CENTENNIAL
COMMEMORATIVE
EDITION
1890
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ILI
l"
19:90
1990
Vol. Cl, No. 33
Ann Arbor, Michigan -Friday, October 19, 1990
Daily got'
scoop on
salk's
vaccine
by Amanda Neuman
"Extra! Extra! Salk Polio Vaccine
Effective"
This Daily headline proclaimed
one of the most important national
news stories of the 1950s and The
Michigan Daily was the first news-
paper in the country to cover it.
Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr. an-
nounced on April 12, 1955, at Hill
Auditorium that the Salk polio vac-
cine was effective.
Former Daily staffer Lee Marks
was the zealous reporter who was
first to get the scoop.
"It absolutely blew everybody's
mind," Marks said of the reaction to
the Daily's instant coverage. The
professional press was "full of con-
gratulations and thought it was a
great tour de force," he added.
Marks recalled that months before
the medical breakthrough, he had
been making plans to prepare for the
coverage of the announcement.
See SALK, Page 5
Celebrate
100
years
of
the
Daily
Alumni, staffers, public to
gather for weekend events
Where it all gets done
The Student Publications Building at 420 Maynard Street houses the Daily, the MichiganEnsian, and the
Gargoyle.
As # -
Free-drop saved paper
by Amy Quick
The best things in life h
always been free.
For 96 years, student
scribed to - and paid for-
Michigan Daily. Until 19
six-day, Tuesday-through-S
paper subscriptions weres
students while they stood
for hours attempting to re
Of course, that was also bei
advent of CRISP.
But in 1985, the Daily
ened its publishing week fi
days to five and was avail
campus newspaper stands a
dence halls Monday throu
day - free.
The Board for Student Pi
tions approved the contro
change unanimously in Jul)
despite strong opposition fr
editorial staff.
Years of dwindling rea
and deficits had promptedt
cussions which led to the ch
In the years 1975 to 19
culation dropped from af
from ruin
mately 10,000 subscriptions a
year to under 3,000, said former
haven't Daily News Editor Tom Miller.
The decrease in readership resulted
s sub- in fewer advertisement sales,
- The which in turn led to a deficit.
85, the The losses continued to mount
aturday despite an increase in the price of a
sold to Daily from 10 cents to 15 cents in
in line 1984.
egister. Eventually, the Daily's annual
fore the $70,000 deficits began to cut into
the endowment, a fund set aside
short- for major expenses.
rom six "(Staffers) were scared the
able in Daily wouldn't even make it to
nd resi- the centennial," former Daily
gh Fri- Opinion Editor Peter Mooney
said.
'ublica- The idea to go to free drop and
versial shorten the publishing week was
y 1985, introduced early in 1985. The
rom the Daily business staff and Student
Publications Manager Nancy Mc-
dership Glothlin supported the idea, argu-
the dis- ing that a shorter publishing week
hange. was necessary to start bringing
85, cir- profits to the paper. They also
pproxi- See FREE, Page 5
by Annabel Vered
Never let it be said the Daily
can't throw a good party.
Good food, good talk and good
company will abound this weekend
when more than 500 Michigan Daily
alumni gather in Ann Arbor to cele-
brate the paper's 100th birthday.
The celebration will include two
panel discussions, the official formu-
lation of the Michigan Daily
Alumni Club, a banquet and other
social events.
"The first event is a panel discus-
sion on preserving editorial freedom
for the next one hundred years," said
Elisa Frye, publicity chair of the
Michigan Daily Centennial Celebra-
tion Steering Committee.
The panel discussion will be
moderated by Dan Biddle, a Pulitzer
Prize winner from the Philadelphia
Inquirer. Panel members include
Leon Jaroff, managing editor of
Time magazine; Rebecca Blumen-
stein, reporter for the Tampa Tri-
bune; and Roger Rapoport, reporter
for the Oakland Press. The discus-
sion is scheduled for Friday at 1:30
p.m. in Rackham Auditorium.
"At around 3 p.m. there's going
to be an open meeting to formally
form the Michigan Daily Alumni
Club," Frye said. "Richard Campbell
is really the force behind it. He basi-
cally got in touch with a lot of
alumns from all different eras and
pulled a bunch of people together
with different areas of expertise."
