{"id":28565,"date":"2015-02-12T20:47:50","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T01:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wendybrandes.com\/blog\/?p=28565"},"modified":"2015-02-12T23:22:25","modified_gmt":"2015-02-13T04:22:25","slug":"what-wendy-wore-ben-and-beau-at-columbia-spectator-dinner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wendybrandes.com\/blog\/2015\/02\/what-wendy-wore-ben-and-beau-at-columbia-spectator-dinner\/","title":{"rendered":"What Wendy Wore: Ben and Beau at Columbia Spectator Dinner"},"content":{"rendered":"

My six-year term as chairman<\/a> of the Columbia Daily Spectator<\/a>‘s board of alumni trustees came to a merry end on January 30. That’s when the news organization for Columbia University’s undergraduates held its annual fundraising dinner, which this year featured guest speakers Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, and Beau Willimon, showrunner\/writer of House of Cards<\/em>. At a board meeting before the dinner at the New York Athletic Club, I passed the baton to Stuart Karle, the new chair, and Beth Knobel, the new vice chair.<\/p>\n

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I’m staying on the board, which I joined in 2002. I became chairman in 2008, succeeding television-news executive Dick Wald, who had served as chair for 40 years. As I’ve said before<\/a>, I had no interest in challenging Dick’s longevity in the role, which is why one of the first things I did as his successor was call for a trustee vote on term limits for the chair. But that wasn’t just because I didn’t want to be booked through 2048. An organization benefits from fresh perspectives. Stuart is general counsel for North Base Media<\/a>. Before that he was the chief operating officer of Reuters and general counsel for the Wall Street Journal. Beth is a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. Before joining Fordham, she spent more than 20 years as a journalist, including seven years as Moscow bureau chief for CBS News.\u00a0 Their experiences are much different from mine<\/a>, so I’m excited to see what they will do.<\/p>\n

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I had some wild times during my term as chairman, starting with the financial crash of 2008 and ending with the Spec’s decision, last spring, to become the first Ivy League news organization to drop daily print publication in favor of a mostly online model. (Oh, the uproar over the latter provided quite a number of amusing moments<\/a>.) In between, we funded and completed the massive task of digitizing Spec’s archives going back to 1877; revamped the fundraising dinner so that it raised funds instead of losing them; and diversified the board of trustees. It can be a challenge to do things differently at a venerable organization and resistance to change often involved the word “tradition.” I decided to say a few words about tradition in the short speech I gave at the beginning of the dinner.<\/p>\n