The Lego Mirror - Press

Where's Eric? Tracking NY politicians' public schedules

2025-10-01T03:15:00+00:00

Note: I had mostly finished this project last weekend, before Eric Adams dropped out of the mayoral race. While Adams will still be the mayor until January, this project made more sense while he was an active candidate.

WHERE'S ERIC? provides a compilation and visualization of when Eric Adams and other New York officials have failed to make their public schedule available in advance, as reported by Politico.

As the New York City mayor's race escalates, I've been paying closer attention to the local politics-focused media outlets, including reading Politico's "New York Playbook" regularly. Aside from the actual news, they have a brief section where they ask: "Where's Kathy?" and "Where's Eric?", and summarize what their public schedules for the day are.

That is, if they receive them. Lately Adams' entry has been some variant of "Schedule unavailable as of 10 p.m. [previous night]".

I was curious what this actually meant in the long-term; was I coincidentally just reading Playbook on days he didn't provide his schedule? Or has he always been bad about providing his public schedule? Are other politicans any better?

Of course, the best way to answer this question was to look at literally the entire history of New York Playbook, so I processed the entire archive dating back to 2016 to get a more complete picture. The first Playbook issue that contained then-Governor Andrew Cuomo and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio's schedules was February 21, 2017: de Blasio had events in Manhattan and The Bronx while Cuomo had no public schedule.

Moving forward to 2025, I was mildly surprised to learn that Adams was actually perfect in providing his public schedule for the first three years of his term. Then on Friday, March 21, his first ever "Schedule unavailable as of 10 p.m. Thursday." appeared.

In April, he didn't provide his public schedule more often than he did. Over the past 8 weeks, his schedule has been unavailable 65% of the time.

This is...not great.

Knowing what our public officials are up to is a standard form of transparency that enables the press to document their actions so the public can hold them accountable. Not being up front with what you're doing undermines public trust, and while this might feel like a small thing, I think it's a decent indicator for how public officials respect the public and the press in general.

Given how chaotic the last few months of the Adams administration have been, part of me is curious whether this is due to incompetence or malice. We know quite well that Adams acts maliciously when it comes to the city hall press corps.

And yet as bad as Adams is at this, he is still better than Andrew Cuomo, who, out of the four officials reported by Politico, is the worst.

WHERE'S ANDREW? shows how his record was consistently spotty since early 2017, but dramatically worsened in May 2020. Admittedly that was a pretty chaotic time for everyone, but this the same person who wanted us to celebrate his leadership during that time period.

During that same time periods Adams and Cuomo were failing at providing their public schedules, WHERE'S BILL? and WHERE'S KATHY? show in stark contrast that it was completely feasible to regularly provide their schedules.

Both provided their schedule to Politico 99% of the time, which I think shows that this is not a difficult task, and makes Adams' and Cuomo's failure to do so even more inadequate and unacceptable.

After scraping Politico's archive, the "Where's {name}?" fields were extracted into a database (raw data), with special handling for some edge cases. For example, on January 6, 2022, Politico had an joint item, "Where are Kathy and Eric?".

Also for about two weeks, Politico spelled it as "BlLL" (that's a lowercase L instead of an I). Oops.

A regular expression was used to identify days when the schedule was unavailable, specifically matching the phrases:

schedule unavailable
not available
schedule not available
schedule not released
unavailable as of
not released
by press time
schedule yet
no public schedule released as of
no public schedule available as of
as of {number}

Notably this does not match when a schedule was provided but there were no public events.

I performed a spot check against most of the unavailable dates and far fewer of the available ones, erring on the side of identifying false positives. If you do find an error, please contact me.

Major credit and thanks to the Politico reporters for collecting and reporting this data for nearly a decade.

Archiving Hell Gate's FYIs

2025-05-08T14:10:00+00:00

Hell Gate is my favorite New York City-focused news outlet. The coverage is good and the writing tends to be exceptional.

When they redesigned their website in July last year, they added a new "FYI" section, which is usually one to two sentences with a link to a story about some current event. As I write this, the current FYI is:

New pope. Way too quick. Suspicious.

Maybe not the best example. Before that, it was:

In Randy Mastro's New York City, there will be no Pride concerts at Central Park if you support Palestine.

They usually update it every 3-4 days, though during major news events it might be more frequent.

Unfortunately it's not well advertised; on mobile, it's buried in a menu that you need to open before you even learn it exists. Plus they don't always post them on their social media and it's not in their newsletters.

So I've taken it upon myself to create an archive of them and provide an RSS feed. If you visit https://legoktm.com/hellgatenyc-fyi/, you'll see a (hopefully) complete archive of all their FYIs, using a layout and theme that tries to look like Hell Gate's website. It was a fun quick trip through the past year of NYC.

I also added a people filter, so you can just see entries that mention Mayor Eric Adams, disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo, and current governor Kathy Hochul. In a surprising-but-not-really-that-surprising twist, the former governor, who is also the leading mayoral candidate, has more entries than the current one.

I started by scraping the Wayback Machine for all the old entries.

Getting the "FYI" out of the HTML was trivial, the script looked for the node that matched the CSS selector .fyi-section p. If the inner HTML was different than what was previously found, it was saved as a new entry. (As a weird contradiction, Hell Gate's website adds both ?ref=hellgatenyc.com to any URL, and sets rel="noreferrer" 🙃.)

The Wayback Machine has some pretty aggressive rate limits, which was annoying for a bit, until I realized I could plug in urllib3's Retry utility and have it, slowly, retry everything until it succeeded. Some days the Wayback Machine had archived Hell Gate's homepage like every 10 minutes so I ended up adding an optimization to skip entries that were within 3 hours of one I already checked (hopefully it didn't miss anything).

