The Daily Campus - Commentary

Commentary

The Commentary section, which features columnists as well as the Letters to the Editor, is the home of the very popular Instant Daily, one of the more revolutionary pieces of interaction in all of print media where readers, usually students, interact with the department by AOL Instant Messenger. The Commentary section is always located on page 4 of the first section of the paper. While it is only one page long most days, it sometimes takes up two pages depending on the amount of content.

Commentary features a selection of weekly columnists, usually three, who have written for the paper for a few years. Each weekly columnist writes one featured column a week. The Commentary Editor and Associate Editor typically write a featured column weekly as well, meaning there is one featured column on each weekday. Also published in the section are columns by staff columnists, who write on a semi-regular basis. All manner of topics are discussed in Commentary, both local and national.

Commentary also publishes a short daily editorial that is considered the official opinion of The Daily Campus. It has been featured on the left side of page 4 in recent years. The Daily Campus editorial board, composed of the Commentary editors, weekly columnists and Editor-in-Chief, meet weekly in order to determine the editorials for the coming week. A disclaimer was added below the editorial in 2003 following an incident in which 9,000 copies of the paper were stolen after a controversial column was published in Commentary (see Controversies below). The disclaimer states that only the editorial is the official opinion of the paper, while the columns are the opinions of the columnist and columnist alone.

The Commentary Section also has additional features:

Instant Daily was started in 2003 by then Commentary Editor Dan Maxwell. Instant Daily receives hundreds of instant messages per day with a select few (about a half-dozen) being chosen for publication by the editors. Most submissions are comical observations of campus life, though tributes (such as ones following the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting), remembrances (often following student deaths) and topical issues are also discussed. Instant Daily has received criticism for being an anonymous forum where students can make hurtful comments without fear of repercussions.

Husky Talk is a sidebar which features a question that is answered by a handful of students on campus. The respondents' pictures are taken and published next to their answers. Questions run the gamut from serious to sarcastic to relatively inane, and the answers run the same spectrum.

Other features include a Quick Wit (a humorous quote-of-the-day) and an editorial cartoon. Various features including a This Day in History element were once included in Commentary but have either been moved to other parts of the paper or removed altogether.