Tuesday, August 27, 1968 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Tuesday, August 27, 1968 THE MICHiGAN DAILY The By LUCY KENNED Personnel Director Daily edit staffi It Y The dating, scribes Princeton guide to good Where the Girls Are, de- the University as a great Edit cutie Kokomo, Photo lads find fame, Walking down the street in Kokomo, Ind., at midnight you might wonder what you are doing there. But then you feel the cold metal of the ikon or Leica which adorns youf neck and you remem- ber that you are a "Daily Photog- rapher" covering the Indiana primary . It is at moments like these when you are questioning the existence of Nebraska that your mind wonders over your vast career as a "Daily Photographer." You started as a freshman when you saw an ad in The Daily that had a funny picture of a long haired guy holding a camera. The ad read: Daily Photograph- ers Wanted ... Bring your port- folio. This lured you into gather- ing all the snapshots of Christmas and Yosemite that you thought were only good for after dinner conversations. You are a little embarrassed that all the pictures in your port- folio have your little brother in them and they say "Eastman Kodacolor." But you know that you are no rank amateur and you boldly appear at the meeting. The first person you see is some- one else with a portfolio of 16x20 prints and four cameras hanging around his neck. You are instantly depressed but you suffer through the ridiculous affair Three days later, when you have, forgotten about the whole thing, the mustasched editor meets you on the street and tells you that your day is Saturday. Bright and early Saturday morning you come to The Daily on your bicycle and find the whole place abandoned. Two hours later, a day editor walks in and gives you your first assignment. You go at it like mad and shoot four rolls of film in 10 minutes. The next day you eagerly get the paper and see that technician has printed the worst one and your name is under it. But in a few weeks, you get better, and things aren't so bad. A year later you find yourself in Kokomo, rubbing elbows in the press car with photographers from Life and Black Star. When one asks you who you are shooting for, you say "Michigan Daily," and all those afternoons of pho- tographing people on the Diag and the joint-judiciary do not seem in vain. place to meet "any type of girl you can think of" and adds that The Daily is the place to look for "violent young politicos." Undoubtedly, if there are vio- lent young politicos anywhere on the staff, they will be found among our editorial staff cuties. It is also undoubtedly true that they can be found in greater pro- portion on The Daily than on the campus as a whole. I reseent, however, (as an edit staff cutie myself) the ivy league boys lumping the whole female half of The Daily editorial staff into this category. Disregarding peripheral responsibilities such as entertaining visitors from Prince- ton, the editorial staff of The Daily has one primary interest. Male and female, 40 of the form- er and 20 of the latter, the edi- torial staff of The Daily sees to it that 10,000 readable copies of The Michigan Daily roll off the presses at 420 Maynard six days a week. Bringing local, I student, and faculty readers news of what is happening today and what may happen tomorrow requires a tre- mendous variety of people willing to ~perform a great variety of jobs - to do a lot more than "violent young politicos.'' It requires, to turn out a Daily that lives up to staff standard: a solid, well written news sec- tion; a stimulating editorial page; and an array of features ranging from the punny to the poignant. All facets of the editorial side of the paper are supervised by eleven seniors whose selection by the outgoing senior editors must be approved through The Board in Control of Student Publica- tions; but who run the paper en- tirely free of University censor- ship. The Board in Control of Stu- dent Publications is a student- faculty-administrative bdy, that is answerable to the Regents for all student publications, the big- gest of which is The Daily. The Board owns the presses and Publications Building which The Daily uses. It is responsible for overseeing Daily business af- fairs, Several times in the past, The Board has attempted, to exercise some censorship by refusing to approve appointment of senior editors suggested by the graduat- ing staff because the new editors might be too controversial. Threats of a Daily staff strike, and pressure from powerful Daily friends and alumni all over the world combined to discourage such a move, It is very Important to The Daily, which has had 77 years of editorial freedom, that they can celebrate 100, 125 or 250 years of editorial freedom. One of the main reasons The Daily can re- main "a gem of the collegiate press" is its investigative report- ing and controversial edit page. This freedom to go out on limbs many local dailies could not af- ford to put their journalistic weight on is made Dossible by The Daily's financial situation. All operating costs and staff salaries are paid from revenue from local and national adver- tisements and subscriptions. The Daily has an annual budget of about $150,000 and does not re- ceive any money from the Uni- versity. There are certain problems all parts of the edit staff face in putting out a Daily that can live up to its national image. (The Daily has been continuously cited by the American Newspaper Build and the Overseas Press Club for its excellent news coverage ) Several problems center around personnel. Few people join the staff with any relevant experi- ence, and most stay on the staff only a few months. Surprisingly few of The Daily's staff members are journalism majors, though a great many former Daily staffers get so enthused that they remain in the publishing field after grad- uation. In an attempt to imbue the new staffers, whose interests range from Chinese history to honors On the job training chemistry, with some profession- al journalistic standards, The Daily maintains an on-the-job training program. Editorial staff trainees are shown the techniques of news and headline writing, proofreading, layout, the qualities of good news, editorial, and feature stories; and the organization of the paper in brief weekly training sessions conducted by the personnel direc- tor throughout the semester. , After a few weeks of' this "or- lentation" trainees are assigned stories and begin to work at the city desk where the next day's paper is put together. For pres- ervation of mental stabilityby all parties, trainees are not usually given crucial stories until they seem to have gained plenty of ease with the mechanics of news gathering and clear writing. t Between four in the afternqon and The Daily's 2 a.m. deadlihe, a ten to twelve page paper must be assembled: news must be as- signed a proper priority, pages must be attractively designed, and stories must be edited to read ac- curately and well. Organizing all of these operations from a semi- circle of desks called the city desk involves potential