ThePromiseOfOnlineJournalism.txt

CAMPUS WEBLINES
CHAPTER 1: THE PROMISE OF ONLINE JOURNALISM
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
- A.J. Liebling

Thanks to the Internet, now you can. The sardonic quote from A.J. Liebling, the longtime press critic for The New Yorker and one of journalism's most gifted writers, takes on special relevance in this age of the World Wide Web. Liebling, writing in the years after World War II, was complaining that the cherished notion of a free press had become more myth than reality. Publishers and owners, Liebling groused, were not nearly as interested as they should be, and as Liebling was, in providing a forum for people to express themselves. Surely Liebling would have welcomed this world of do-it-yourself publishing. Now all it takes to be a publisher is knowledge.

Campus Weblines contains everything student newspaper staffs and advisers need to know as they start building online school newspapers for the world to see. The authors, with help from a talented crew of high school students on the one hand and patient computer professionals on the other, will tell readers what they need to know right away and what they may want to look into later. The book also talks about how journalism articles are written and edited, how a staff can be organized for a class or club paper and what can be done on a small budget or a big one. A high-quality school paper can be published with very little money; a school with an Internet connection and at least one computer could do it free. The most important factor in a school paper's success is the staff's commitment to good journalism.

This project began with an idea from Jack Rosenthal, a Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter, writer and editor at The New York Times who is now the president of The New York Times Company Foundation. Mr. Rosenthal thought of his own days as a high school journalist and thought it a shame that printing costs were forcing reductions in printing schedules to the point that much of what made a newspaper a newspaper was being lost. A publication that comes out only a few times a semester may be many good things - a literary magazine, a poetry forum, a photography display case. But it is not a newspaper, which relies on frequent publication to be a NEWSpaper and on tight deadlines to create journalists. That seemed especially sad to Mr. Rosenthal because the digital revolution had made the transmission of information to a broad audience astonishingly cheap.

Mr. Rosenthal thought that The Times Foundation should be able to provide a little nudge. He got in touch with Stuyvesant High School, a public high school of 3,200 students in lower Manhattan, to see if it wanted to be Square One for an online high school paper project. Stuyvesant seemed to be a good choice for a number of reasons: While it is a math and science high school, it has a thriving print newspaper, scrappy and aggressive. Students attend Stuyvesant from all over the city, and they are hard-working and bright - admission is only through a rigorous test. Thus, the thinking went, Stuyvesant students could figure out how to create their own online paper and, along the way, figure out what the choices were for other student staffs with the same goal. Schools that might not have the resources to blaze their own trail could follow the map the Stuyvesant project produced.

A call to the paper's adviser, Doug Goetsch, produced a welcome bit of serendipity. Mr. Goetsch expressed interest in the project, then told Mr. Rosenthal about two journalists who had been volunteering at the paper for more than a year, helping out with workshops on journalism skills and ethics. Both had decades of experience in the news business, both were veteran teachers, both had a keen interest in new technologies and both had links to The New York Times. One of them, Steven Knowlton, teaches journalism and has worked on educational technology projects at Hofstra University, located just outside New York City; he also served on the College Advisory Board at The Times. The other, Karen Freeman, was even closer at hand - she is a former associate professor of journalism at Penn State who was then an editor in Circuits, the technology section at The Times. And both have written for The Times occasionally. That both were Stuyvesant parents added up to a measure of good luck not unlike finding a parking space in front of a popular Manhattan restaurant on a Saturday night.

The next task was to round up some of the liveliest minds on The Stuyvesant Spectator, the print paper, and give them four full weeks and a fall class to do research on the technology of online journalism and teach one another - as well as the authors - about what they found. Their story, as they found ways to add online publication to their student journalism program, is told in Chapter 1. Much of the technology information in Campus Weblines comes from the work of the summer online crew, the Stuyvesant 8, who went on to form the nucleus of The Spectator Online. You can learn more about each member of the team in the mini profiles that appear at the beginning of each chapter. The journalism instruction in Campus Weblines is much the same curriculum as what was taught to the Stuyvesant 8 and to the school's other journalists, online and off.

