After 108 years, the Daily is still going strong

Last year's Daily editor in chief ended his birthday comments with the above sentiment, and so I find it fitting to begin mine with it. It's the kind of thing we pass down around here.

Like many student organizations, we have our crazy traditions and silly memories. But they fade after a while. What remains (yellowed, but still there) are the pages and pages of Dailys and the impact that 108 years of editorial freedom has had on the members of the University community.

The Daily has changed just as college campuses have over the years.

In the 1920s and 30s, when the country's attention was focused on national and international affairs, so was the Daily's. In 1925, the paper published a personal interview with Gandhi.

In the turbulent '60s, the Daily was a radical vehicle for political speech and expression. It published editorials criticizing the draft, covered the volatile 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and braved tear gas during demonstrations.

In the 1980s, the Daily shed its liberal skin and took up a more conservative attitude, editorially.

Today, the Daily retains a classic approach to journalism that, sadly, many papers have abandoned in favor of USA Today-style graphics and MBA-style journalism. In some ways, of course, it's a little easier for us to resist these trends.

We're a need-to-know newspaper, and we don't apologize for that in the least. We have plenty of graphics and illustrations on hand, but they're there to make the news more easily digested, not to attract attention. Granted, we don't have to sell our newspaper.

We don't need focus groups because our readers are our roommates, classmates and neighbors. We live just down the street at 420 Maynard St.; if readers don't like what they see in the Daily, they can tell us. Or they can join the staff.

Providing news to the Ann Arbor community has sometimes required a little legwork - and an occasional trip overseas. Ambitious Daily staffers got down and dirty with the rest of the reporters - sometimes scooping papers that would later hire them or their Daily colleagues. Their escapades resulted in personal and lively accounts of events that may otherwise have seemed far and irrelevant to the University community.

n In 1958, an editor's note read: "Daily reporters Huthwaite and Elsman spent their Spring vacation in Cuba attempting to get an interview with rebel leader Fidel Castro. Before they could travel to contact Castro in the Seirra Maestra mountains they were the first reporters arrested by the Cuban government as it attempted to deny privileges to all newspapermen in Santiago."

n The Michigan Daily was the only college paper credentialed by Judge Julius Hoffman to cover the Chicago Seven trial in 1970.

n In "Special to the Daily," a compilation of Daily article excerpts from the newspaper's first 100 years of publishing, an editor wrote next to a 1975 story: "I haven't a clue how this story came about, or what a Daily reporter was doing in Vietnam. Sometimes it seemed as though the Daily was everywhere."

Most of the time, however, the Daily is right here in Ann Arbor.

Although we take great pride in the fact that we have brought the University community news from all corners of the world, we are most proud of the work we do right here on campus.

Several years ago, someone asked what I thought life on campus would be like without The Michigan Daily. Life, classes and sporting events would go on, I suppose. It's the knowledge and perspective of their participants that would change.

I remembered a day a few years ago when there was no Daily for most of us. We awoke one morning in March to find most of the press run had been removed from campus as a political statement.

The mood was somber inside 420 Maynard St. that day and several days later when editors and staffers gathered at the window to watch a crowd of students chant and burn a Daily in front of building where it was created.

"Well, honey, in journalism, you won't always make everybody happy," my father said to me over the phone as I watched the scene outside.

No, we don't always make everybody happy. That's not our job.

After the noise died down, the Daily picked itself up, dusted itself off and marched into production with the same classy-but-raw determination it has always had. Why? Because students on campus didn't read about the GEO strike, MSA elections, candidate endorsements and a host of other things in the missing March 27 Daily, and they darn well were going to hear about that and more in the days, weeks and years that followed.

That's our job.

- Laurie Mayk is the Daily's editor in chief and can be reached over e-mail at ljmayk@umich.edu

Laurie Mayk

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10-02-98