disaster. Chaos can only be avoided by appoint- ing someone lord and someone serf. As the newest staffers, trainees become the serfs - writing head- lines, reading proof, and running errands. If trainees can survive several months of being worked hard and barked at, they emerge into the sunlight as assistant day editors who, between the errands and the scolding, have picked up quite a bit of information about practical journalism. The Daily is hard work, espe- cially when you consider all of its staffers are full-time students, and we've never quite figured out how we get enough people to stay on the staff to put out a paper. Like lemmings, more than 100, staffers pour into the Publica- tions Building to work for four to 40 hours a week for very little or no pay. Apparently, some staffers are there because they love to write. Others want to create something meaningful. Some discover they can make friends easily at The Daily, and are reluctant to have merely the doubtful warmth of the quad to go to each day. Many develop the journalist's keen de- sire to know everything, and to uncover hidden truths. For most, The Daily becomes more than just a newspaper. It often becomes an institution; a home, or at least a place where you can find a fourth for bridge anytime of day or night. In addition to gathering and training new personnel, the en- tire staff faces problems of in- ternal coordination of 100 very individualistic people ready to go in all directions at once while maintaining proper contact with the University as a whole amidst all these "Daily bugs." These two problems are tackled by the editor and executive editor. Many story ideas come from The Daily's editor, the head of the organization. The editor's po- sition opens many doors for him throughout the University com- munity. The editor seeks to lead The Daily by helping to provide the staff with an overview of the Uni- versity and The Daily's tole in the University, He is The Daily's official liason with the commun- ity. He is the one who speaks to student groups to explain what The Daily is trying to accomplish, and why It is important to read The Daily and know what goes on on the campus. Intra-staff inconsistency is countered by the work of the ex- ecutive editor who sits between the editorial and managing desk and performs a corresponding co- ordinating role, working with one group one day and the other the next. Now that we have some people on the paper and we've given it some order, we must fill it with scintillating news copy. For this we turn to the managing desk. A managing editor and two news editors draw up each week an assignment sheet which tells reporters where to look for stories. The "M" desk gets a cer- tain amount of news feedback from beat heads. - experienced reporters assigned to watch for upcoming events in specific areas such as academic affairs or stu- dent activities. One of the M desk's chief sources of news is the national -I frkes and collegiate news services to which The Daily subscribes. The Daily is a member of the Associat- ed Press and fills each day several inside pages with national, in- ternational, and state news often supplemented with local com- ment. College news services, Col- legiate Press Service, and Libera- tion News Service, provide infor- mation pools for The Daily and other colleges as well as provid- ing The Daily with feature and editorial stories important to stu- dents such as interviews with General Hershey, director of the Selective Service System. Locally generated news has proved in recent years to be The Daily's most interesting. The key to The Daily's excellent investiga- tive reporting is alertness. 'Some- times The Daily learns of impor- tant news through contacts but often local irregularities such as the building code violations of some local realtors can be found merely by listening carefully to students complaints or getting to know a VIP's secretary well. In addition to gathering news, M desk must superv se the work of the understaff (ssistant day editors, day editors, assistant night editors, and night editors) in evaluating the news for each days' paper and putting It together co- herently. Night editors, under supervisiion of M desk are responsible for the next days paper with other under- staffers having more limited re- sponsibilities. The night editor's work is such that a lot of hair-pulling and arm twisting is at times required, so the post is generally reserved for juniors. There are the nights that night editors remember like the mnore .1 night no reporters brought in sto- ries for editing until 12 (the paper must be finished in every detail by 2 AM) or the time a night editor waited till four for the election returns than got the wrong figures, or the time a night editor was tapped for an honor- ary and had to come back and finish 'putting out the paper cov- ered with brickdust and little else. Also within the bounds of the desk are the feature editor and personnel director. The personel director is re- sponsible for recruiting and train- ing new staffers in addition to taking care of a lot of undefined areas such as the special edition you are currently reading. Features are solicited and edited by the feature editor who also is in charge of arts coverage in Ann Arbor and putting out the only college book page. Longer features find their way into the Daily's monthly tabloid magazine. An editor and associate magazine editor supervise the magazine as a fairly independent part of the regular newspaper. Articles range from special inter- views with leading figures, such as former Secretary of Defense Robr ert McNamara, to a discussion of the chances of the Wolverine sports team. Opinion and predictions based on local, national, and interna- tional news in the paper are su- pervised by the editorial directors --editorial director and two as- sociates. The left side of the editorial page is set in extra large type to set off the straight opinions given there. All editorials must be in- dividually signed and validated except for extremely critical areas the seniors choose, to give an opinion as a whole on. Left side editorials are edited only for clarity and soundness of argument-all opinions are those of the individual writers. The editorial page also includes the many letters inspired by our editorial opinions and long-range predictions or analyses. National columnists such as Walter Lippmann and well- known cartoonists such as Jules Feiffer are also included on the edit page. All staffers become mysterious- ly well-rounded after a few years on The Daily - perhaps because they are encouraged to cover sev- eral different areas as reporters. The , resultant news - editorial - feature writer The Daily turns out is a powerful and interesting per- son to know-in addition to being a "violent young politico." 77 years of editorial freedom I U I A M 0 N D R I N( $ ' eWe er 1 113 South tniversity Ann Arbor; Michigan Editor Mark Levin ______-- S ..:. ..,« ... .... ......... ........ " v - ..1 ..... ,.. .. . .4 YY'r ,.. 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