CENTENNIAL COMMEMORATIVE EDITION 1890 ..i. 'ii': ". 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 R: :'" :