our routine fact-checking process. Like letters, they can be submitted via email to opinion@dailycal.org.

Not every submission is guaranteed to be published. Op-eds or letters that are deemed libelous, racist, sexist, homophobic or highly offensive in any other manner will not print. Content that does not meet our fact-checking standards will not print. And, at the end of the day,  all content publishes at the discretion of the opinion page editor.

Finally, if you have any questions or concerns about how to submit something, feel free to email me. I hope this information is helpful, and I look forward to reading your submissions.

J.D. Morris is the opinion page editor. Contact him at opinion@dailycal.org.

The post How to write for the Daily Cal’s opinion section appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The Facebook Comments Box will replace Disqus, our current commenting platform, which we implemented in spring 2011 when we switched our website to a WordPress content management system.

The new system requires commenters to sign in using their Facebook accounts or an account with Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail. Those without any of these accounts will not be able to leave comments. Posting comments to one’s own Facebook page is an option, but it is not required.

In recent years, other news outlets, including The Dallas Morning News, TechCrunch, The Business Journals and the Los Angeles Times blogs, have made the move to Facebook to provide better authentication of comments and encourage more civility in discussions.

We are making this change in an effort to ease the difficult process of moderating comments and to foster a more honest discussion in the commenting section of the Daily Cal.

We have always encouraged readers to post under their real names, but in practice, many readers hide behind pseudonyms while posting mean-spirited or profane comments. We hope this change will improve the quality of discussion and discourage anonymous “trolls” from leaving often hostile or off-topic comments.

We encourage discussion, but we hope that our commenters act with respect and caution when voicing their opinions on various topics.

Still, we will continue to monitor comments on all articles and will remove any comments we deem in violation of our Comment Policy, which one can find at the top of the comment section on every article and on our about page.

Previous comments made through Disqus will appear below the live comment section.

As we continue to work on improving the reader experience of the Daily Cal online, we welcome your feedback and any questions you may have as we move forward.

Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president. Contact her at editor@dailycal.org.

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The Daily Cal was one of six winners for the Online Pacemaker award for newspapers at colleges with more than 20,000 enrollment. The winners were announced at the organization’s annual conference at the Sheraton hotel in Chicago on Nov. 3. The paper was also one of 10 finalists for the Newspaper Pacemaker award for four-year college daily newspapers.

Winning the Online Pacemaker would not have been possible without the dedication of our talented online team — namely online manager Karoun Kasraie, senior web designer Persia Salehi and former-online managing editor Javier Panzar — whose efforts have been essential to the redesign of the Daily Cal site and without which we would not have won this award. We would also like to recognize 2010-11 editor in chief and president Rajesh Srinivasan and former designer Katherine Maslyn who initiated the redesign of the site in spring 2011 and the switch to WordPress as our content management system.

The staff also won first place for Multimedia Feature of the Year for last fall’s Dream State, a project that examined the role of California’s DREAM Act on the UC Berkeley campus and told the stories of students most affected by it. Panzar, former university news editor Jordan Bach-Lombardo and current online managing editor Kelly Fang spearheaded the project and led a collaborative effort between multimedia producers, news reporters and web developers and designers to produce a web page with exclusive written, illustrated and video content about the DREAM Act.

This semester we launched our first online-only special issue, Cal on the Frontlines — the Tech & Ideas issue — which we hope will set a precedent for future online specials and projects. We also created exclusive pages for football Gameday content and 2012 Elections coverage.

Still, our digital efforts are ongoing, as we continually seek to improve the online experience of the Daily Cal for readers. Looking forward, we will be rolling out entirely new designs for sectional pages as well as a more dynamic homepage and a new blog design. We are also planning more multimedia projects similar to Dream State.

As an independent, student-run newspaper, we pride ourselves on continually creating exceptional content all while serving the student body and surrounding community, but we cannot do it without your support. One way you can contribute to the student staff of the Daily Cal is by making a tax-deductible donation to help us continue to grow and produce award-winning content.

We appreciate your support and encourage you to share your thoughts by emailing me at editor@dailycal.org.

Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president. Contact her at editor@dailycal.org.

The post Daily Cal awarded Online Pacemaker, first place for Multimedia Feature of the Year appeared first on The Daily Californian.

And now, Vargas, a journalist himself, is calling on the media to stop using the term.

“Above all, for journalists who seek neutrality and fairness, using the term further politicizes an already political issue,” Vargas said at the annual Online News Association meeting on Sept. 21. “The term dehumanizes and marginalizes the people it seeks to describe.”

At The Daily Californian, we agree.

On Sunday, the Senior Editorial Board voted to no longer use the term “illegal immigrant” when reporting on immigration issues. Out of preference and habit, it has already been the practice of our reporters and editors to opt for the word “undocumented.”

As students of the University of California at Berkeley, we regularly report on issues of immigration in the state, and many of our peers themselves are undocumented students. Last fall, we rolled out a packaged multimedia feature named Dream State to analyze — and humanize — the California DREAM Act on our campus.

We believe that the modifier “illegal” unnecessarily offends our readership while the word “undocumented” is a more effective and objective way to describe one’s immigration status.

Last year, the Society of Professional Journalists passed a resolution urging all newsrooms to stop using the terms “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant” after hearing an emotional plea from Rebecca Aguilar, a member of SPJ and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. The organization, which has around 9,000 members nationwide, called the term “illegal alien” “offensive and bureaucratic” and described the phrase “illegal immigrant” as “politically charged.”

“Only the court system, not reporters and editors, can decide when a person has committed an illegal act,” the resolution states.

In recent years, some mainstream news sources, including the Miami Herald and the San Antonio News-Express, have stopped using the term while others, like the Associated Press and The New York Times, have refused to drop the term.