Now that I had collected ~75 entries in a JSON database, I wrote a small Rust program to identify new entries and export a RSS feed on a 3-hour timer.

When I started manually reviewing all the entries, I realized that some of them were just typos or other cosmetic changes. For example, back in August 2024:

- To truly understand Bryant Park, y<a href="https://hellgatenyc.com/bryant-park-frog-carousel-flaubert-mystery/">ou must wrestle with its large frog</a>
+ To truly understand Bryant Park, <a href="https://hellgatenyc.com/bryant-park-frog-carousel-flaubert-mystery/">you must wrestle with its large frog</a>

The "y" didn't get linked, and within a few hours they fixed it.

I applied two checks to detect these type of typo entries. First, seeing if the plain text version is the same, to detect links changing or issues like the one above. Then I added in a check for the Levenshtein distance to detect other cases of minor changes.

Even with those two checks, it's not perfect. Sometimes the edits are more substantial, like "George Santos has been sentenced to more than seven years...". The additional "more than" is more than a small typo fix, but still just a correction.

But then there are FYIs like "What are you doing on ~~December 5~~TONIGHT? ..." Only two words being changed, but it feels like both merit independent entries. The ideal solution would be manual curation, but I don't think I can commit to that, so the current implementation is a reasonable compromise for now.

The last part of this project was creating a HTML browser for all of these, which would allow linking to old FYIs. I tried pretty hard to mimic the styling of the Hell Gate website, which was fun.

It's weird what you learn when you dig very deeply into a website's CSS. On the Hell Gate website, if you hover over an author link, after 2 seconds it turns purple. I never noticed!

Nearly everything draws from elements on the Hell Gate website, except I wasn't able to replicate the font used in the headlines because it's not freely licensed. They use Futura Passata; I looked for free equivalents to Futura and ended up with "League Spartan", which is not really close, but in the ballpark at least. The body text is correctly "Outfit".

I'm exceptionally pleased with how the people filter turned out. In the database, I wrote some code to tag entries based on who was mentioned. "Adams" maps to Eric Adams, unless it's Adrienne Adams (no relation); "Cuomo" maps to Andrew Cuomo unless it's Chris Cuomo (yes relation).

This was especially fun to implement since Rust's primary regex crate doesn't support negative lookaheads.

On the HTML side, it's a radio input element, so only one filter can be selected at a time. The actual filtering is implemented in pure CSS:

body:has(#filter-adams:checked) .entry:not(.person-Adams) {
    display: none;
}
body:has(#filter-cuomo:checked) .entry:not(.person-Cuomo) {
    display: none;
}
body:has(#filter-hochul:checked) .entry:not(.person-Hochul) {
    display: none;
}

The only issue I ran into is that Firefox helpfully remembers the radio button state you last used, which isn't what I wanted here. I ended up adding a few lines of JavaScript to take care of it for now:

document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", () => {
    document.querySelectorAll('input[type="radio"]').forEach((elem) => {
        elem.checked = false;
    });
});

That's pretty much it, I've published the source code for those that want to peek.

Goodbye FiveThirtyEight

2025-03-10T01:30:00+00:00

Back in April 2023, I was in Brooklyn to attend a live taping of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. It was great, someone corrected Nate Silver on the U.S. constitution and former FiveThirtyEight writer Clare Malone returned for a lot of great banter backed by data.

The very next week, Disney laid off two-thirds of the staff, including Silver, and merged the website into the primary ABC News one. I have yet to ever attend another in-person podcast taping.

So it wasn't really a surprise that Disney finally killed FiveThirtyEight last week. But it's a sad time.

Nate Silver (left) and Galen Druke (right) discuss whether the New York Post headline was a "good use of polling" or not at a live podcast taping in April 2023. (It was bad.)

FiveThirtyEight really popularized and built up modern data journalism. The 2020 presidential election forecast was a fantastic case study of how to represent both probabilities and uncertainty. Its pollster ratings actually graded pollsters, and helped drive discussion on changing methodologies.

This is not to mention all of the fantastic work they did on sports predictions and statistics.

I'm particularly nostalgic about FiveThirtyEight since its peak was around the same time I started studying journalism. The "Significant Digits" newsletter was my mandatory morning reading and of course, I'd share the new statistics I just learned with whoever would listen.

Likewise, I'd listen to the weekly politics podcast within an hour or two of it being released to hear the latest "good use of polling or not" debate and polling details about the next election. Even though I stopped listening two years ago, it's still my #1 most listened to podcast at 354 hours (#2 is at 90 hours). My favorite series, "The Gerrymandering Project", was a deep, data-driven analysis of redistricting and gerrymandering. It's still worth a listen today.

Since being let go, Silver has criticized Disney for failing to monetize the site properly, which I agree with. There was no way to financially support them aside from buying merch, which I assume brought in basically nothing.

FiveThirtyEight was originally just Silver's blog, before it was bought by The New York Times (and then later sold to Disney/ESPN). It was just one of the many free web blogs the Times had, but if it were today, I could easily see them selling it as a separate subscription, like The Athletic or Wirecutter. Just ahead of its time unfortunately.

Some of the work FiveThirtyEight did has since been taken over by others, like The Upshot, Split Ticket, Harry Enten's Margins of Error, etc., but I have yet to find a similar data-focused media outlet to replace the void.

Inside Scoop - Spartan Daily is a Pacemaker finalist!

2020-10-22T06:41:31+00:00

Inside Scoop is a column about the operation of the Spartan Daily, San Jose State's student newspaper.

It feels like forever ago, but at the end of the Spring 2019 semester, I was chosen as the next executive editor of the Spartan Daily. I definitely felt a lot of pressure to keep up high quality newspaper that my predecessors put out three days a week. But at the same time, I had that inner drive of "What's next?" and "How do we get even better than before?"