The authors are out to convince high school students, teachers and administrators that journalism is not only worth doing, but is also lots of fun. One school can dip a tentative toe into the world of Web technology while another jumps into it with a splash, but both schools can use online journalism to empower the students who do it and the ones who read it. But be warned: journalism is contagious. Working with Stuyvesant High School students to build the online edition of The Spectator, the authors of Campus Weblines asked the students why they joined the paper. Most said they had been looking for impressive-sounding extracurricular activities for their college applications, but they all said they had found much more than that. Several of the Stuyvesant students succumbed to the journalism bug during this project and are now planning to pursue journalism in college and beyond.

There are many cheap places on the Web that will host a high school paper. Some school districts may be able to offer a student newspaper at no charge as part of its Internet offerings, and www.myhighschooljournalism.org, a service of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, allows schools to publish online papers free, after an initial $25 registration fee. The iHigh.com site also offer free hosting for school papers but puts ads on some pages. A school that wanted a newspaper design that could not be accommodated by the ASNE or iHigh templates could turn to a commercial hosting service. Several commercial services will host your site free if they can put ads on it, or will host a site without ads for as little as $25 per year. This book tells you how to build your paper, how to find a hosting site appropriate for your needs and how to transport your paper to the site.

Campus Weblines is wide-ranging and tries to point readers toward more in-depth information in many areas. The aim of the book is not to make everyone an expert in every phase of the journalism business. But the book will tell students and teachers how to do journalism - how to report, how to write, how to edit - and how to handle enough technology to publish on the Web, even without much computer expertise or money. Like every Web book, Campus Weblines lets readers choose their own paths through the material, focusing on just the information they need, in the order they want it.

· Chapter 1, The Promise of Online Journalism
An introduction to the Campus Weblines project and the Stuyvesant 8, the original team at Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan who led their fellow newspaper staff members in the experiment that became the Spectator Online.

· Chapter 2, Online or Print, or Online and Print? 
Adding an online paper to a school journalism program that already has a print paper may not be easier than starting a brand-new program with online journalism. Here are suggestions for structuring a newspaper staff, and ways to integrate online journalism into English, social studies and science classes.

· Chapter 3, News Students Can Use 
Web papers can do all the things a traditional school paper can do, and much, much more. And that lets an online school paper open new lines of communication for the school community.

· Chapter 4, Clear Thinking, Clear Writing
How to report and write news, sports and feature articles and opinion pieces, and how to stay within the ethical boundaries established by responsible professionals.

· Chapter 5, Editing: Standards in Action 
After the articles are filed, then what? Here's how editors can work with reporters to make their articles even better, then write effective headlines. Editors also need to know about press law, including libel, privacy and censorship issues, and the legal status of student journalists.

· Chapter 6, Mirroring the World in Images
You might think that putting art into a Web paper requires an investment in digital photography. That's one way to do it, but not the only way.

· Chapter 7, The Techie Details
HTML and other details, for those who want to know - and shortcuts to avoid most of the tangles of the technology thicket, for those who don't. Sample budgets and options for Web hosting services make many of the choices clear. Here is also advice on finding volunteer help, and software (written for Stuyvesant by Carlo Yuvienco) for those schools that decide to take the boldest course and run their own Web servers.

· Chapter 8, News by the Screenful
Web newspapers have a lot of design characteristics in common. Here are elements of good design and suggestions for specific designs for section pages. For schools that want a leg up on design, the chapter concludes with HTML templates that can be copied and used with a minimum of technical expertise. The templates can be customized and made more elaborate as a school's staff gains experience and confidence.

· Links
One book cannot do it all, so here are places for students and educators to go for more information about high school journalism and Web-site building. And here are some links to online high school papers, a list the authors hope will grow as more schools learn to publish papers on the Web.

The Stuyvesant Spectator Experiment

The clock is rolling steadily toward 1:15 p.m. on a hot July day, but the Stuyvesant 8 are oblivious of the time. All eyes are locked onto computer monitors as the Stuyvies gaily and loudly fire away at one another in an online shoot-'em-up called Quake.

