Editors’ Blog

The first sentence of the Daily Cal’s mission statement is as follows: “The Daily Californian exists and functions to provide an opportunity for the students of the University of California to receive training in journalism and all aspects of newspaper production.”

We take this role seriously. There is no undergraduate journalism program here at UC Berkeley, as Stephen wrote about earlier when introducing the Daily Cal DeCal, but that doesn’t mean there is no demand. The Journalism School offered five freshmen or sophomore seminars this semester, with spots for fewer than 100 students. We had enough interest in the Daily Cal DeCal to fill more than double our original capacity of 40 students.

But what makes us qualified to teach journalism? While the Daily Cal as an institution has been around since 1871, our most experienced editors have only been around for three or four years and may have no professional training experience. At the Daily Cal we treat this training as more of a cooperative experience. No one, in any position, pretends they know everything about their jobs, and we regularly seek out expert advice.
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One of the goals of the Daily Cal news desk is to improve its coverage of breaking news, delivering important stories immediately via the Web and then following up with more detailed articles in the print edition.

An aspect of our coverage that really benefits from this accelerated news cycle is crime reporting. This came into play for two recent crime stories:

On the night of Sept. 10, just after editing our regular stories for the next day’s issue, we received several calls about a rumored shooting on campus. A few writers immediately went to the North side of campus to chase down police officers, while others called emergency dispatchers from the office.
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Every so often you might notice a photo in the paper unaccompanied by anything more than a short description of the action in the photo. These might vary from a picture of Mayor Bates raising a glass in honor of the law legalizing brew pubs to a hard-news image of tree-sit supporters scaling the fence which currently surrounds the oak grove. We call these feature photos.

We run feature photos for a variety of reasons, but it’s usually one of the following:

• To acknowledge an event which doesn’t need a full news story
• To capture a bit more of the regular oddness (that sounds oxymoronic) of Berkeley life
• To make sure there are always visual elements in the paper
• Because they look cool

Feature photos are one of the ways in which The Daily Californian photo department has an opportunity to flex our muscles, to run images with more concentration on the aesthetic portion of photo journalism than on the reporting aspect.

They (whoever they are) say a picture is worth 1,000 words. Well, generally, I like to think they’re worth the length of a news story–a way for the photo department to independently engage the reader and provide a little some extra. I’d hope you agree.

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On Tuesday the Daily Cal published two op-eds with opposing views on the Memorial Stadium and Student Athlete High Performance Center project. The first one, by ASUC senators Dave Rhoads and Gabe Weiner, discussed the importance of the athletic center to student and employee safety. The second, written by UC Berkeley student and Free Speech Free Trees member Matthew Taylor, argued for preserving the oak grove because of its intrinsic sacred nature.

There’s been a lot said on the stadium lawsuit and the athletic center, but the majority of opinions in the news comes from campus administrators, city officials, lawyers, and other Berkeley community members. This proposed project is one of the most contentious and significant issues to hit UC Berkeley, and it’s important that student have their voices heard on this subject.

The Daily Cal is a great medium for students to express those views. The opinion section not only runs editorials, which are the opinions of the Senior Editorial Board, but also publishes op-ed and letters, many submitted by students. The Daily Cal Opinion Page is a forum for the campus and community and one of the most accessible resources available for students to air their thoughts.

So the next time your student group is organizing a special awareness event, or if an article in the newspaper rubs you the wrong way, tell us. Let your opinions be known. You can submit letters and op-eds to opinion@dailycal.org.

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Two months since the launch of The Daily Californian Editor’s Blog, we’re making a few changes to better fulfill the original purpose of this project.

As part of our commitment to editorial transparency, this blog will now include posts by all Daily Cal editors. It will continue to explore issues on editorial decision-making, ethics and coverage, but the posts will now be from the people directly involved.

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I’m going to come out and say it: This is the year the Cal football team earns a trip to the Rose Bowl in January.

Personally, I do not believe in jinxing the thing. After all, Bears fans have tried every trick in the book for almost a half-century to no avail. Plus, it’s my senior year. One can hope, right?

Whether you agree with me or not, you must at least acknowledge the possibility of Cal playing in January, and with that in mind, the Daily Cal is poised to bring you comprehensive coverage of Bears football all season long.

There will be four writers on the beat—sports editor Steffi Chan, Steven Dunst, Ryan Gorcey and Gerald Nicdao. Chan said the extra personnel will mean more analysis and features on players who otherwise would not get as much coverage. This week’s articles included features on Jahvid Best and Shane Vereen, and Craig Stevens.

The special Saturday Gameday editions will again be passed out at all home games and at the Big Game in Stanford. We hope to generate awareness about the issues and devise a more efficient distribution plan, especially for the students attending the games.

It can either be a magical season or just another heartbreaking chapter for Cal, but we’re ready to bring you all the details. For the next four months, let’s savor all the memories!

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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.

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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.”

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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.
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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.

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