Publisher donates $3m

10/07/2005

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stanford Lipsey has agreed to donate $3 million to renovate the 73-year-old Student Publications Building, which has not been significantly altered since it was built.

Lipsey will sign an agreement to donate the funds in University President Mary Sue Coleman’s office today.

His donation will provide most of funds necessary to gut much of the inside of the building, which houses The Michigan Daily, Gargoyle and Michiganensian. “I think it’s important to have the proper facilities to nurture the young people who are going to become journalists,” Lipsey said.

Before graduating with a degree in economics, Lipsey worked at both the Michiganensian and the Daily from 1945 to 1948. He served as photography editor of the yearbook and took photos for the newspaper.

Lipsey’s career has ranged from newspaper photographer, reporter, editor and publisher to his current post of vice president of Warren Buffett’s investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. In 1973, he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles he wrote while working at Sun Newspapers in Omaha, Neb.

He is also currently the publisher of The Buffalo News.

A proposal to name the building after Lipsey will most likely be submitted to the University Board of Regents early next year.

Before Lipsey said he would make the donation, plans were in place to go ahead with a less significant renovation that would only update things such as wiring.

The renovations were long overdue, said Jason Pesick, Daily editor in chief. “This might very well be the most decrepit building in use at the University right now,” Pesick said, describing its falling tiles and general dirtiness. “The building is literally crumbling.”

The introduction computer technology into the publishing equation has made such a renovation necessary, Lipsey said. “It used to be a reporter made notes and then knocked them out on a typewriter,” he said. “All that’s changed.”

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By Karl Stampfl,
Daily Staff Reporter
Photo by Mike Hulsebus / Daily