Blam, blam. "You're dead, Dimitri."

"Was that you, Mike?"

"Yeah. That was me with the Superblaster."

"Next time - Dimitri will get you." The voice is exaggerated and fierce, a parody of "The Terminator" that is greeted by a chorus of laughter.

"Never, Dimitri. You're too slow."

Blam, blam, blam. "I got you, Mike. You're dead."

"Where'd you come from, Ling?"

"I was hiding behind that wall. There."

Blam, blam. Fingers jab at arrow keys and hit keyboard trigger keys with staccato abandon. There is some more blam, blam and more sounds of delighted anguish as cartoon versions of the teenagers run around the computer screens until they are blown in half, reborn and re-armed, ready to resume the chase.

At 1:15, Steven Knowlton, who's been surveying the maelstrom, shoves two fingers in his mouth and whistles. "Quake break's over," he shouts above the din. In less than a minute, Quake is shut down on terminal after terminal and the eight students are back at their separate tasks. There is no whining, no "just another coupla minutes," no "puh-LEEZE." And no more blam, blam. At 12:15, when the lunch break began, eight students were plugging away on different projects. By 1:16, they are back in gear, their concentration abruptly shifted from hand-eye coordination and back to The Puzzle: How do we take The Spectator, Stuyvesant's venerable newspaper, onto the Web? And while we're doing it, how do we come up with a range of practical choices that will put online student journalism within the reach of high schools with vast differences in resources, both technical and financial?

Mike Kwon, he who slays and is slain with the Superblaster, is putting together a PowerPoint show on Web design. Just before lunch, he was new to PowerPoint and asked no one in particular how to make the elements of a slide show move around so items would arrive with a little pizzazz. Nobody gave him an answer, so Mike poked around a bit and now has type and graphics flying around his screen: the ESPN logo materializes, a headline swoops in low, the masthead of The San Francisco Examiner circles lazily, then comes to rest. He's working on a demonstration of effective online newspaper design.

While Mike was figuring out how to make ESPN logos materialize, Dimitri Keselman was working on one of the project's more enduring and vexing problems: Just what is the relationship between the online edition and the paper one?

Down the line, Robin Kachka, who stayed out of the Quake pit, preferring a round of World Cup Soccer - Robin against the world's best, a tolerable exaggeration of her own skills on a real soccer field - is designing a staff chart, imposing order upon the chaos that is the high school newspaper staff.

By the end of the day, Carlo Yuvienco, the computer wizard who serves as the sun for this workshop galaxy, has amassed a small mountain of files in various state of completion, and he needs to take them home to continue working on them. But there's a problem: Sheer volume makes e-mail transfers or copying to floppy disks impractical. Carlo ducks under the row of monitors to a computer's C.P.U., resting on the floor. Three minutes later, he's back up and slinging his bookbag over a shoulder - mission accomplished. The computer is still securely locked down, but its hard drive is now in Carlo's pocket, ready for another long night of programming. The next morning he reinstalls it and reboots, and all is well.

· · ·
Welcome to the fruits of Stuyvesant High School's workshop in online journalism. With long days and nights that frequently stretched past midnight and often past dawn, the student journalists at Stuyvesant have worked even harder than they played, figuring out the Web so high schools elsewhere don't have to. What they learned is in these pages. High school journalists who want to start Web papers of their own can follow the trail the Stuyvies blazed as closely as they wish. They may stay right in the Stuyvesant footprints by copying Spectator pages as templates for their own paper, or veering off the trail as they like, knowing they can get back on track whenever they like.

The students who did the research developed their own perspectives on online high school journalism, and they want to pass on the lessons they learned. That's why a profile of a member of the team is found with each chapter of this book.