A few days after my selection, Marci, our design chief, and I went to Peanuts (the de facto Spartan Daily hangout restaurant) to discuss the "Pacemaker". I knew winning an ACP Pacemaker is pretty much the top award in college journalism as they're unofficially known as the "Pulitzer Prizes of college journalism", but I didn't realize what exactly it took to win one. Luckily Marci had some experience in this area - she had already won two Pacemakers as a part of The Advocate during community college.

She walked me through ACP associate director Gary Lundgren's 2018 "The Pacemaker" presentation, which started off with examples from past winners. To be honest, it was intimidating. Most of those papers looked significantly better than ours and it didn't seem possible to get on their level, to the point that I didn't even make it one of my goals (and I had some pretty lofty goals).

There were some basic tips in Gary's presentation, which became the foundation of how I wanted to improve the Spartan Daily:

Tell human stories.
Storytelling results from verbal and visual planning.
Engage your readers.
Take readers behind the scenes.
Use a variety of story formats.
Headlines require layers of information.
Storytelling images and video add realism.
In-depth reporting packages have impact.
Content packaging matters.
Tell stories across multiple platforms.
Simplicity is always the best strategy.
Listen to your readers.

Trying to address all of these really required redesigning the whole story flow, from coming up with the idea, to writing a story and finally publishing it. It became a philosophical shift as we tried to take the guidance to heart.

Previously, story ideas were mostly pitched from staff writers, which allowed for a greater diversity of story ideas. But it came with a downside, staff writers often favored writing about the same topics and the ideas rarely had coordination when writers did work on similar stories. And I don't think continually allowing staff writers to pick what they write about really fulfilled what Gary recommended.

So instead we flipped it around and had editors come up with the majority of story ideas. Aside from the benefit that editors usually came up with higher-quality ideas, it allowed for our ideas to be more cohesive, focusing on what each editor wanted in their section.

Building on that, we picked the topics for our "special" issues and content ahead of time so we could spend more time planning them out, hopefully leading to a higher-quality result. I'm pretty proud of our women's soccer special and the Fighting 'fake news' special.

Then we streamlined the editing process. Normally, stories go through three primary rounds of edits. "First edits" are done by the section editor, who has been working closely with the writer already. "Second edits" would be done by the executive or managing editor, and finally a copy editor would do "copy edits".

As a writer, I had seen this process often times become repetitive and frustrating when one round of edits tries to undo what a previous one did. To avoid that, each round of edits was given specific things to look for and fix. First edits ensured the 5 W's (who, what, where, why, when) were answered, at least 3 sources were used, and also that the story actually matches what they initially pitched. Second edits would then go into the finer details, improving the lead, improving word choices, eliminating reptition and so on. And of course copy edits would ensure compliance with AP Style and do basic fact checking. Editors were empowered to send stuff back if they came across something that should've already been fixed by that point.

And then there's all the little stuff we did to make our content crisp: we switched to ragged right for columns (differentiating opinions and news stories), used label heads (a headline with no active verb like "Period problems") for our feature stories and enforced having borders on all of our photos. We also added more regular, dependable content so we weren't rushing at the last minute to fill all the space. These aptly named "space fillers" included the crime blotter, campus images, and weekly columns.

I think we also made significant improvements in recognizing individual accomplishment while still ensuring our collective success (and failure) was treated as team successes and failures. Each week the editors selected a "Staff Writer of the Week" to highlight someone who went above and beyond. We also eliminated grading penalties that punished individual writers for making mistakes like spelling a name wrong when in reality, such a mistake could only be made if there were significant failures in the editing process as well.

But at the same time some initatives to strengthen our content by adding longer student profiles or featuring classes kind of faltered. At first we didn't really have a large enough stuff to have writers work on much longer pieces, but once people had settled in, I really didn't push it that much. The few long-form profiles we did were good starts, but the more experience we had writing and editing them, the better they would've been.

And some changes that I tried to implement at the very beginning like weekly doubletruck features and editorials left an understandably sour taste in some editors' mouths after some early failures as we just weren't ready to handle that workload yet. Again, I didn't really push it after that.

Part of that was because in addition to all those changes I was really trying to follow the recommendation of simplicity. We favored having less, higher-quality content rather than trying to do more and sacrificing quality. So instead of putting out a 20-page paper that was reaching to fill space, we put out 8 and 12 pagers that aimed to be more cohesive. Most of our newspapers were 6-8 pages because that seemed to be our natural limit given the quality we were striving for.

The other significant shift was planning things out ahead of time as much as possible along with contingency plans, giving us plenty of flexibility when things inevitably didn't turn out as expected. It sounds so basic, but it really came in key for all of our special content. And having a plan meant we could jump on a plane to Colorado with less than 24 hours notice, but that's a story for another time...

So with respect to all the ideas that I dropped early on, I don't know whether we would have been able to pull it all off or we would've doomed ourselves if we continued down that extremely ambitious path.

I think it was especially fortunate that the next executive editor, Chelsea, was my news editor and had endured the ups and downs of all of these changes. I'd like to think she also saw the value in them, often refining or continuing them throughout her semester.

All that said, when the list of 2020 Newspaper Pacemaker finalists was published, I scrolled through the list, seeing all of our typical competitors: The Daily Californian (UC Berkeley), Daily Bruin (UCLA) and Daily Trojan (USC). "Sigh, we're going to lose to all of them again," I thought.

And then I scrolled a little farther and saw the familiar face of Lindsey Graham staring back at me, from my column about the EARN IT Act.

Unbelievable.

As far as I know, this is the first time the Spartan Daily has been a Pacemaker finalist. I have no expectations that we'll be named a winner at the award ceremony later today, it just really means a lot that we were even named a finalist.

