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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

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