After a year filled with administrative turnover, campus protests, a presidential election and all the late nights involved in turning these events into news, The Daily Pennsylvanian's 120th Board of Editors and Managers finally gets a chance to get some sleep.
The board will officially hand over the newspaper's reins at its annual banquet tomorrow night at the Inn at Penn. A long-standing DP tradition, the banquet will honor the outgoing and incoming boards before about 250 guests, including, for the first time, University President Amy Gutmann.
Gutmann and incoming Executive Editor David Burrick will each address the crowd, and DP alumnus Richard Dunham, senior White House correspondent and national political reporter for BusinessWeek, will deliver the keynote address.
The DP's outgoing 120th Board covered Gutmann's election and inauguration, a Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania demonstration and the re-election of U.S. President George W. Bush. Its reporting over the past year earned the publication its fourth consecutive Pacemaker Award, also known as the Pulitzer Prize of collegiate journalism, placing the DP among the very best college newspapers in the country.
In addition to earning distinction for its reporting, the board redesigned its Web site, dailypennsylvanian.com, and added several new features for the benefit of its readers, most notably a comprehensive dining guide that includes a fully searchable database of more than 600 restaurants across Philadelphia.
Burrick, a College junior and native of Short Hills, N.J., plans to expand on this success during his tenure as executive editor, the organization's highest officer. Burrick previously served as the DP's senior sports editor.
"My goal is to continue the DP's tradition of excellence while also crafting new and innovative ways to make the paper more accessible and interesting to our readers," he said.
Burrick is excited about the new board. "I think it's a diverse group of opinions. We have several people in fraternities. We have people from all over the country. We have very conservative people and very liberal people. So it's a nice microcosm of the campus community."
Burrick also plans to make himself and the organization accessible to the campus community.
College junior and incoming Managing Editor Garrett Young will be responsible for overseeing all editorial operations of the DP and dailypennsylvanian.com. The former city news editor aims "to make the overall publication more accessible and readable." He plans to push reporters and editors to improve both the paper's writing and its presentation.
"We need to make it easier for a reader to get more information in less time," he said.
The DP's business departments will be led by Business Manager Steven Saviano. Saviano was formerly the paper's production manager and sat on its executive board.
Leadership of the paper's weekly arts and entertainment magazine, 34th Street, will fall on the shoulders of College junior Yona Silverman, who served as the magazine's managing editor on the 120th Board.
The remaining members of the Editorial Board include Jeff Shafer, Rachel Feintzeig, Cynthia Yeung, Evan Goldin, Josh Hirsch, Jeff Greenwald, Zachary Levine, Matt Conrad, Nathan Johnson, Ian Zuckerman, Fred David, Ryan Jones, Alex Bellos, Sandip Garg, Thomas Xu, Matt Jones, Kali Backer, Deborah Singer and Chris Bellis.
The remaining Business Board members are Shawn Safvi, Rachel Hayes, Anastasia Leng, Kimberly Hsu and Steve Doan.
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