As I wrote last time, "This is probably one of the most team-based awards that I've had my individual name on." This wouldn't have been possible without Victoria, my managing editor, and the rest of the editors and staff writers. And I'm always grateful for the support and well, advice from our advisors, Richard Craig and Mike Corpos.

And then the Spartan Daily has four 4 individual finalists too, all in design categories!

Pinnacles, Best Newspaper Front Page for 'I couldn't be home when home needed me' (Marci, Christian, Mauricio)
ACP, Best Illustration for Black students seek unity and belonging (Nachaela)
ACP, Best Illustration for Period problems (Melody)
ACP, Best Informational graphic for Tips for success at Zoom University (Marci and myself)

Thanks to Marci for reviewing and editing this post before publication.

Ode to Jeopardy!

2020-09-21T23:09:45+00:00

I originally wrote this for the Spartan Daily in April 2020 to be included as a comparison of different types of loading music. It wasn't ever published, but given the new Jeopardy! season and that I just finished reading Alex Trebek's memoir, I dug it out of the archives.

Answer: the most iconic game show track.

“Alex, what is Jeopardy!’s ‘Think’ music?”

Since the show’s inception in 1964, the “Think” music played during the Final Jeopardy! round has become a staple in any scenario in which there’s a time deadline. The basic melody is incredibly simple, making it easy for people to hum when they want to put someone on the hot seat.

That’s kind of on purpose, as Jeopardy! creator Merv Griffin originally wrote the song as a lullaby for his son. But what Griffin originally intended to be a relaxing song to fall asleep to now causes stress for three different contestants every weeknight.

The song is exactly 30 seconds long, so contestants can figure out how much time they have left based on the music alone, rather than needing to look at a clock.

Just like the show itself, the music has gone through changes over the years. The original version from the ’60s emphasized the ticking noise from a clock while lighter bells played in the background.

The early ’90s saw more variations on the theme, including one variation that replaced the ticking clock with bongos. It didn’t last very long, thankfully.

Audiences heard the biggest change in 2008, when Chris Bell Music & Sound Design entirely overhauled the “Think” track for Jeopardy!’s 25th anniversary. It remains the music you hear today, consisting entirely of electric guitars.

The song is still Griffin’s though, in 2005, two years before his death, he told The New York Times that he had earned “close to $70-$0 million” from royalties. That sounds pretty good for what Griffin described as something “he wrote in less than a minute.”

Even though the music is set, it does get remixed occasionally for tournaments; most recently the Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time tournament. It featured three past champions who are considered to be some of the best players ever: Ken Jennings, who had the longest streak, Brad Rutter, who had never lost to a human opponent, and newcomer James Holzhauer, who had the most Jeopardy! records.

Given host Alex Trebek’s stage IV cancer diagnosis and the likelihood that Jennings and Rutter were both past their prime, fans knew that the end of a Jeopardy! era was approaching and the music reflects that.

The GOAT “Think” music takes a slower and more somber tone, reflecting the seriousness of the tournament as well as the underlying message of a generational shift.

Ultimately the theme music and even Jeopardy! itself shine because of the simplicity. Anyone can easily pick up the 30-second tune just as quickly you can pick up the Jeopardy! format.

Encrypting a college newsroom with Signal

2020-08-19T12:00:00+00:00

Originally published on freedom.press

Students in San Jose State University's journalism program discuss content for an upcoming issue.

Student journalists have it pretty rough. Most try to balance passing a full load of classes with running around to get the latest scoop, often without being paid.

Many programs are underfunded and, as we've previously discussed on this blog, lack any form of meaningful digital security training.

After interning at Freedom of the Press Foundation last summer, I was determined that when I took over being the Executive Editor of the Spartan Daily, San Jose State University's student paper, I would beef up our digital security.

First, I devised our risk assessment, analyzing who would be most likely to target our newsroom, and the data we wanted to keep secure. I wasn't too worried about three-letter agencies spying on us. I was concerned with our school administration. We had recently alleged that SJSU had misused millions of dollars of athletic donations, so it was in their interest to discredit us. As I considered our risk assessment, I realized our university already had access to our university-provided email accounts, Google Drive folder, the lab computers we used and even the keys to our physical newsroom.

I put Freedom of the Press Foundation webcam-blocking stickers on all of our computers, so that was no longer a risk we needed to worry about.

The one thing they didn't have access to was our chat platform. Originally we used a combination of GroupMe and SMS/MMS for all types of remote communication. Those messages could be as innocent as, "Hey my story is ready for you to edit," to an urgent heads up like, "Police activity by the library, can someone go?" or even private discussions of sources.

In 2014 Edward Snowden informed the world just how insecure SMS is: Your messages are unencrypted and your phone company or the government can easily access them. In one of his disclosures, the NSA described SMS messages as "A Goldmine to Exploit."

GroupMe is owned by Microsoft and uses the Microsoft Privacy Policy, which allows for data sharing for advertising and marketing purposes as well as to: "Comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process, including from law enforcement or other government agencies." Plus anyone in your group can receive their messages over SMS, opening them up to all of those problems too.

Neither of those two options provide a strong sense of security and confidentiality that we as journalists would like to have.

Beyond sensitive, editorial conversations, everything else in those chats were stupid jokes and memes. (What do you expect? We're college students.) But as Gawker taught us, bad jokes are no laughing matter for some newsrooms. Looking back at some of those old messages now, there are a few that make me cringe.

Nearly all of our gaffes and bad jokes end up on an offline "quote wall."

