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.