The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Tuesday, September 29, 2015 — 9A
One Hundred Twenty-Fifth Anniversary

transformational digital opportu-
nities and stay financially viable? 
I would love to listen in on the 
conversations you all have about 
this and know how you balance 
Daily values worth preserving 
with the need to train success-
ful leaders and assure a relevant 
future for the newsroom.

CALFAS: The issue of simul-

taneously adapting to a changing 
media landscape while maintain-
ing the strong traditions and val-
ues is one of the most important 
conversations happening every 
day in our newsroom. What’s 
difficult is striking a balance 
between honoring our past and 
thinking critically about our 
future. The most memorable 
changes in the Daily’s history are 
now movements that we honor 
— so why can’t we make some 
changes ourselves and join the 
innovators of the past? Some-
thing I’ve tried to promote during 
my time as editor is the willing-
ness to try something new. As a 
college newspaper, we must take 
advantage of our unique lens we 
bring to campus and Ann Arbor 
news as students, and we have a 
responsibility to explore new and 
innovative ways to produce and 
promote our content. If someone 
has a new idea, why not try it 
out? If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t 
work, and that’s the worst thing 
that could happen. Whenever the 
topic of moving away from print 
comes up, we often look to the 
scores of bound volumes star-
ing back at us in our newsroom. 
The tradition and legacy of the 
paper is something that carries 
us to where we are now, but the 
progress and innovation that 
came before us remind us that we 
too can leave a mark within our 
own newsroom. What does the 
value of the Daily’s print publi-
cation mean for you — and, per-
haps, what’s the significance of 
its social media presence and new 
website design?

LIPINSKI: I’m unsentimen-

tal about the print Daily. A few 
years ago, the bound volume 
I had received commemorat-
ing my year as co-editor was 
destroyed in a house flood. I was 
sad at first, then calmly resigned 
when I conceded that I rarely 
looked at it and that my fierce 
attachment was to the idea of 
the Daily, the amazing people I 
learned from and the collective 
we built there. (…) But my real 
education on Maynard Street 
was so much more profound. I 
remember as a young reporter 
watching the senior editors (all 
of a year or two older than me) 
investigate an accusation of pla-
giarism, a charge that ended in 
their painful decision to dismiss 
a gifted student peer. I won’t 
forget the seriousness of their 
deliberations, and years later I 
leaned into my memory of their 
ethical stewardship when as an 
editor I was put in judgment of a 
colleague similarly charged. You 
can’t lose that in a flood and as a 
student-run teaching hospital for 
journalists, I think the Daily is 
extraordinary. (…) My own bias is 
to be more bold, though I think a 
lot of college papers are surpris-

ingly conservative about change. 
You’re right to ask, “Why not try 
it out?” and be grateful for the 
paper’s legacy but not a slave to 
it.

May I change the subject? 

Here I am, a woman who was 
Daily co-editor, talking with the 
Daily’s presiding woman editor in 
chief. That’s already two more top 
women editors than most major 
news institutions have had, and 
you and I are but two of many 
women leaders in the Daily’s 
history. We recently published a 
lengthy story in Nieman Reports 
on female leadership in journal-
ism and found the numbers dis-
mal. I love that our college paper 
defies that. Although I certainly 

encountered my first instances 
of newsroom sexism at the Daily, 
I’m proud of the amazing history 
women have made there. What do 
you think accounts for that given 
the overall industry profile?

CALFAS: When I was the 

managing news editor as a sopho-
more, I faced a host of difficulties, 
as I felt I had to prove my worth 
because I was both young for the 
position and a woman. Certainly, 
the majority of my staff did not 
consider these two characteris-
tics as weaknesses, but a few did. 
Growing from the subtle sexism 
I faced in that post, I thought of 
how important it would be to have 
another female editor in chief — 
since it hadn’t been done for five 
years at that point. I can’t count 
how many times male sources of 
mine have called me “sweetie” or 
“honey” during an interview, or 
encountered someone who was 
shocked to hear that I, indeed, 
was the editor in chief of the 
Daily. At a certain point, I would 
think that it’s not the newsrooms 
that are inhibiting the growth 
and empowerment of female lead-

ers, but rather the world around 
us. That’s a tricky issue to solve, 
and affects women in all career 
fields outside of journalism. How 
do you think women can empow-
er themselves to take on these 
challenges?

