By JENNIFER CALFAS

Editor in Chief

Ann Marie Lipinski’s name 

doesn’t just grace the wall — it 
illuminates it.

Her name, sitting alongside 

seven others, hangs on the wall at 
the entrance of the Daily’s news-
room — noting her Pulitzer Prize 
from 1987 that she received for 
her work as editor of the Chicago 
Tribune — where she was the first 
female editor.

But her legacy goes beyond just 

that. As a co-editor of The Michi-
gan Daily in 1977, she led a team 
of intrepid reporters. After her 
tenure at the Tribune, she became 
the curator of Harvard Universi-
ty’s prestigious Nieman Founda-
tion for Journalism — becoming 
the first woman to do so.

Changing history is a trend for 

Lipinski, it seems. But she doesn’t 
let her game-changing tendencies 
halt her from giving back to the 
place that gave so much to her: 
The Michigan Daily.

For me, as another female edi-

tor in chief of the Daily, her legacy 
has had a powerful impact on me. 
Her story and drive are inspiring 
for not just women, but all Daily 
alumni. In honor of our 125th 
anniversary, I was lucky enough 

to talk with Lipinski about all 
things journalism, Daily and 
beyond.

LIPINSKI: The Daily has a big 

birthday coming up and you’re 
about to be overrun with a lot of 
nostalgic alumni. I’ve thought so 
often about the deep impact that 
place had on me, how virtually 
all of my journalistic values were 
shaped by something that hap-
pened to me there. What do you 
think accounts for the power of 
the experience?

CALFAS: There’s something 

powerful about the experience of 
working at the Daily that seems 
to be so difficult to describe. I’ve 
met so many alumni who have 
all told me working at the Daily 
was the best decision they ever 
made. But I think the reasoning 
behind this can be best summed 
up in the words of another editor 
I’ve worked alongside with over 
the past few years: the Daily is 
addictive. Once you walk through 
the doors of 420 Maynard, you 
become enthralled by what this 
place has to offer. You become 
a different person — one who 
chooses to spend 50 hours (or 
even more...) a week inside this 
building, instead of going to class 
or partying each weekend with 
friends. This addiction may come 

from the fact that everyone in the 
newsroom shares it; everyone 
shares the drive to produce work 
that serves an important purpose 
and informs our community in 
a way that nothing else can. But 
perhaps I can’t fully understand 
the full power and impact of the 
Daily until I leave in just a few 
months. For you, how did your 
experiences at the Daily help lead 
you to so many successes?

LIPINSKI: The Daily made 

us apprentices of the adult world. 
That responsibility is a great gift 
and had a very powerful impact 
on me. In my first weeks as co-
editor in chief, I recall a long Sat-
urday in the newsroom debating 
not whether our editorial would 
stand for or against the execution 
of the infamous Gary Gilmore, 
but whether our opposition to the 
death penalty should run on the 
editorial page or boldly plastered 
across Page 1 — as if the governor 
of Utah or a justice of the Supreme 
Court would be any more likely 
to see it there. … Two decades 
later, while editor of the Chicago 
Tribune, I oversaw a multi-year 
examination of criminal justice 
issues, including an investigation 
of every Illinois death row case. 
We uncovered so many wrongs 
and irregularities that the gover-

nor of Illinois — who did read the 
Tribune — declared a moratorium 
on executions and then a dra-
matic decision to shut down death 
row. Our editorials about this won 
a Pulitzer Prize. It’s not a stretch 
for me to look at that work and 
see the shadow of college news-
paper editors who lacked the full 
skill and influence to dismantle 
the nation’s capital punishment 
apparatus, but who were learn-
ing and honoring the promise of 
journalism, even if only in a dress 
rehearsal.

CALFAS: The amount of time 

I’ve spent examining potential 
legal issues, holding a debate over 
whether or not we should pursue a 
story, or carefully editing a 3,000-
word investigative story line by 
line for 16 hours in the newsroom 
on Tuesday is much larger than I 
ever imagined. What’s interest-
ing is that while we certainly do 
feel working at the Daily seems 
like a dress rehearsal, we’ve real-
ized that what we do can have 
the same impact on people the 
way stories from a professional 
news source can. Several Univer-
sity policies have changed due to 
investigations and stories from 
the Daily during my three years 
here so far. Perhaps because we 
can have a broader audience now 

because of the Internet and social 
media. I wonder: What would 
have been different about your 
time at the Daily if stories could 
be easily published for a global 
audience then as they can be now?

