Bwog attended the annual Blue Pencil Dinner in Low Rotunda last night to see how the other half lives. Our impression follows.

At 8:30 on Saturday night, the staff, alums, and distinguished guests of the Columbia Daily Spectator traipsed into Low Library in their finery for an evening of hobnobbing and a speech by Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post. A dinner (if networking can be called dining) preceded the event.

Editor-in-chief emeritus John Davisson C’08 began the evening with a speech about Spec in the last year, during which he referred to the newspaper’s critics and fans who have both lauded the paper and called its reporters “pedestrian hacks” and “accomplices to the destruction of mankind.”

But things seem to be looking up for the campus rag. In Spring of 2007, the Spec had 1.7 million page views and in the Fall of ’07 it had 7.96 million, which could be attributed to the website redesign or the presence of an Iranian dictator on campus soil– it’s a toss up. The paper’s circulation holds steady at 10,000 a day, and Spec has recently agreed to host Wiki CU after Bwog declined the offer.

Davisson celebrated the paper’s accomplishments: its coverage of Ahmadinejad’s visit, its new blog trio, and its weekly magazine The Eye, which he called “the edgiest magazine on campus.”

After a few more speeches and awards, it was finally time for Downie. The executive editor, who graduated from Ohio State University, has been head honcho of the WP for 17 years. Before that, he was a Deputy Metro Editor and helped oversee the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal. Last night, standing before the audience with a large statue of the Buddha’s head benevolently looking down on him, he looked and sounded like an editor from The Wire’s Baltimore Sun newsroom delivering a State of the Media address. A rarity among newsmen, he also didn’t instinctively cringe at the word “media” and used it liberally throughout the evening.

He sounded the call for public service and accountability reporting; he gave a long list of the WP‘s many successes in the last year (e.g. the Walter Reed Hospital story); he tactfully acknowledged that newsrooms are shrinking and journalism is becoming a harder, tougher, meaner business; and he concluded with an adage: “As they say in the sneaker ads: Just Do It.”

But for those who are doing it, or hope to do it, Downie’s insistence that newspapers and accountability journalism aren’t dying–“Our ambition is to do better with less,” he said–wasn’t fully convincing. During the Q&A, former Spec EIC Nick Summers, C’05, a writer for Newsweek, asked whether Downie wasn’t being a bit blithe, considering the Post is going through another round of early retirement offers (read: layoffs) next month. Collars got tight and necks reddened as Summers finished his question.