The eight students included seven of the print paper's top editors, plus Carlo Yuvienco, who was brought in to be the technology leader. The eight students are all immigrants or the children of immigrants, and it is remarkable that eight students with roots in Asia, the Pacific Rim and the former Soviet Union would come together for this experiment in American journalism. One of the Stuyvesant 8, Eugene Oh, was born in Korea, and two others, Michael Kwon and Danny Lee, were born in New York of Korean parents. Ling Wu Kong was born in China. Carlo is a native New Yorker, but both of his parents were born in the Philippines. Robin Kachka was also born in New York; her parents are immigrants from Moldova, in the old Soviet Union. Ana Ivascu was born in Romania and immigrated at the age of 4. Dimitri Keselman was born in Ukraine and immigrated at the age of 12.

From the beginning, the authors considered it to be just as important for the students to learn good journalism as it was for them to become good at the technology, and they urge teachers considering online papers not to let the attention paid to the technology steal the spotlight from an emphasis on quality writing and editing. The 20 days of the summer workshop represented fully 42 weeks' worth of class time during the regular school year. And that estimate does not take into account the enormous value and efficiency gained from having the teaching and research time concentrated in blocks. Teachers and students in other high schools are unlikely to have the luxury of that much time, but the kinds of things studied in the summer workshop can be a good model for a journalism class.

Mornings were given over to journalism class - history lessons, ethics discussions and reporting and writing drills. Dr. Knowlton and Karen Freeman prepared writing exercises and put them on a Web site they had built for the class. Having a site like that let the students post their writing for all the students to discuss. At the beginning, the exercises were simple and straightforward - little more than the fact sheets that journalism teachers have been handing their students since the days of the purple dittograph. But with each passing exercise, the work got harder. The facts given for a news event became more difficult; how to handle the articles became less obvious. Along the way, there came hands-on confrontations with questions of fairness, of taste, of squeezing everything possible out of a story without yielding to sensationalism.

Then there was instruction in how to be a reporter. One handout, for example, dealt with a local bistro being shut down for violations of the city's sanitation code. Students had to navigate their way to the city's Health Department Web site, where restaurant violations are listed, then compare the information presented in the class handout with data posted on the site.

Part of each day was spent on technical lessons. Nearly a dozen computer professionals from New York and Long Island volunteered to help with various technical dimensions: teaching HTML, teaching site design, giving tips on making a database for archiving stories, and so on. What the volunteers shared is contained in Campus Weblines.

In deciding to support the Web paper, the school administration at Stuyvesant worked through some of the concerns that administrators elsewhere may have. Most of the worries center on the realization that once a paper is on the Web, it is potentially everywhere. With a pesky, irreverent print paper, student journalists may irritate and even offend others in the school, but the paper's reach is largely confined to the building. The chronic problems of students' reading in class and leaving newspaper trash in the halls pale into trivia when the imagination considers what could happen if young colt journalists pitch into cyberspace something that offends the Board of Education, a particularly touchy parent or the president of the teachers union.

It's not that the Stuyvesant principal, Stanley Teitel, and the English department chairman at the time, Steven Shapiro, didn't know what they might be getting into. Two years earlier, before Mr. Teitel took over, there had been such a ruckus over the high school paper, its staff and its sass that the principal shut down The Spectator for a few weeks. The trouble started when the paper had a smart, irreverent editor in chief for whom circumspection equaled timidity. He was said to have the newsrooms of New York stored as speed-dial numbers on his cellphone so when the paper was suspended, the New York press got a freedom-of-the-press case to write about. The ripples raised by the controversy took awhile to calm down. Things remained unsettled as a vacancy opened in the principal's office at the end of the 1998-99 school year.

But instead of keeping the paper closed or putting it under tighter restrictions, Stuyvesant chose to bet on better education. By asking professionals to help teach the students journalism ethics and practices, and having the students write their own manual for how The Spectator should operate, the school raised the quality of its student journalism. The manual, an extensive document that is well worth reading and emulating, is posted at The Spectator Online. The commitment of the school to student journalism continued when Mr. Teitel, a physics teacher, took over as principal.

Mr. Teitel thought the student paper was important to the school, and he was enthusiastic about the idea of a Web paper when the idea was broached by The New York Times Company Foundation in spring 2000. He wanted to make sure, however, that nothing would be posted on the Web site until Doug Goetsch, the paper's adviser at that time, had seen it. But even then, the focus was on education, not restraint. Mr. Goetsch is a staunch advocate of the First Amendment and viewed his role as that of a writing coach and educator.

