The beginning of a semester is always a challenging time for the Daily Cal. There are more than 100 employees working in the editorial department, and because all of them are students, we have to overcome high turnover rates inherent to being a student-run organization.

For those interested in joining the Daily Cal, this means there are going to be opportunities available. The first two weeks beginning with Welcome Week is the most important time for our recruitment. We had our first recruitment meeting Aug. 24, and we’ll have our final one this Friday at 4 p.m. at our office.

This summer, development editor Bryan Thomas redesigned the application, which was part of a bigger plan to improve how we track the status of our applicants. The application deadline this fall is Sept. 5, giving editors time to review before the Sept. 14 hiring deadline.

While section editors will hire based on the current needs of their sections, we stress that it is OK not to have previous journalism experience. The Daily Cal is looking for responsible and dedicated individuals who are looking to improve.

“Prior experience is a plus, but we all realize when we get here that we have a lot to learn,” said Thomas, who interviews applicants for the news sections.

Good luck to all the students out there on the new semester! For more information about our recruitment process, please visit apply.dailycal.org.

Popularity: 14%

Today, the Daily Cal published a special Welcome Week issue on the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Being on a campus with so much history, we’re fortunate we can revisit some of these events.

“Ever since I started at the Daily Cal I wanted to do something on the 1960s because it was so unique to Berkeley,” said Katlyn Carter, who edited the issue along with Julie Strack. “I thought it’d be a good access point to look at the late ’60s, which was a very pivotal time for the campus and the community.”

The edition gave the Daily Cal staff a unique opportunity to dig through archives, revisit the events and people of 1967, and most importantly from our perspective, examine the impact the movement had—and continues to have.

“It was inevitable that a portion of the issue would just look back, but we tried to compare it to what the campus and the city is like today and look at why that is,” Carter said. “We tried to examine the impact of the 60s not only on campus, but in the country today.”

Popularity: 13%

We’re a couple weeks away from the start of the fall semester, which is an important time for Daily Cal staff members as we prepare for the rigors of daily production.

But in addition to publishing a daily newspaper, The Daily Californian serves as a training institution for students interested in journalism. This is an especially important responsibility for us because UC Berkeley does not have an undergraduate journalism program.

Over the years, we’ve prepared many employees for careers in journalism. Currently, there are Daily Cal alumni working in places such as the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated and NBC. This summer, two of our graduated seniors—last year’s editor in chief Tiffany Hsu and former opinion page editor Amina Khan—landed internships at the Los Angeles Times. We’re very proud of their achievements, but we hope to do an even better job of training students in the future.

This fall we will debut The Daily Cal DeCal: Intro to the Practice of Journalism. It is an introductory journalism course aimed at providing students with practical experience to understand journalistic principles. Having a structured training program ensures students will get a view of the various components of a newsroom and how they work together. We will draw from the expertise of industry professionals, current editors and Daily Cal alumni for this course.
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 16%

Last weekend I attended the Associated Collegiate Press summer journalism workshop in muggy Baltimore. More than 150 college newspaper editors and advisors met with professionals to discuss industry trends and explore ways to improve collegiate journalism.

Many of the newspapers were from smaller universities and community colleges that had very different publishing procedures, but some of the most significant comments came from the editors of these organizations who were trying to resurrect their newspapers. They shared stories of censorship by their university or disagreements between their publication and the student government over the allocation of funds.

According to the Student Press Law Center, “state and federal courts have decided over 60 cases in the last three decades directly involving censorship of the public college and university press.” There have also been several cases involving private universities. Last December, we editorialized on an incident that threatened the independence of the Daily Trojan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11%