LIPINSKI: In 2004, while 

I was editor of the Chicago 
Tribune, seven of the nation’s 
25 largest papers were run by 
women. A decade later, that 
number was three. Moreover, 
most of the country’s largest 
news organizations have never 
had a woman at the helm, mak-
ing the Daily, even with the 
challenges you and others have 
regrettably faced, progressive 
by comparison. What I find more 
worrisome is that media manag-
ers of your generation are recre-
ating the same gender and racial 
imbalances atop the new digital 
start-ups. I would have hoped for 
better. Given the opportunity to 
reinvent everything about legacy 
news organizations, the old man-
agement rules persist. I agree 
with you that there are broader 
forces at play, but the problem 
is so pernicious in journalism 
since you’re not likely to repre-
sent the community you cover 
if your newsroom is of a type. 
There’s content analysis suggest-
ing an editor’s gender can have 
meaningful influence on what 
gets covered and who covers it, 
something I know we have both 
experienced.

I wish we had talked more pur-

posefully about this when I was 
at the Daily. You’ve prompted me 
to think back on some election 
assignments one year that had 
every significant candidate going 
to a male reporter, while more 
experienced women were rele-
gated to down-ticket races. I was 
angry, but kept my head down 
and covered my stories, com-
miserating only with friends. So 
my first advice is transparency 
in talking about this. Diversity 
discussions were less common 
in newsrooms then, but should 
be daily occurrences now on 
behalf of improving our cover-
age and expanding our audience, 
a path that should naturally lead 
to more diverse leadership, if 
only as a business imperative. 
Women and men need to rede-
fine success, which in news-
rooms historically favored beats 
more common to men — politics, 
business, foreign news — while 
undervaluing others. The path 
to leadership needs to be wider 
and account for the fact that the 
bruising demands of so-called 
“hard news” can be incompatible 
with family life during stretches 
of a woman’s career. We, all of 
us, need to stop self-replicating 

— favoring and promoting those 
who remind us of ourselves, a 
long game that has never favored 
any minority journalist. And 
we need to find and create role 
models at the earliest points in 
women’s careers. I feel fortunate 
that early in my Daily career we 
had an extraordinary co-editor 
in Cheryl Pilate, someone who 
took an interest in my work and 
modeled for all of us what strong 
leadership looked like. 

You have one semester left 

to your editorship, Jen, and the 
time will go so quickly. When 
others are recalling the Daily 
under your leadership, just as 
I’m recalling Cheryl, what do you 
hope they remember?

CALFAS: When I think back 

to when I joined, I can’t help 
but remember how much I’ve 
changed and progressed as a 
journalist and as a person. With 
such little time left, there’s so 
much left I hope to accomplish 
— but so much of it is within 
the ideology of the newsroom 
as a whole. With a new web-
site developed under my term, I 
hope this inspires future Daily 
editors and staffers to think 
creatively about how our con-
tent can be presented, with a 
digital-first goal in mind. But, 
more than anything, I hope 
I’ve served as an example or 
inspiration for aspiring col-
lege journalists to pursue their 
passions and think beyond just 
themselves and their individu-
al accomplishments. Over any 
other goal, I’ve always viewed 
the Daily as a place where a 
bunch of young journalists 
come together and produce an 
informative, quality product 
for our audience. Working with 
collaborative rather than indi-
vidual goals in mind is some-
thing I hope I instill in this 
staff and future ones as well. 
College journalists — including 
myself — can often get caught 
up in their own aspirations, 
internships and positions on 
the paper rather than the col-
lective goal of the publication. 
This isn’t necessarily a bad 
thing, but something that may 
inhibit the teamwork within 
our organization.

For all the work and passion 

I’ve put into this place, I hope 
others continue to sacrifice for 
the sake of strong, balanced and 
award-winning journalism.

For you, Ann Marie, your 

impact as an editor left a contin-
uous mark on every staffer who 
has entered the newsroom since 
your term. What did you imagine 
your legacy would be while you 
were the editor, and what advice 
do you have for us at the Daily 
now as we move forward in this 
publication and beyond?

LIPINSKI: You’re kind to say 

so, but I got so much more from 
the Daily than I could ever give. 
We’ve stood on the shoulders of 
generations of editors who cared 
deeply about the institution and 
did their best to leave it in bet-
ter shape than they found it. 
But there’s no denying that the 
Daily’s greatest contribution has 
been as a classroom. I made a lot 
of mistakes there and learned 
from them. The Daily’s culture of 
criticism could be harsh, as you 
know, and perhaps less forgiv-
ing than in a journalism school 
classroom since we were acutely 
aware that our efforts were made 
public. It was both thrilling and 
humbling to think of the history 
that was edited in that news-
room — coverage of Franklin 
Roosevelt’s funeral, the Freedom 
Riders, the Alger Hiss trial, news 
of the polio vaccine. The Daily 
made possible a deeper engage-
ment with the campus and the 
larger world, and provided the 
place and the people who would 
challenge us to do our best work. 
We were the lucky ones who got 
to do more than read the his-
tory being made around us, and 
that made the paper an unusual 
campus classroom. When Henry 
Butzel and Harry Jewell founded 
the paper they called the U. of 
M. Daily, they had no capital, no 
publisher and virtually no adver-
tising, but they did have the com-
mitment to more fully represent 
the University community than 
did the fraternity groups pub-
lishing the two existing journals. 
“We built better than we knew,” 
they wrote of their creation some 
50 years later. It’s not for me to 
tell future classes of journal-
ists what building better might 
look like, but I hope the paper 
remains a classroom, a safe place 
for our successors to make the 
mistakes and discoveries that 
will define them.