The result of all this journalism education was a student newspaper staff that took itself and its responsibilities seriously. The student journalists took on tough issues: what to write when a student government official lost her office because of academic cheating, how to handle a controversy over financial management of the student store, what to include in an article about sexually explicit poetry that had been taken off display. But before the students published those articles, they fretted over questions of accuracy, fairness, balance and privacy. As editors batted around ideas for the articles, voices were raised in anger and indignation. The students learned to care deeply about what they were doing and to stand up for their convictions. That alone stands as a fine legacy of this project.

The eight Stuyvesant students who initiated this project, and their faculty adviser, have moved on since Campus Weblines was first published in 2001. Stuyvesant High School continues to produce high-quality journalism, both in The Spectator Online and the print Spectator. The members of the Weblines crew look back with pride on what they accomplished and hope that high schools will continue to turn to the project for the information they need to publish online newspapers.

The other goal of the Campus Weblines project was to use an online paper to knit the school together. It took the Spectator Online just a few months to carve out an identity separate from the print Spectator. One prejudice the online paper had to overcome was the widespread belief among the staff that the print version of The Spectator is the real paper. Student writers and editors like to have real paper in their hands, said Michael Kwon, the editor in chief during the Weblines project.

"Professional papers are primarily a public service, a way of getting information out," Mike said, "but at a school, people mostly join a newspaper not to help others or to spread information, but to have the unique experience of being on a newspaper. And the print paper is the manifestation of that experience, the physical record of their time on the paper. The print paper is something that stays, that lasts. You can put the big issues up on your wall."

When the print paper first becomes available in the school, he said, "You can stand by the rack, and every hand that goes by takes the paper - it's really an uplifting feeling." There is nothing quite comparable in the electronic world, not even a hit counter that tracks how many people visit a site. And for the student audience, the attraction of being able to read the paper clandestinely in class will keep the popularity of the print paper high, at least until wireless Internet access becomes ubiquitous in classrooms.

Robin Kachka, one of the two sports editors in 2001 (and by universal agreement, the hardest-working of all the editors handling online material), acknowledged the lure of the print paper but said there could be at least as much ego payoff from online journalism as from print. "I had all my sportswriters in the other day, showing them how to put their stories on the site," she said just before she graduated. "And I showed them about the search function, where they could see not only the most recent story they had written, but every story they've ever written. They all thought that was so cool. Wherever I am now, if there's Internet access, I can call up the online Spectator and show all the things we've ever done."

Mike Kwon said Spectator staff members had not realized from the beginning that some editors needed to focus only on the online paper. Trying to do justice to both is impossible for one person, he admitted. "The editor in chief is not able to do both and still stay sane," he said. To say nothing of doing well in all his courses, no trivial task at Stuyvesant.

The paper's managing editor in 2001, Ana Ivascu, agreed. "I think that the most important thing that we should have gotten initially and didn't is a separate Web editor to deal with the print editors - keep track of deadlines, edit copy, make sure that the content that goes into the Web paper is correct, and think of new features to make the site interesting."

Instead, there was just one person at first who handled only online copy: the Webmaster, Carlo Yuvienco, who built the site. That was a monumental task for one high school student, no matter how talented, because the Stuyvesant 8 decided from the beginning that they wanted their site on their own server, not on a server run by a hosting service. This is not the way most high schools should choose to put up online papers, but the Stuyvies thought they could handle the challenge. A business that ran its own site off its own server would have an information technology staff to handle the work and would be able to buy lots of off-the-shelf software and bring in consultants at $400 per hour. The Spectator Online, by contrast, had Carlo. He built the site largely with free or inexpensive software and lots of computer code that he wrote himself. Fortunately, Carlo got help and advice from Michael Zamansky, the Stuyvesant teacher who oversees much of the school's digital technology, and Stephen Kramer, the vice principal for technology.

