Earlier this week several readers left comments asking why we don’t publish the IU Police Department blotter anymore. Having dealt with the blotter one semester as a former campus editor, let me explain.

First, when we received the reports from the police department they were usually in a format quite similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Decoding the reports and putting them into the police blotter style was extremely time consuming and made the entire process very prone to errors, and errors in police stories leave us open to lawsuits that we really don’t have the resources to deal with.

Second, whenever the blotter ran it would usually be followed by a flurry of e-mails and phone calls from students saying we had ruined their lives by printing their names and presuming their guilt (which of course the blotter didn’t do). Every now and then a “helicopter parent” would call us with even bigger complaints such as “How do you say my son was drunk in McNutt! He was arrested for being stoned in Briscoe!” This would usually be followed by curses and threats of legal action.

Considering the time it took to do the blotter and do it correctly, and because most of the reports are little more than minor consumption or public intoxication which have little effect on our readership, the blotter was discontinued last year, and for the foreseeable future so that we can instead focus on better coverage of more important police reports like assaults amd thefts.

A 13-year-old girl was molested this weekend by her relative. It’s heartbreaking.

When Bloomington Police Dept. beat reporter Michael Reschke told his editors about the situation, we knew we should discuss how to handle it in the newspaper. BPD gave us the name of the man since it’s a matter of public record, but we chose not to run it because in using his name, we could be identifying the victim as well, since she’s identified as his relative.

We do not identify victims of sexual assault.

Just last week, we had an angry woman on the phone who demanded to know why we printed a man’s name, who was accused of sexually assaulting another woman. She thought it would be fair to print the victim’s name, as well.

In that instance, we ran the man’s name because the description the police provided us was not one that would identify the victim. Further, the man had been formally charged with the crime.
What are your thoughts of running perpetrator’s and victim’s names? You might have noticed we do not run the police blotter anymore. I’d love to hear what you think. Feel free to e-mail me at editor@idsnews.com if you don’t want to post on the blog.

The IU Student Media code of ethics committee is meeting this semester to update our code of ethics. We’ll keep you involved with that discussion.

The nice people at the College of Arts and Sciences are requesting that we cease and desist from referring to them as COAS on 2nd reference. They prefer to be called “The College.”

I’m reluctant to comply, because honestly, I’ve always known of it as COAS, and calling it “The College” doesn’t make much sense to me. It seems as if it refers to IU in general, or who knows what else.

What do you think? Should we call it The College? Or stay with COAS?

The Indiana Daily Student will celebrate its 140th birthday in February. We think that’s pretty special – after all, there aren’t many financially and editorially independent student newspapers in the country.

I’d like to know what you think about us commemorating a part of IU. Should we have an article on our anniversary? Should we look back 20, 50, 100 years to see what newspapers, IU and life were like?

Would you like to see old IDS mast heads?

Or, do you think we should keep the celebration out of the newspaper, and keep it in the newsroom with a gigantic cake?

I’m curious. Please share your thoughts.

Hello readers! This is my first adventure into the world of blogging. Ever. Really. Anyway, as IDS art director, I figured that DEADLINE would be a good place to get my feet wet.

As I understand it, the point of this little experiment is to explain some of our thoughts and decisions as managing editors to you, the reader. In return we hope to gain some insight into your thoughts and decisions about our thoughts and decisions … or something.

So, what I want to know is this: What makes you pick up the paper? What attracts you those few extra steps over to a box and causes you to bend down and pull out a piece of media that is cumbersome, non-interactive and will likely turn your hands a gross color?

I ask this because, as art director, it is my job every day to make sure that what you see in that box gets you to do just that.

In IDS backshop (the hot, cramped little room where page designers, graphic artists and I work), we often wrestle with decisions about how to display stories visually on the front page. Sometimes we go for the so-big-you-can-read-it-from-the-bus headline. Sometimes we go for a gigantic photo. Sometimes the most visual elements are the “pluses” (That area above the words “Indiana Daily Student” that tells you to check out the inside of the paper, too.) We base these calls of a variety of factors, but if you let us know what grabs your eye, we’ll try to do more of that.