So, strengthening our newsroom's group chat/texting platform was my main priority. These are specific requirements I came down to:

Required:

Disappearing/expiring messages: Disappearing messages make our conversations ephemeral and can empower people to be more candid with what they say. I think it makes online conversations feel more like in real life, where you can still remember what the person said, but it's not being recorded forever. When not everyone can physically be in the newsroom at the same time, it allows us to have a similar atmosphere.
Free (as in cost): College newsrooms are often underfunded and generally have less support resources than their professional counterparts. Also, I didn't want to have to worry that if the university was paying for a service, they would have access to it and therefore be able to read our messages.
Installable by everyone, with a straightforward UX: It's hard to overstate how important having a good user experience was for this – if it wasn't straightforward for people to use, I would end up being tech support for most people, something I didn't want to do. (It inevitably happened anyway.)

Nice to have:

Desktop support: Sometimes it's nice to type on a keyboard instead of a tiny phone. More practically, it allows sending messages during class when your laptop is already on your desk, but taking your phone out would appear rude.
End-to-end encrypted: This wasn't a hard requirement because I really wasn't concerned about a compromise from the service provider, as long as disappearing messages were truly implemented.
Free and open source software: As a believer in the free software movement, I prefer to use free and open source software whenever possible, and like to recommend it to others.

The best match:

Signal fit really nicely into these categories, and I was already familiar with using and evangelizing it. After trying it out with a few editors over the summer the goal was set: Encrypt the newsroom's conversations with Signal.

I asked everyone to install the Signal app and then send me a message so I could add them to a group chat with the entire newsroom, but in practice it wasn't that straightforward. Some people needed to leave class early and missed my instructions. One person kept getting an error from the App Store when they tried to install Signal (their phone didn't have enough free space). I would regularly check the list of people in the group chat against the class roster, but unfortunately one person slipped through the cracks for a few weeks.

We had two main group chats, one for everyone and another just for editors. Both of those chats had disappearing messages set to retain messages for 1 week (the longest option), which worked out well. Today those two chat groups are basically empty, and while there might be some screenshots on peoples' phones, I feel confident that there are no significant copies lying around, waiting to be leaked.

To help new Signal users, I put up keyboard shortcut reference cards in our newsroom.

Can't default everything to Signal: One of the weakest points of using Signal was how one-on-one chats worked. While I could ensure that I used Signal to talk to everyone, I had little visibility/influence in how others talked to each other. Phones tend to steer people into the default system apps (iMessage/SMS), so only using Signal requires a conscious behavior shift for each person. A common example is the canned message you can send saying you're busy when declining a call.

Don't want everything to disappear: The bigger problem was that even for those who used Signal, configuring disappearing messages wasn't practical. You'd have to enable it for every single chat, but sometimes you'd want to talk about personal, non-newspaper things to that person that you didn't want to disappear. I rarely turned it on for individual chats myself.

No automatic backups: As I learned, when people run into problems with an app, they sometimes will try a strategy of uninstalling the app and then reinstalling it. Unfortunately in the case of Signal, that means you've lost all your messages. This is a win for privacy, but very much not what users expect.

Requires an iOS/Android device: Not everyone has access to a smartphone. My plan was nearly foiled when I found out one of our reporters didn't have a smartphone, and couldn't download and use Signal (which wouldn't have been an issue on GroupMe). Luckily, they could use Signal on their old iPod Touch. Combined with campus-wide Wi-Fi, the solution was largely sufficient.

Lack of proper group management: You can't kick people out of group chats — they have to leave on their own. Thankfully, we did not have to kick anyone out, but we did come close to removing someone from our staff. We would have had to create a new group chat with everyone but that staffer and simply hope everyone else stopped using the old one.

Messages disappear too quickly: A week is rather short for messages to disappear, and if the conversation moves fast, people may forget that the older ones are gone. When setting up our "secret Santa," everyone posted in the group chat suggestions for what they liked. Not everyone jotted down what their person had said, so when they went to look back a week later… the messages were gone.

If your top priority is to ensure that all your communications disappear consistently, Signal is probably not the best tool to set an organization-wide retention policy. But for resource-strapped college newsrooms, it does a decent job. There are plenty of other holes in our digital security, but we're better off than before.

Two important changes Signal could make that would have improved our experience would be to: (1) Offer a longer disappearing expiry, such as 1 month; and (2) Implement more robust group management features, which we hear are coming soon.

For an application known for its encryption, Signal is an accessible tool for non-technical users to set up. Recently added features, like reactions and stickers, make it more accessible and closer in feature-parity for people comfortable with other, less-secure messaging apps.

Despite reporting in a learning environment where digital security wasn't a priority, each student is now set up with, and has practical experience using, Signal. They now have a leg up on many of their peers, and can continue communicating with sources and other journalists in a secure manner.

Mauricio La Plante, who served as an editor alongside me at the Spartan Daily, said he found Signal very straightforward to use. Now a freelance reporter with San Jose Spotlight, he continues to use Signal during his reporting. "I would recommend it to any journalist I meet who doesn't already use it," he said.

If you're interested in getting started with Signal, check out our Signal for beginners guide.

Inside Scoop - Breaking down our award-winning special issue

2020-04-07T09:52:38+00:00

Inside Scoop is a column about the operation of the Spartan Daily, San Jose State's student newspaper.

Each semester the Spartan Daily staff puts out a special issue that focuses on a specific topic or concept. It allows for an in-depth exploration of something that the San Jose State community is interested in. Previous topics have included race, gender and home. The special issue normally comes toward the end of the semester but we thought we'd do things a bit differently.

Rather than do one special issue - we planned on doing three. The first of them is what I want to break down today: Fighting 'fake news'. It won second place for best special issue in the 2020 Best of Show ACP San Francisco convention competition (here's what won first place), two steps up from our fourth-place finish for Heroic in 2019.

You can download a PDF copy of the issue to follow along.