But the primary responsibility was on one set of shoulders. "This was probably the most painful part of my experience with the Spectator," Carlo said in the explanation he wrote to accompany the software he has made available to other schools at the end of Chapter 7.

"Producing on the unforgettably dreadful deadline of the launch was quite the terrifying task. I remember staying up late nights before a deadline, given by Mr. Goetsch, would pass the next day. One important word of advice to Web architects and engineers out there: pace yourself and never lose sight of the big picture, especially when dealing with a very intricate site design." For several issues, Carlo did nearly all the updates and site maintenance by himself. Then Dr. Knowlton and Ms. Freeman ordered him to clone himself, both to share the work and to leave The Spectator Online with the institutional memory it needed after Carlo graduated. He recruited seven young programmers he called the Seven Dwarfs, and one of them, John Lee, succeeded Carlo as Webmaster. In trying to figure out how to configure the staff after The Spectator Online was born, the Stuyvesant students got themselves tangled into some knots. More than once, the technology staff uploaded an article only to hear wails of outrage from an editor: "But that story isn't the edited version! You posted the wrong file!" And when Robin tried to put an investigative article she had written about the shortage of athletic fields for Stuyvesant teams in the Web paper before it ran in the print paper, communications problems delayed its appearance online. So the article, which had a colorful graphic that was perfect for the Web, was published in print first, then online.

Eugene Oh, the only junior among the Stuyvesant 8 during the Weblines project, admitted that he and others had been blindsided by the amount of effort that went into the online edition. "Coming in, I thought, 'How hard could it be to make a Web site?' " he said. After all, several of the students already had their own Web sites. But the project turned out to be "a lot more than just throwing together a Web site," he added. Eugene took over the post of Web editor for the 2001-2002 school year and helped the online paper make the transition from a pilot project to an integral part of Stuyvesant life.

Going into that job, Eugene stressed that the online paper would have to compete with its print sibling. "We have to change the way we think about the online paper," Eugene said, "and how the students think about it. I want to make it that we're competing with the hard-copy paper. Our site will complement the regular paper, but we're going to try to upstage the paper sometimes, too."

Then the Sept. 11, 2001 attack happened just a few blocks from Stuyvesant, forcing the students out of their building for several weeks and making the school year much more stressful for students after they returned. The Spectator Online helped build community during that difficult time.

While students may be inclined to model a paper after a big-city daily, a high school paper almost always most closely resembles a small-town weekly. Its audience is made up of students, of course, but the paper is also read by faculty, administrators, parents and alumni. An online paper is an effective (and cheap) way for the school to stay in touch with parents and alumni, who learn about students' triumphs, big and small, and get a sense of perspective when complaints about the school crop up. A good online school paper can help knit the entire school community together.

Stuyvesant students will undoubtedly find even more ways to make The Spectator Online provide services to the school. It's hard to predict just what features may lay ahead because Web journalism is still very new - even professional journalists are still feeling their way as they find new ways to serve readers. That kind of floundering usually characterizes the introduction of a new technology. When telephones were new, they were used as both a one-way and two-way medium. News and entertainment programs were "broadcast" over the telephone to passive listeners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but people found fairly quickly that the phones worked much better for two-way communication. In much the same way, journalists started out thinking of Web journalism as a one-way medium, as just another way to put out the newspaper, and they have had to adjust to the idea of making the communication truly interactive.

Acknowledgements

Like all projects, this one involved many people. The Campus Weblines project took more than most because of the technical nature of the work. It also took the unflagging support of The New York Times Company Foundation and its president, Jack Rosenthal, who initiated the work. And there is one person who has put nearly as much work into this project as we have: Carlo Yuvienco, the Webmaster of The Spectator Online. He certainly put in many more all-nighters.