The influence of the media is unquestionable, and, as journalists, we must be constantly aware of that fact. Sometimes we have to take a step back, question the language we use and consider how it shapes public discourse.

Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president.

The post Editor’s Note: Daily Cal drops use of ‘illegal immigrant’ appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Seth Rosenfeld, author of the newly released book “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power,” spoke at UC Berkeley Wednesday evening to discuss his new book in which he reveals the “secret history” of the FBI’s involvement on the Berkeley campus in the 1960s.

The event was hosted by the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism at Sibley Auditorium in the Bechtel Engineering Center on campus. Lowell Bergman, Logan Distinguished Professor in Investigative Reporting at the journalism school, facilitated the conversation with Rosenfeld.

During a question and answer period, several audience members questioned Rosenfeld’s assertion that civil rights activist and Black Panther Party member Richard Aoki was an FBI informant. Since the release of the book, Rosenfeld has received a fair amount of criticism in response to this revelation.

Read the documents obtained by Rosenfeld on Aoki and watch a video produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting about Rosenfeld’s research on the civil rights activist.

The following is an excerpt shown in the video of a 2007 interview in which Rosenfeld asks Aoki if he ever worked for the FBI:

Rosenfeld: Am I wrong?

Aoki: I think you are.

Rosenfeld: Yeah. So, would you say it’s untrue, that you ever worked for the FBI, or got paid by the FBI?

Aoki: I would say it.

Rosenfeld: And, I’m trying to understand the complexities about it, and I, and I think —

Aoki: It is complex.

Rosenfeld: I believe it is, and —

Aoki: Layer upon layer.

Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president. Contact her at editor@dailycal.org.

The post ‘Who were the real Subversives?’ appeared first on The Daily Californian.

—The Senior Editorial Board

Wednesday evening I was alerted to a comment on a column in the opinion section of The Daily Californian, alleging that the article was “almost word-for-word” from a post on another website.

The columnist was hired Sept. 7 as the Wednesday columnist for the opinion section at the Daily Cal. This was the writer’s first piece for the newspaper.

The piece “But you looked different on Facebook …” had already been published on the blog Adios Barbie almost a year ago, and the columnist submitted it, almost verbatim, as one of their writing samples in their application to the Daily Cal.

The Daily Cal applications website instructs opinion department applicants to submit “two original, unpublished columns,” and it is custom for the opinion page editors to publish at least one of the original clips submitted by hired columnists.

We trusted that the columnist had followed the application instructions and that the work produced was original. The writer did not realize that submitting a piece that they had published elsewhere meant that they were submitting unoriginal work. We are at fault for not asking enough questions and properly screening previous work while considering the applicant.

In this case, the author presented the column as original work for the Daily Cal when, in fact, the work was lifted from a previous post that they had written for another organization. Regardless of the fact that they were the author of both renditions, the reproduction of content without disclosing the existence of the original piece is something the Daily Cal considers unethical.

All content produced for the Daily Cal by our writers is owned by the Daily Cal, and it is against our policy to publish unoriginal content. We do not tolerate plagiarism or self-plagiarism in any form and hold ourselves to the highest standards of journalistic integrity.

The column has since been removed, and the columnist will no longer write for the Daily Cal.

In addition to the Daily Cal’s processes for name-checking and fact-checking during editing, all editorial departments will now scan articles for plagiarism to ensure that all of the our content is original.

If you have any questions or concerns please email me at editor@dailycal.org.

Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president.

The post Editor’s note: ‘But you looked different on Facebook …’ retracted from Daily Cal site appeared first on The Daily Californian.

At about 9 a.m., I strolled into 600 Eshleman Hall and took a seat at a desk next to the window. The newsroom was a bit messy, to say the least. The floor was sticky here and there and roughed up in other places. Piles of papers were strewn across the desks and the walls were covered with old clippings, pictures and quotes documenting awkward or funny interactions between staff members. The keyboards were all grimed up with dirt and food, and chairs from at least five different decades were scattered about the room — some at a desk, others just in the middle of nowhere. The green ones were lined at the seams with dust and covered with mysterious stains. I grabbed a less-seasoned chair and dragged it to my desk. (To this day I avoid sitting on those green chairs.)

My editor came by and handed me a reporter’s notebook, asked if I had any questions and left.

At around 7 p.m. — two hours past my deadline — I was making some finishing touches to my story after my last source got back to me. My editor came by and asked how it was going.

I told him I was tired. He said, “Welcome to the Daily Cal.”

That day, I wasn’t sure how long I would last, but it soon became clear that I would never be able to leave. In my three years at Cal, I’ve probably spent more time in Eshleman than anywhere else — that’s the norm for Daily Cal staffers.

And now that we’ll be out of here on Friday and in several months this office will cease to exist, the time I spent in Eshleman feels so much more special. I never thought I’d become so attached to such a messy and sometimes mouse-ridden office, but over the course of three years Eshleman became home.

Future generations of Daily Cal staffers will never know 600 Eshleman. They will never know the sunsets on the 6th floor balcony. They will never know the bulky wooden typewriter desks that decades of editors signed on the last night of production. They will never know what it feels like to look up at those big, bright yellow letters that stretched across the 6th floor windows.

But no matter where we’ve been and where we’ll go, lots of things remain the same. Soon, 2483 Hearst Ave. will feel like home and future generations of Daily Cal staffers will make their mark on the office with new traditions and stories. We won’t have the desks, the balcony, the view of the Bay and campus, but we’ll still have each other, and it’s the friends and mentors who make working at the Daily Cal worth it.

Stephanie Baer is the editor in chief and president.

The post Thanks for the memories appeared first on The Daily Californian.