Ultimately, our goal as an organization is to give you the news you want, and part of that is presenting it how you want it presented.

One of our goals for this semester is to bring you local-breaking news as it happens. As we continue to strengthen our Web site with features such as photo slide shows, video and other online-only content, we also want to make sure we are updating our frontpage throughout the day with the latest coverage. For us, most other college papers and even national sites, we are all still relatively new of breaking away from the thought that we can wait until the print edition comes out until we finalize our content for public viewing. While we are not new to the game of updating stories during the day (as we have posted news such as the Myers trial verdict, election coverage and other various events), we want to do better.

Now we hope to update stories every day if possible and do so for as many as possible. For example today at about 6 p.m. we published to our site a short story about how the Girls Gone Wild event at Jake’s has been cancelled, instead of having to wait until the morning paper comes out, when we have our complete coverage of the controversy. In addition yesterday, for example, we also published an early article about the robbery that occurred at the Circle K.

This is only the beginning though. It is our goal to do more in the days, weeks and months to come. Ideally we would like to see constant updates during the day as our Web site will become a broader extension of the paper.

So the moral of the story is this: Continue to check out our site during the day as we should have updates whenever key events occur. Also be sure to let us know when you see the updates, if you think there is an angle to the story you think we missed or you notice something that may be inaccurate. That’s the beauty of the Web, through your feedback we easily and instantly improve our stories and then better prepare them for the daily issue and hopefully then be able to give you better content. If you do see anything in an article you have a question or concern about please give us a call in the newsroom at 812-855-0760 and ask for the editor of the section the story is in or one of us, the managing editors. Also let us know if you think there is something happening that you would like us see updated more

The unthinkable has happened.

We make mistakes. We do our best to get it right, but sometimes things go wrong.

When you see an error in the IDS, please let us know right away so we can fix it online and run a correction in print.

Call the newsroom at 812-855-0760 and ask to speak to me or a member of management. If we’re not in the newsroom at the time, ask for a Campus editor.

Or, you can e-mail me at editor @ idsnews.com. The e-mail address stays with the editor in chief each semester.

Thanks for your help!

-Kacie Foster

It’s almost unavoidable that we will screw up. A lot of times it’s something minor like a typo or grammatical error. Every now and then we might get someone’s title wrong.

But Tuesday we killed someone. Oops.

In a page one caption we identified Naomi Tutu as the “daughter of slain civil rights leader Desmond Tutu.”
We would like to clarify that Desmond Tutu is still very much alive.

How something like this happens is due to a combination of structural problems and just plain old ignorance. Captions, because they are so short and usually just identify what is going on in the picture, are only viewed by editors once they’re on the page and do not go through the same kind of fact checking as longer stories.

I and several other editors saw the caption on the page last night, but not being very familiar with Desmond Tutu, assumed that it was correct. Perhaps it was something the photographer overheard at the lecture.

We try to avoid mistakes like this and wish Desmond Tutu a long and healthy life.

We had lots of events to cover for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and unfortunately, there wasn’t enough room in the newspaper for everything. If you pick up a copy of Tuesday’s paper, you’ll see our centerpiece story is about Naomi Tutu and her speech. We have video of her talk available online.
Also on the front page is a story about “Living the Dream: The Audacity to Believe,” an event held at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on Monday night.

Open up the paper to pages 4 and 5, and you’ll see a “doubletruck,” (that is, two touching pages of coverage). We’ve got photos, another story, and a column from one of our reporters who traveled to Birmingham, Ala., this weekend for MLK Day coverage.
Finally, be sure to check out our photo slideshow of MLK Day coverage. If you don’t want to wait for the slideshow to play, hold your mouse over the play track, click, hold and drag your mouse along the way.

We’ve been planning this coverage for the past few weeks. Hope you like it!