LIPINSKI: 
I’m 
guessing 

everything 
except 
our 
jour-

nalistic values and the insane 
workdays, while maintaining, I 
suspect, a predominant focus on 
University news. I envy you hav-
ing the tools you have now. I know 
the Daily faces the same business 
model challenges vexing all leg-
acy print publications, and those 
are serious. I didn’t file my stories 

on a computer until I went off to 
intern at the Miami Herald the 
summer following my junior year, 
and I returned to the Daily, where 
we still wrote on typewriters and 
were just making the transition 
from hot to cold type. (A prized 
possession: the lead Daily logo we 
used to print the last hot type edi-
tion.) But you have a core audience 
on campus that can adapt to new 
technologies and a staff of digital 
natives who are fluent in the new 
media forms. Will there be a print 
paper at the next reunion? How 
does the Daily exploit all of the 

Sept. 11, 2001

Student writers 
arrested while 

trying to interview 

Castro in Cuba

By WILL GREENBERG

Daily News Editor

A college newspaper is sup-

posed to be a place where young 
journalists take risks and learn 
through their successes and fail-
ures. At The Michigan Daily, 
plenty of writers have taken huge 
swings and had major success, 
including covering the desegre-
gation of schools in Little Rock, 
Ark. and interviewing Mahatma 
Gandhi.

But for Bart Huthwaite and 

Jim 
Elsman, 
their 
reporting 

adventure would land them in jail 
— in Cuba — for trying to inter-
view Fidel Castro.

The two were students at the 

University and reporters at the 
Daily in the late 1950s. While on 
campus, Huthwaite said they met 
a couple of Cuban students on 
campus who knew Castro, who at 
the time was hiding in the moun-
tains, on the cusp of taking power 
from Fulgencio Batista.

Huthwaite and Elsman’s trip 

was just one assignment from a 
noteworthy list of Daily off-cam-
pus reporting trips. While the 
Daily’s audience is mostly Uni-
versity students, the news section 
has often looked for opportunities 
to do first-hand reporting on his-
toric national and international 
news.

Over the years, Daily reporters 

have been on the scene for events 
across the state of Michigan, 
covering the governor, reporting 
from the Supreme Court in Wash-
ington, D.C. — wherever there’s 
an opportunity to write about 
something meaningful to stu-

dents without blowing the travel 
budget.

For Huthwaite, getting an 

interview with Castro — who was 
popular among students — would 
offer first-hand perspective for 
people back home.

“I figured well heck, it’d be 

great to interview him in the 
mountains and see what he’s all 
about,” he said in an interview 
with the Daily.

Huthwaite, 
who 
graduated 

from the University in 1960 and 
worked for the Daily’s news sec-
tion, started out as a night report-
er watching the police blotter. No 
longer in journalism, Huthwaite 
now lives on Mackinac Island.

As a student, Huthwaite said 

he usually travelled to Florida for 
spring break, and said a trip to 
Cuba by way of Florida wouldn’t 
be too difficult. So, with a con-
tact set up who would bring him 
to Castro, Huthwaite set out with 
Elsman to Cuba for his junior year 
Spring Break.

But Huthwaite and Elsman 

weren’t able to complete their 
assignment — they were arrested 
soon after arriving at their hotel 
in Santiago de Cuba.

“Unfortunately word got out 

(that we were there) and so Batis-
ta sent his boys over to pound 
on our door in the middle of the 
night, put us in a Jeep and take us 
up to (Moncada) barracks,” Huth-
waite said, adding that the prison 
they were held in also held rebels 
against the Cuban government, 
some of whom were executed 
while Huthwaite and Elsman 
were there.

“There was gunshots going off 

and such,” he said.

The pair would spend several 

days in the jail until a New York 
Times reporter, who was also in 
Cuba to interview Castro, secured 
their release through the U.S. 
Embassy.

When students returned to 

school after the break, the front 
page of the Daily read: “Two 
Daily Reporters Jailed in Strife-
Torn Cuba.”

“Finally after 12 hours in the 

90-degree heat of the cell, we 
started to sing the ‘Star Spangled 
Banner.’ A machinegun-bearing 
guard ordered us to be quiet or he 
would ‘separate us,’ ” the article 
read, giving a first-hand account 
of their experience.

“It’s one of the primary things 

in my youth because the people 
who were there, whether it was a 
guy like Tom Hayden or any other 
guy, it was always a wonderful 
place of free-thinking,” he said.

“Our job was always to find, 

cultivate your own stories.”

In more recent years, Daily 

news reporters have taken trips to 
cover political events — and have 
had much better luck staying out 
of Cuban jails.

Bethany Biron, who was the 

Daily’s managing news editor 
in 2012, said she tried to give 
as many people as possible the 
chance to cover major off-cam-
pus events. While running the 
section, Daily reporters were on 
the scene at the Iowa Caucuses, 
President Obama’s second victory 
watch party and other political 
events around Michigan.

While 
Biron 
acknowledged 

that stories written remotely are 
often still well reported, she said 
it adds to the Daily’s credibility 
and quality when reporters are 
actually on the scene.

“Being there at the event kind 

of gives these events more color 
and more of a true taste of what’s 
going on,” she said. “When you’re 
actually there, there’s just a larger 
level of detail that you can include 
that really brings the reader in in 
a different way.”