The way we picked the special topics went differently this time around, and I think for the better. In the past topics were chosen during the semester based on what was going on as well as having the staff vote on it. Sometimes this worked, but I felt that if we spent more time selecting the topics, we could do a better job ensuring the content was cohesive and complete without significant duplication.

When we picked the topic over the summer, we thought we had the title too: Combatting 'fake news'. The word "combatting" is weird though, as it can also be spelled "combating". I definitely did not feel comfortable using a word in the title that people could (incorrectly) interpret as misspelled. Misspellings destroy our credibility ("if you can't even get the spelling right, how can we trust you to get the facts right?"), even the perception of one. So we switched the title to: Fighting 'fake news'.

The title takes a clear stance - "fake news" is bad and we need to fight it. There is an expectation that journalists will objectively cover their subjects, trying to stay as neutral as possible. But I think anything that threatens our mission of informing our audiences (restricting our First Amendment rights is a common example) is appropriate for a newspaper to take a stance on, even outside of the opinion/editorial pages.

The second problem with the title of the issue was whether to put "fake news" in quotes or not. We decided that upon first reference we would put it in quotes to indicate that we were referring to it as the term rather than literal fake news. Later references wouldn't use quotes because by then the reader should be able to understand what the meaning/intent is.

That leads us into the first story - what exactly does "fake news" mean?

I'm not sure how it happened, but John ended up writing the intro/lead story for two of the three special papers in addition to the lead story in our soccer season preview. And like usual, he did a pretty great job with balancing his own research with what SJSU professors (our experts) told him. Typically we have a blanket prohibition on interviewing journalism professors/students because it's "incestuous" (as said by Professor Craig) to be interviewing ourselves, but because journalism professors are subject-matter experts in this case, writers were given an exception this one time.

This was also the time we fully realized that John was designing his infographics in InDesign rather than Illustrator/Photoshop. I really like how the timeline visualizes all of the events covered in the story, starting with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. We struggled a bit with how to represent two different timescales, as a significant amount of events happened very recently. Eventually we settled on the zig-zag line that you seen in graphs to indicate a shift.

My one regret is that the quote, "Honestly, it is a fire hose of shit," didn't make it into a pull quote.

The next story about false ICE rumors spreading over Twitter was easily the most important story in this entire issue. As seen in the screenshot (or on Twitter itself), people falsely claimed on Twitter that ICE was on the SJSU campus, obviously scaring undocumented students. It's trivial to find other tweets that falsely claim this too.

There's no better case study for "fake news" than something concerning our own campus. Given that the Spartan Daily already covered the incident when the rumors first spread, Vicente's story retells the tale from a different angle: focusing on how the university fought the "fake news". This is the theme that all the remaining stories keep in mind - how do we as individuals and as a society fight "fake news". I do wish that we could have had an interview with someone who actually spread the rumors on social media though.

Echo chambers seem rather relevant to SJSU as most students lean progressive/liberal/left/etc. but there are definitely some people holding conservative/right/etc. views on campus. After defining a jargon-y term, Christian included insight from students on how they obtain their news, really priming the reader for the next section on Pages 4 & 5.

Melody's illustration was absolutely beautiful...and then we couldn't afford to run it in color. :( I also think the rest of the page ends up becoming a sea of gray - it would have benefited from a pull quote to break up the solid columns of text. That would have also forced us to shorten the story a bit and maybe make it slightly more concise.

These two pages discussing where students get their news from are a beautiful mess that did not turn out the way any of us planned. The original idea was that we would survey students on where they get their news (e.g. CNN, NY Times, BuzzFeed News), and provide a ranking and analysis (e.g. AllSides media bias ratings) for each source. But that's not at all what happened. Most students returned the survey with the platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) they got their news from rather than the actual sources.

The resulting dataset was messy and overlapping, calling for one type of chart: a Venn diagram. Chelsea and Ed did a great job putting it together that night as people were still returning survey slips. Some really fantastic things can come out of being forced to work under pressure, but we should have had a better plan for this. We should have started the survey earlier and had a backup plan for what to do with that space if the data didn't come out the way we wanted.

The second half answered the natural follow-up question: does it actually matter? It was kind of a leading question, unsurprisingly everyone gave favorable answers to the point we were trying to push. Also we messed up in the layout, the headline with the question should have been above the speech bubbles.

The main take away I had was that if you run a free response survey, expect that the responses will be all over the place. Also to run a controlled test of the questions with friends or such before giving it to everyone.

The idea was that our guide would be the "if you take one thing away from this issue, it should be this." I think the content did that, but the framing/location in the issue wasn't ideal even though it's a logical follow-up from the previous infographic content. The infographic is unsigned as if it's an editorial statement, but it wasn't something the entire board worked on, just 3-4 editors did. Also putting the main takeaway on Page 6 probably isn't that great, I think it would have worked better on the back page (Page 8) with the editorial. We would have needed majority approval from the editorial board on the concept/text, but I think it would have been a good idea regardless.

The evolution of this story was unexpected but great. Going into it, Brendan was going to reach out to coaches/players at SJSU as well as professional journalists to capture the story from both sides of reporting. We expected that it would be straightforward for him to get interviews at SJSU because we already have a good relationship with our athletics media relations team and a bit more difficult to get a hold of professional sports journalists ... but the exact opposite happened. CJ was able to put him in touch with multiple fantastic sources while we were struggling to get good quotes from SJSU coaches. Coincidentally we visited The Mercury News on Monday (the issue came out on Thursday) and while we took a tour around the building, a few of us hung back to interview two of their sports reporters.

Our biggest failing in this story was the lack of good artwork. The infographic was a last-minute thing because we needed some graphical element for the story, but at least to me it really looks like an afterthought. Had we moved the guide to another page, this story would have gotten an entire page and I think we could have done some kind of cool photo illustration with Durant and headlines.