Happy anniversary, Jen. Take 

care of our Daily.

the 2012 Iowa Caucuses. Like 
Huthwaite, Goldsmith wanted to 
make the political figures she was 
covering relatable to University 
students.

Not only that, Goldsmith also 

said covering a story of that size 
while still a student provided an 
incredibly unique experience.

“I felt like we got a real experi-

ence as journalists in determin-
ing what was worth putting in 
the paper,” she said. “That was 
definitely one of the highlights 
not just of my experience at The 
Michigan Daily, but at Michi-
gan.”

Andrew Schulman was a gov-

ernment beat reporter when 
he was tapped to cover Barack 
Obama’s election night watch 
party in 2012. The party was in 
Chicago at McCormick Place, a 
large convention center along 
Lake Michigan. Schulman said 
he could feel the excitement in 
the room as election results were 
reported.

At the same time, Schulman 

remembers, he had no idea what 
he was going to write before the 
event started, which was over-
whelming.

Still, 
Schulman 
said 
the 

experience helped him moving 
forward when he became a pro-
fessional writer. He’s now a free-
lance reporter.

“It helped me, I guess, in the 

future kind of find a little bit more 
focus,” he said. “It was something 
that I think I learned a lot from.”

Even for Biron, who is now 

working in public relations, get-
ting to cover a speech delivered 
by Obama in Detroit and cover 
government for the Daily helped 
her realize her interest in pub-
lic policy and shaped her career 
goals after school, she said.

“I think I started as an Eng-

lish and Comm double major. 
Then I joined the gov beat and 
fell in love with it,” she said. “If I 
hadn’t, you know, done so many 
of those things on gov beat, I 
wouldn’t have been exposed to 
it — I wouldn’t have realized I’m 
passionate about it.”

which detailed these shifts and 
suggested new initiatives like 
adding a position in charge of 
developing more special issues 
(with 
a 
revenue-generating 

focus in mind) and putting 
together a team to post more 
news content during the day.

Kraus, now an English pro-

fessor at the University of 
Scranton, voted against the 
free-drop proposal. He said it 
was probably the wrong vote 
in hindsight. But at the time, he 
felt compelled to vote in oppo-
sition to take a symbolic stand 
against what he felt the change 
represented.

But Chase says that kind of 

traditionalist mindset is impor-
tant, too.

“It’s that conscience that 

makes the thing keep surviv-
ing no matter what happens to 

the market,” he said. “There are 
smart people who will figure 
out what to do and how to take 
this very rare thing and make 
sure it survives.”

Josh White, a current editor 

at The Washington Post, edited 
the paper in 1997 — a time when 
Daily staffers first started to see 
the website as something more 
than another platform to plop 
the day’s print content. 

In Dec. 1997, the Michigan 

men’s basketball team had 
beaten Duke with a game-win-
ning dunk three seconds before 
the buzzer, and, in that same 
day, Charles Woodson won 
the Heisman Trophy. Class 
had concluded for the semes-
ter, and print production had 
wrapped up, too. The Daily’s 
website — then fairly primitive 
— hosted original, breaking 
news coverage for perhaps the 
first time.

“A really good story about 

something 
really 
important 

can touch millions of people, 
can get a conversation going 
globally, and there’s a lot of 
power in that. I think once peo-
ple started to recognize that, 
the game changed,” White 
said.

“We looked at The Michigan 

Daily as a way to try things, and 
to make mistakes and to learn 
from those mistakes,” he said. 
“We cared intensely about it, 
we tried to do it very carefully 
and ethically, but it was a lab, 
it was a place where you could 
make a mistake and learn from 
it and recover from it and build 
from it.”

So often, buzzwords like 

“tradition” and “innovation” 
are brushed in opposition. But 
maybe the Daily’s history tells 
us that’s simply not true.

“The Daily has done a spec-

tacular job of changing in the 
way that it needs to change,” 
Kraus said. “And that is precisely 
its tradition.”