Many computer professionals in the New York City area graciously volunteered to help the Stuyvesant High School students with various aspects of Web design and site management. Most of these volunteers came from a nonprofit group called Mouse, an acronym for Making Opportunities for Upgrading Schools & Education. Our thanks to Mouse's executive director, Sarah Holloway, and program director, Melissa Gallander, and to the Mouse volunteers who helped us: Dan DeVlieger, a senior project manager at WiredVines, helped with Web site planning; Sarra Mossoff, vice president for production at SmallWorld.com, provided a valuable lesson in site design; Kristin Murphy, a field communications specialist at InterWorld Corporation, taught file management; and Ed Summers, an engineer at CheetahMail, taught HTML early in the workshop, then returned later to help with individual tutoring. (We list professional affiliations as they were at the time the assistance was given.)

Other high-tech professionals also pitched in. We thank Beth DeCarbo, director of database development at Newsday.com, who gave a valuable lesson and demonstration on the use of databases in setting up archival searching. Ed Bringas, the computer facilitator for the School of Communication at Hofstra University, taught the students how to edit photos and graphics with Photoshop. He also stayed in touch via e-mail with the students across the fall, answering questions as they arose.

Two visual artists from The New York Times gave valuable lessons: Rick Perry, a staff photographer, demonstrated digital photography. (He also let the students use his cameras to practice. The photograph of Steven Knowlton that appears in this book was taken by the students during that session. The photo of Karen Freeman was taken by Michel Marriott, a multitalented technology writer in the Circuits section of The Times.) Rodrigo Honeywell, an art director at The New York Times, spent two sessions with the students, first giving a lesson in Web design and then coming back to examine and critique the designs the students developed. Antoinette Melillo, a photo editor at The Times, arranged Mr. Perry's class as well as photography sessions by Ruby Washington and Earl Wilson. Most of the photographs in this book were taken by Ms. Washington. The photography for the cover of Campus Weblines is the work of Philip Greenberg.

Several people at New York Times Digital provided much appreciated advice and insight when the Stuyvies showed up for a visit in August 2000 (at lunchtime - thanks, too, for the pizza). At that session were Rich Meislin, editor in chief; Will Tacy, managing editor; Meredith Artley, associate editor; John Decker, media producer; Noreen Wu, director of software development; Patricia Byrne, advertising representative; and Rob Larson, information architect. The program was arranged and moderated by Alice Carter, project manager for education products at Times Digital. Ms. Carter also visited the school and provided advice on many occasions.

On the last day of the summer workshop, Mr. Rosenthal invited the whole Stuy crew to present its work at a wonderful luncheon in the Times's Publisher's Dining Room - truly a wonderful way to wrap up that phase of the project. Joining us for lunch were Randy Becker, program officer for The New York Times Company Foundation; Bernard Gwertzman, editor of The New York Times on the Web; Mr. Rosenthal; Clare Salvaggio, grants administrator for The New York Times Company Foundation; and Steven Shapiro, chairman of the English department at Stuyvesant High School. Their presence made the luncheon even more special.

Two members of the legal department of The New York Times Company also deserve our thanks. George Freeman, assistant general counsel, kindly reviewed the section on press law and had many useful suggestions (and encouragement). And Adam Liptak, senior counsel, helped us find information on the legal status of the student press when we were teaching the summer workshop.

We incurred another debt of gratitude to three professionals who graciously read over the technical chapters for accuracy and clarity: Mr. Bringas, of Hofstra University; Mr. Summers, of CheetahMail; and Brendan Freeman Knowlton, a senior technical architect at eForce.

The production process of Campus Weblines has depended on the cheerful help of Alison Zimbalist, the education editor at The New York Times Learning Network. The design of the site was created by Ron Louie of OptoDesign, who designed the pages beautifully and graciously accommodated changes on the fly. Ms. Salvaggio has ably handled production details for the Foundation. And Amy Heit, group director for creative services at The New York Times, and Bart Solenthaler made the Campus Weblines brochure very appealing.