Campbell worked for the Daily
from 1981 to 1983, during which
time he served as an editor for the
Arts and Weekend sections.
Following a dinner banquet at 6
p.m. in the Michigan League, a
keynote address will be given by
Ann Marie Lipinski, a Chicago
Tribune reporter and Pulitzer Prize
winner. Lipinski will talk about
what it was like to work for the
Daily and "what the Daily meant to
me."
In her speech, Lipinski said she
will quote from old memos and let-
ters by former Daily staff members
which she has gathered.
"I found memos outgoing editors
wrote to their successors. They are
pretty incredible I think," Lipinski
said. The memos include "personal
comments on what' it (the Daily)
meant to them, in terms of profes-
sional development and what it took
out of them."
"It's really a warm sense you get
about the institution," Lipinski con-
tinued. "The Daily was really about
more than journalism; it was a fam-
ily with the wonderful and terrible
things that families bring with
them."
For a complete listing of
colloquia activities, plase see
page 12
There will be a second panel dis-
cussion titled "Journalists and their
Sources: Who's Using Whom?" on
Saturday at 9:30 a.m. in Auditorium
A of Angell Hall. "It's a discussion
of ethics," Frye said.
The moderator will be Walter
Shapiro, senior writer at Time mag-
azine. Panelists include Paul Green-
berg, senior executive producer'at
NBC; Betsy Carter, editor-in-chief of
New York Woman magazine; Beth
Nissen, a correspondent for ABC
News; Jonathan Miller, director of
public affairs for Sky Television in
England and former media editor for
the Sunday Times of London.
"The number of panelists we've
been able to get and their positions
speak well of the Michigan Daily,
and the important role it played dur-
ing their early years," Frye said.
The panel discussions are free and
open to the public.
The Daily's move from charging 15 cents per copy to a free-drop system
meant more than a threefold increase in circulation.
MWI-
Latin class, rugby team
subjects of 1st 1890 paper
by Ian Hoffman cided that the University needed a the paper as "the lowest-mriced dail
IV
Something Latin, something
blue, something scientific and some-
thing new.
That's how the the first issue of
the U. of M. Daily might have
looked to an Ann Arbor student on
Sept. 29, 1890.
The front page of the Daily fea-
tured an announcement about Latin,
Course I; a feature story about the
rugby team; and an invitation from
Prof. V. M. Spaulding to discuss
that term's Biology classes.
Published by the U. of M. Inde-
pendent Association, the newest
campus paper evolved when, "In the
spring of 1890 a number of us de-
real journal," wrote two of the pa-
per's first staffers - Justice Henry
Butzel, an 1892 law school graduate
and Harry Jewell, who graduated in
1891 - in the Daily's 50th anniver-
sary edition.
The four-page paper had competi-
tion from only two fraternity
newsletters, Alpha Delta Phi's The
Chronicle and Beta Theat Pi's The
Argonaut.
"Neither (paper) was representa-
tive of the entire University," Butzel
and Jewell wrote.
So the U. of M. Daily was born.
An introductory statement below
the staff box on page two proclaimed
paper in America." The note went on
to say that the editors intended "to
make the Daily so bright and newsy,
so wide awake and progressive and
vital and so important that no one
can get along without it."
Much smaller than today's 13.5
by 22 inch spread, the Daily, for its
first ten years, was printed on a sin-
gle sheet of paper folded in half to
yield four 11 by 14 inch pages with
four columns across.
In order to make the paper afford-
able to everyone, the Daily main-
tained a newsstand price of only 3
cents throughout its first decade,
See 1ST DECADE, Page 8
MICHIGANENSIAN
. Photo of the Daily staff circa 1900. Reporters no longer wear coats and ties in the office.
*afrthe Daily.> ......
This Centennial- Edition is an attempt, in
Q ' so me ml wy ocommemt+rrorate .the work
One hundred years. and dedicationt of 'cenitury of writers.t Is an
For one hundred years the Michigan Daily attempt to give a feling of the og~roe
has been a* highly visible and integral part of history+ of the Daily and the resiliency that has
'4ha t Ir~ sr+r l hi~, ,..4 t r,kn *tsu4 thP' 1n vthrrCiImn ::: rwrt+_ e'inS.,
'89 staff was divided by issues
of politics, journalistic ethics
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