LIPINSKI
From Page 3

SCENE
From Page 3

INNOVATION
From Page 3

“We’ve stood on 

the shoulders 
of generations 
of editors who 
cared deeply 

about the 

institution and 
did their best to 
leave it in better 
shape than they 

found it.”

“My own bias 
is to be more 
bold, though I 
think a lot of 
college papers 
are surprisngly 

conservative 
about change.”

Student reporters 
compete with the 

professionals

By EMILIE PLESSET

Daily News Editor

When a group of University 

students published the first issue 
of The Michigan Daily in Sep-
tember 1890, it was one of seven 
newspapers servicing the city of 
Ann Arbor. As the Daily enters 
its 125th year, it now stands as 
the city’s only daily print paper. 
Throughout its long history, the 
Daily has not only covered Ann 
Arbor and University news, but 
also generated national attention 
with its reporting.

When The Ann Arbor News 

ended its 174-year daily print run 
in July 2009, the Daily became the 
only paper in the city printing five 
days a week. The Ann Arbor News 
is now run by the digital media 
platform MLive.

MLive reporter Jeremy Allen, 

who predominantly covers the 
University, said there is some 
competition over who publishes 
a story first, but MLive and the 
Daily serve readers differently. 
The Ann Arbor News is charged 
primarily with serving the people 
of Ann Arbor, whereas the Daily 
largely caters to the University 
community.

“We kind of work together to 

provide coverage across the entire 
spectrum of anyone who has an 
interest in the University of Mich-
igan,” Allen said.

University alum Gary Graca, 

who served as the Daily’s editor in 
chief when The Ann Arbor News 

announced the end of its daily 
print production, said though the 
Daily had always covered issues 
influencing the Ann Arbor com-
munity, the announcement incit-
ed the Daily’s staff to expand its 
coverage of the city.

“It’s a stretch to say the issues 

of the campus and the city are not 
intertwined, and the Daily clearly 
has a strong edge and clearly has 
the ability to cover high-level city 
issues,” Graca said. “That was 
kind of the thinking. How can we 
do the city council issues, how can 
we do the interaction between the 
city and campus better, and the 
city ordinance issues that affect 
student lives better?”

Throughout its long history as 

the University’s most prominent 
student publication, the Daily has 
found itself repeatedly making 
national headlines and, at times, 
breaking stories before its profes-
sional counterparts.

In April 1955, Daily reporter 

Hanley McGurwin packed into 
a Rackham Building auditorium 
to hear Dr. Thomas Francis Jr. 
— the University’s head epide-
miologist at the time and leader 
of the field trial testing the polio 
vaccine developed by Jonas Salk 
— describe the vaccine as “safe, 
effective and potent.”

The news, which the Daily 

reported first, was celebrated 
across the country, as parents 
finally had a scientifically-proven 
means of protecting their children 
from polio, a major cause of death 
for children in the first half of the 
20th century.

The Daily achieved national 

prominence again in September 
1957, when it sent a staff report-
er to Little Rock Central High 

School in Arkansas to pose as a 
student and cover the school’s 
integration. James Elsman Jr., 
then the Daily’s editorial direc-
tor, wrote an eyewitness-account 
of the Little Rock Nine’s first day 
of class, reporting that only a little 
more than half the school’s stu-
dents attended class that day.

The Daily has also garnered 

national attention as other news-
papers have looked to the Daily 
for its noteworthy journalism. 
In 1967, The Washington Post 
published an article about the 
Daily after the student-run paper 
printed an editorial calling for 
the legalization of marijuana. The 
Post, quoting the article by Har-
vey Wasserman, then-University 
student, noted that the editorial 
described marijuana as having no 
worse effects than alcohol.

More 
recently, 
The 
New 

York Times published a lengthy 
article about the Daily and its 
coverage of a University scandal 
involving a member of the foot-
ball team. As the Times noted, 
the Daily was the first to report 
that Brendan Gibbons, former 
football starting kicker, had per-
manently “separated” from the 
University for violating the Stu-
dent Sexual Misconduct Policy 
five years prior.

The Times wrote that while the 

news of the scandal was shocking 
for the Ann Arbor community, the 
origin of the news was almost as 
shocking.

“The story was not broken by 

the local, professional news orga-
nization, The Ann Arbor News,” 
the Times wrote. “Instead, it 
was uncovered by The Michigan 
Daily, the university’s indepen-
dently-run student newspaper.”

Daily draws national 
attention for coverage

ALLISON FARRAND/Daily

In July 2014, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” sent correspondent Jordan Klepper to the Daily’s newroom to 
film a segment in which the newspaper was satirically mocked for not practicing clickbait journalism. 

THE DAILY ON THE DAILY SHOW