Rayza Goldsmith, a Senior 

News Editor at the Daily in 2012, 
was part of the team that covered 

Free-drop, focus 
on online coverage 
mark moments of 

Daily change 

By SAM GRINGLAS

Managing News Editor

There was a joke staffers at 

The Michigan Daily told often 
in the 1980s.

How many Daily editors does 

it take to change a lightbulb?

“The answer was three,” said 

Joe Kraus, the opinion page edi-
tor in 1985. “Two to change it, 
and one to talk about how great 
the old one was.”

On the surface, the joke seems 

silly. (Kraus says lightbulb jokes 
were pretty popular back then.) 
But in many ways, the dig encap-
sulates a dynamic every genera-
tion of Daily editors consider.

The Daily not only must 

adapt in a field that’s changing 
at an incredibly rapid pace, but 
also must do it with 125 years 
of sepia-colored bound volumes 
staring down from the confer-
ence room shelves. That chal-
lenge is as relevant today as it 
was in 1985, when Daily edi-
tors voted to stop charging for 
the paper, or in the mid-1990s, 
when the Daily’s website carried 
breaking coverage for the first 
time.

Ann Marie Lipinski, a former 

Daily co-editor in chief who 
now curates Harvard Univer-
sity’s Nieman Foundation for 
Journalism, said most college 
newsrooms are too conservative 
when it comes to change, and 
that was likely true during her 
time as editor.

“I love Daily history, but 

we’ve sometimes been slaves 
to it, worrying too much about 
what predecessors will think,” 

she wrote in an e-mail.

When Lipinski and Jim Tobin 

became co-editors in chief, they 
sent a letter to recent editors. 
Cheryl Pilate, co-editor in chief 
of the paper two years before, 
responded with the following 
advice:

“You’re only editor of The 

Daily for one short year. So don’t 
waste your time shilly-shallying 
around and muttering about tra-
dition. Try any creative thing 
that pops into your head. In most 
cases, the only thing you can 
really ruin is one day’s paper.”

Neil Chase, a digital media 

consultant and chair of the 
Board of Student Publications 
who was the Daily’s editor in 
chief in 1985, said change is 
often the product of tough con-
versations.

That was the case in the win-

ter of 1985, when the Daily’s edi-
tors voted to initiate free-drop, 
or offering the paper at no cost 
from pick-up locations across 
campus. Until then, a Daily staff-
er would canvas the dorms the 
first week of classes, hawking 
subscription cards. Early every 
morning, local seventh graders 
picked up the papers and deliv-
ered them all over town with 
Michigan Daily bags slung over 

their shoulders.

The move was controversial, 

and Chase recalls that the final 
meeting on the topic elicited the 
kind of intensity characteristic 
of an all-staff election.

“You’re thinking, ‘I’m going 

to create this thing and you’re 
going to throw it in a pile, and 
somebody’s going to pick it up 
and read it and throw it back 
down, or they’re going to be 
blowing all over campus.’ It just 
felt like it’s cheapening the prod-
uct,” Chase said. “We thought 
we were creating something 
valuable, and we’re being told 
the new cover price for this 
product is now zero.”

But circulation was down, 

and free-drop would allow the 
paper to attract more advertis-
ing dollars. At this time, the 
Daily also began printing five 
days per week, instead of the 
traditional six.

“It’s exactly the situation that 

we’re in today,” Chase said. “The 
paper is doing well, it is not on the 
brink of any kind of disaster by any 
means, but revenue is way down.”

In early 2015, members of 

the Daily’s Management Desk 
adopted an innovation report, 
which detailed these shifts and 

Reporters file from 
the scene of the story

Daily editors juggle 
tradition, innovation

A conversation with Ann Marie Lipinski

COURTESY OF STEVE KAGAN

Michigan Daily co-editors James Tobin and Ann Marie Lipinski watch the 
printing of the last hot type edition of the paper in the fall of 1977. 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Tuesday, September 29, 2015 — 3A
One Hundred Twenty-Fifth Anniversary

See SCENE, Page 9A

See INNOVATION, Page 9A

See LIPINSKI, Page 9A

March 24, 1965 
Faculty hold first 
“teach-in” during 

Vietnam War.

Feb. 10, 2005 

Pulitzer Prize-winning 
playwright and Daily 

alum Arthur Miller dies. 

Sept. 6, 1968

Dozens of students are 
arrested during a Diag 
protest criticizing the 

provision of welfare aid in 

Washtenaw County.

Nov. 5, 1962

Dr. Martin Luther 
King Jr. speaks at 
Hill Auditorium.

May 22, 1964

President Johnson 

delivers “Great 
Society” speech 
during Spring 

Commencement.

June 24, 2003

U.S. Supreme Court 
upholds Law School’s 

use of affirmative action.

Dec. 20, 2013

The Daily reports 
Michigan kicker 
Brendan Gibbons 
was permanently 
separated from the 

University.

Aug. 23-31, 2005

University responds to 

Hurricane Katrina.

Nov. 8, 2006 

Michigan votes to ban 

affirmative action. 