Perfection is elusive. One of the hardest lessons for me to learn as executive editor has been that no matter how many checks or reviews we do, some things will just slip by everyone.

Somehow a faint gray border was accidentally set on the text box of Olivia's story, which pushed everything down a line so her story did not finish. It was fixed for the digital PDF copy, so I took a picture of the physical print copy to show it.

It's not productive for us to blame any specific person given the number of eyes that went over it and didn't notice (also blaming people in general is a terrible practice). But it's still frustrating enough that I don't really have any comments on the story itself. For a later special paper I had one of our editors go through all of the pages again before we sent them to the printer to double check stuff like this.

This story was not planned. I don't remember where we went wrong, but when we were laying out which story was going to go on each page, we ended up short one story in the opinion section. While normally I would have preferred a staff writer to fill in the gap, because we were very short on time Jonathan, the opinion editor, wrote the story himself. Plus he likes satire so it was a great fit.

I would also like everyone to know that there is a Wikipedia article titled 'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens about The Onion stories with the same name.

Before I get into discussing this page, I want to share an excerpt that explains my position on editorials from one of my favorite books, The Landry News.

(Maybe another time I'll write about how much I love editorials.)

While most of the special issue addresses how consumers of news can do a better job avoiding "fake news", I think we tackle the hard issue that many journalists may not want to admit - the news media is also culpable in the rise of "fake news". As we explain how our correction policy works, I hope that came across as the heart of the Spartan Daily - as student journalists we do our best to get it right the first time around, but we will always publicly admit our mistakes and rectify them with the aim of doing a better job the next time.

For laying out the page, Melody really came in clutch and did a great job. We were expecting to have a half-page ad and then it fell through rather late in the day. Melody stepped up and had the attitude of "I get to draw something how big?" And finishing the page with the one correction we had to run that day just sealed the deal.

Overall, I do wonder how much this issue resonated with our primary audience, San Jose State students. I think we did well among one of our secondary audiences, SJSU professors, but that doesn't surprise me given this is a topic many of them are already interested in.

We tried to push the principle of doing things early and planning to give a better result and I think it mostly worked. Nearly all of the content finished going through the entire editing process by the weekend, which really helped Marci put together skeletons/templates of each page for editors to just paste in the final content. This allowed us to spend more time making minor tweaks to get the details right rather than having to just settle for the basics (of course, some stuff still slipped through - "founding founders" still gets to me).

One oddity of this paper was that there was only a single image in the entire issue (the teaser photo of Kevin Durant on the bottom right of Page 1). "Fake news" isn't really a photograph-able subject I suppose.

Because of the name of this issue, it's frequently referred to as "the fake news issue" (even I'm totally guilty of this), which is going to be a great way to be a great way to be remembered in Spartan Daily history: "Yep, that was the semester they put out a fake news issue."

Thanks to Victoria for reviewing and editing this post before publication.

Inside Scoop - The best student newspaper in California

2020-04-02T05:28:08+00:00

tl;dr: The Spartan Daily picked up best student newspaper honors for the first time and had its best awards season ever. Inside Scoop is a column about the operation of the Spartan Daily, San Jose State's student newspaper.

In 2016, I made the decision to go back to school and pursue a degree in journalism. I had briefly dabbled in it in middle school, but really had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I started at De Anza College, as a member of the La Voz staff. After a quarter covering the student government beat, I moved up to serve as news editor. I regularly felt that putting out a paper every two weeks was incredibly difficult ... not realizing what was waiting for me at San Jose State University.

I spent the Fall 2018 semester on SJSU's broadcast program, Update News, mostly getting familiar with the campus. And then, in January 2019, I began my stint as a staff writer on SJSU's flagship publication, the Spartan Daily. I quickly learned that putting out a paper 3 days a week was basically a real job. Every moment I wasn't in class, I'd be running off to conduct an interview or finish typing up a story before my deadline. I started staying late as the editors put together the paper - I was fully hooked.

The Daily basically rotates staff every semester, so in April the advisers and some of the outgoing editors selected me as the next executive editor (our fancy name for the editor-in-chief). I wasn't actually present in class when they played Taylor Swift to announce my selection - I was at a robotics tournament in Houston. Oops.

I spent the summer interning in New York, slowly ~~plotting~~ planning how exactly to run the Spartan Daily. There were some things we had done great while I was a writer, but some things I wanted to redo entirely.

Thankfully, I wasn't embarking on this journey alone. Victoria, my managing editor, was technically #2 in the leadership heirarchy, but it ended up becoming a partnership. Early on I disregarded her advice a few times - and generally came to regret it. I'd like to think I very much learned my lesson.

We were backed up by a great team of editors. I've previously written how we put the team together, but the main thing I want to emphasize is that the editors were picked to create a cohesive team, rather than picking the most skilled person for each role. Add in our staff writers and it really felt like we were a family. Most everyone understood that we won or lost as a team AND THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED.

For the 2019 calendar year, the Spartan Daily was recognized as the best student newspaper in California by the California College Media Association (CCMA) and then again by the California News Publishers Assocation (CNPA).

Left to right: Nick (Spring 2019 executive editor), Jana (Spring 2019 managing editor), Victoria (Fall 2019 managing editor), me (Fall 2019 executive editor). Photo by Professor Craig.

This is probably one of the most team-based awards that I've had my individual name on. It's impossible for me to overstate how much every single person on the Daily staff contributed to this award. It felt incredibly fullfiling and validating with a bit of vindication mixed in to know that all of the work we put in paid off in being named the best student newspaper in the state.