We are grateful to many people at Stuyvesant High School for making the project possible - we could not have done it without their help and support. Among them are Stanley Teitel, the principal, who turned a computer laboratory over for our use in the summer and then created an online journalism class to keep the program going in the fall semester. Dr. Shapiro, the English department chairman, has been a longtime supporter of The Spectator and helped its move to the Web as well; Stephen Kramer, the assistant principal for technology services, provided valuable help on hardware and software issues. As the fall term started and The Spectator's dedicated server had to be installed, Michael Zamansky, the program coordinator for computer science at Stuyvesant High School, shepherded the work. And an enormous thank you goes to Doug Goetsch, the faculty adviser of The Spectator and The Spectator Online, who welcomed outsiders into his classroom - a gracious gesture - and who joined with his students in writing and editing drills.

Carlo Yuvienco got much help during the past year from his crew of techies, especially from John Lee, who is taking over as the new Webmaster. The other members of the Seven Dwarfs, as the technology team came to be known, are Peiran Guo, Mohammad Khan, Billy Li, Christopher Pak, Kevin Teoh and Vic Zhong. Ian Friedman, the Webmaster of the school's official site (www.stuy.edu), also gave advice and assistance, as did Spike Gronim and David Blackman. Another person who helped turn The Spectator Online from an idea into reality was Candace Nuzzo, who joined the Stuyvesant 8 in the online journalism class in fall 2000 and is the paper's new managing editor.

We have become very fond of all the members of the Stuyvesant 8: Ana Ivascu, Robin Kachka, Dimitri Keselman, Ling Wu Kong, Michael Kwon, Danny Lee, Eugene Oh and Carlo Yuvienco. We are sure that Eugene will do a good job as the new Web editor, and we wish the others well as they move on to colleges.

In a very important way, this project is our way of thanking all the faculty, staff and students of Stuyvesant High School for making it such a wonderful place. Stuyvesant has given our daughter, Cassidy Freeman Knowlton, a high school experience full of challenges and fun. We cannot imagine a more fruitful four years.

Thanks to all,

Steven Knowlton and Karen Freeman
March 15, 2001

An Update

Much has happened since Campus Weblines went online in spring 2001. The Spectator Online, the creation of the Stuyvesant 8, has a new look, the product of the creativity of the Stuyvesant students who succeeded the original group. Since digital newspapers are so easy to change, it is particularly easy for each new class to make its mark on the design.

The authors are pleased that many groups have found Campus Weblines helpful. With the invaluable assistance of Alison Zimbalist, the education editor at The New York Times Learning Network, they have made minor changes to the site to keep it fresh.

S.K. and K.F.
June 2003

PROFILE
MICHAEL KWON, 2001 EDITOR IN CHIEF

Michael Kwon, the editor in chief of the first Spectator Online (as well as the print Spectator in 2000-2001), is on a trajectory toward success that is fueled by culture as well as talent. The Queens-born son of high-achieving Korean parents, Mike grew up infused with the classic immigrant philosophy of America: Get a good education and you'll go far; get a better one and you'll go farther."I became a math person like all Korean-Americans," he said. "You go home from school, you do your regular homework, then you do extra math." Math is especially attractive to Asian immigrant parents, Mike said, because while the parents may have trouble with English and literature, math's global language lets them ride herd on their children.

Mike is now at Columbia University, where he decided to major in political science and philosophy. But as of spring 2003, he had not settled on a future course, saying he was debating a list of possible occupations that included, in order, "professor of philosophy, lawyer, businessman, general manager of the New York Mets, literary and art criticism."

Mike's style is to solicit opinions and build consensus, not to trample on other people's feelings to push his own ideas forward, so he proved to be a tactful leader in forging the path to an online paper for Stuyvesant. But when he became the paper's editor in chief in the second semester of the 1999-2000 school year, there wasn't a hint of an online paper in his future. When The New York Times Company Foundation broached the idea of a Web paper, though, Mike gladly took on that responsibility as well.

It was his mother who insisted that he join the newspaper staff, he said, "because it would be good for my future." But lo and behold, he loved it. He rose through the ranks, from staff writer to news editor and editorial board member, then became the hands-down choice to be editor in chief. Under his leadership, The Spectator took on major stories, earning respect from faculty and students.

Looking back on the online newspaper project, Mike said he liked to think that Campus Weblines was continuing to help student newspaper staffs. "I hope that it was as helpful to them as we all hoped it would be."

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