On top of that, the Daily picked up a host of individual awards, wrapping up basically our best awards season ever. Here's the full list:

Pinnacle Awards: 2nd place best sports investigative story (Lindsey)
ACP: 2nd place best in-depth news story (Lindsey)
ACP: 5th place best breaking news photo (Lindsey)
ACP: honorable mention best newspaper inside page (Marci)
ACP San Francisco Best of Show: 2nd place best newspaper special edition (for Fighting 'fake news')
ACP San Francisco Best of Show: 4th place people's choice: newspaper
ACP San Francisco Best of Show: 4th place people's choice: overall
Hearst Journalism Awards: 2nd place Hearst Enterprise Reporting (Lindsey)
CCMA: 1st place best newspaper (Nick, Jana, Kunal, Victoria)
CCMA: 1st place best podcast (Vicente)
CCMA: 2nd place best news series (Erica, Brendan, Jozy, Nathan, Chris)
CCMA: 2nd place best editorial (Jonathan, Kunal)
CCMA: 2nd place best news photograph (Lindsey)
CCMA: 3rd place best sports photograph (Melody)
CCMA: 3rd place best photo series (Brendan)
CCMA: 3rd place best newspaper inside spread design (Lindsey, Kunal, Marci)
CCMA: 3rd place best social media reporting (Spartan Daily staff)
CNPA: 1st place general excellence (Spartan Daily staff)
CNPA: 1st place best enterprise news story (Lindsey, Jana, Mauricio, Kunal)
CNPA: 1st place best illustration (Nachaela)
CNPA: 3rd place best enterprise news story (Christian)
CNPA: 4th place best enterprise news story (Chelsea, Vicente)
CNPA: 4th place best news photo (Mauricio)
CNPA: 4th place best illustration (Cindy)

The list has never been this long before. And while the CCMA and CNPA awards are only statewide, for ACP, Pinnacle and Hearst we competed against colleges all across the country.

I would be remiss if I didn't thank our two advisers, Richard Craig and Mike Corpos, for supporting us throughout this entire experience. I knew that both of them would always have our backs, no matter what. Even that one time I walked into the newsroom and told them, "I'm going to be served sometime this week." The same applies to my adviser from La Voz, Cecilia Deck, who really helped me get started in the first place.

My new tech column in the Spartan Daily

2020-01-31T02:05:24+00:00

After a pretty hectic last semester, I'm taking a much more backseat role on the Spartan Daily for hopefully my final semester at San Jose State. I'm going to be the new "Science & Tech Editor" - yes, I invented my own position. I am currently planning for a science & tech section every month as a special feature.

Every two weeks though, I'm going to be publishing a column, titled "Binary Bombshells", about the different values imbued in technology, analyzing the values they contain, explaining what effects they have upon us and suggesting any avenues for improvement.

You can read the first installment of my column now: Values exist in all technologies.

Inside Scoop - Week 4: One month later

2019-09-16T18:26:29+00:00

Inside Scoop is a weekly column about the operation of the Spartan Daily, San Jose State's student newspaper.

It's been a month and I'm tired. Three newspapers again this week: Tuesday ("the shut it down issue"), Wednesday ("the 9/11 issue") and Thursday ("the Frog Dorm issue").

We had late breaking news that there was a potential security flaw in the self-checkout machines used at various campus dining stores. It took a while for us to figure out exactly what the exploit was, reproduce it and report it to the correct people.

But since I spent a decent amount of time doing that, I wasn't doing the normal stuff that I do (helping with headlines, cutlines, reviewing pages). Some people ended up waiting on me, at which point I realized how much of a SPOF I had become. For some things, it's important that I'm the person who makes the decision, but for a lot of the production night questions and what not, there's no need for people to be blocked on me, especially when I'm doing other (also important) stuff.

Goal accomplished: we got out before 1a.m. (just barely). The main thing that held us back was lack of planning around the 9/11 story and art for the front page. I had some photos of the memorials from when aismallard and I went around to Ground Zero, one of which we were able to use.

The story was a bit messy/unorganized, but that was mostly because we (editors) didn't give good story direction, and we opened it up a bit too late to give good feedback so the author could change it. So we had to do that ourselves.

We also started doing opinion pages and content as ragged right to distinguish it from the rest of the paper. So far it's gotten a good critical reception from our advisors, but we still have some implementation issues, notably consistency.

All of the English pages were done by 12:25a.m., it just took the Spanish page a bit longer.

The front story about frogs in the dorms was really fun to read and edit, but I think we missed the better story angle. Instead of talking about the individual impacts, we should have first talked about the social and community aspects of "The Frog Dorm," which we left towards the end of the story. Our goal was to do this weekly, but I'm not really sure how if it's possible to top this one.

We didn't have good photos for the university scholar series, but I went to the event and watched one of my reporters on how they reported. That was probably one of the most valuable things to see, since I know exactly how to help him (and hopefully others) going forward.

Also, putting the meme of the week right below an editorial about lacking mental health resources and suicide was pretty dumb from a layout perspective. Oops.

The Spanish page turned out nicely, hopefully it happens on a regular basis. And finishes earlier.

The Lego Mirror - Press

Where's Eric? Tracking NY politicians' public schedules

Where's Cuomo?#

Where's Bill and where's Kathy?#

Methodology#

Archiving Hell Gate's FYIs

How I built it#

Goodbye FiveThirtyEight

Inside Scoop - Spartan Daily is a Pacemaker finalist!

Ode to Jeopardy!

Encrypting a college newsroom with Signal

Background#

Evaluation#

Getting started#

Weaker points#

Gotchas#

Conclusion#

Inside Scoop - Breaking down our award-winning special issue

Inside Scoop - The best student newspaper in California

My new tech column in the Spartan Daily

Inside Scoop - Week 4: One month later

Tuesday: out at 1:31a.m.#

Wednesday: out at 12:59p.m.#

Thursday: out at 12:45a.m.#