What exactly is the evidence that the Michigan Daily needs changes?
First, there is the bad journalism. Consistently, the daily misses big stories, or scrambles to play catch-up with the Ann Arbor News, or the Associated Press. When Harvard professor and world-famous scholar Cornel West spoke as part of the annual Conference on the Holocaust in 2000, the Daily didn't cover his speech - they hadn't even sent a reporter. When other newspapers were reporting the details of the Coleman presidential search, the Daily played catch-up even though an editorial staffer had, unusually, the foresight to file a freedom of information act request for it, and the University had released the documents to the Daily before any other newspaper in the state. In Fall 2002, when two students filed a lawsuit against the University, the Daily heard of it through the A.P. wire, scrambling to investigate the story at 10 o'clock in the evening.
I had a friend on the U-M women's rugby team, who complained bitterly to me that the Daily hadn't reported on their highly successful season even though they had built an impressive fan base, making it to the equivalent of the women's rugby sweet sixteen in their division. Similarly, in October 2002 a letter-writer complains that although a photo of the men's crew team had run on the front page of the Boston Globe, the Daily ignored their participation in the regatta completely, covering only the women's team. The letter writer complains: "It truly is sad that a our own school newspaper chooses to ignore the Men's Crew Team, while the Boston Globe, a paper read by millions nation-wide, prints their picture on the front page of the sports section." Both of these mistakes are probably because the teams in question were both "club" status, and were overlooked by sports writers who rely heavily on the Athletic Department's website, heavy with news about varsity teams, for their information. These mistakes are also the result of an understaffed newspaper that has neither the staff nor inclination to actually seek the news.
Although no newspaper is completely without mistakes, I think the Daily could be much better because it has been much better. The Daily used to be at the vanguard of journalism on an international scale, covering the free speech movement in Berkeley California, the freedom rides in the south in the late 1960s, the 1968 democratic national convention in Chicago, and even printing dispatches from Vietnam in the 1970s. Now, the newspaper seems hardly able to keep track of what's going on in its own backyard.
Second, the Daily has something of a human resources problem - their staff, for a Daily newspaper at a big ten campus, is ridiculously small.
An intelligent and opinionated columnist and arts writer quit angrily after the head of the arts department selected a much less qualified, much less experienced writer, who happened to be his friend, for an editor position. An editor who was receiving a little heat over a controversial columnist fired him - over email, from Africa. A communications studies major quit after being lectured by an editor she wasn't spending enough time on her beat - the editor not knowing the difficulties she was facing in her personal life at the time. "Quitting the daily was one of the best things I ever did," she quipped one day, after we were leaving a communications studies class taught by an award-winning former Reuters and CNN correspondent. A bright, shy, idealistic freshman I had met in a class about the history of the U.S. civil rights movement hung around the Daily for a while, wrote a couple investigative pieces, and quit after about a year 'to do other things'. While I was working for it, a daily newspaper serving a student body of over 30,000, including 23,000 in the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts, only had a very few writers whom could be reliably called on to write stories when the newspaper was in a pinch.
I think it's safe to say that most motivated, intelligent, creative young students that come to the Daily end up leaving. One can determine this by comparing how many people attend mass meetings at the beginning of the year versus how many help put out the newspaper's last issues. The reasons why this happens are many and complex, and I will explain they a bit later as best I can. The newspaper is run with an extraordinarily rigid hierarchy, which undoubtedly dissuades many writers who wouldn't like to spend two years of their college career as the equivalent of someone's literary bitch. Since the newspaper is unprofessionally run, only the reporters who make it their life stand any chance of getting their articles in print consistently, and getting selected for desirable beats. And being asked to work "production" - from roughly 4 PM until around midnight or later - two nights a week - undoubtedly scared off people who could contribute much to the newspaper. (In the past, other students interested in layout and production were hired to do this job, and writers focused on writing and reporting.)
The people who survived this regimen generally are not independent thinkers, and are willing to be told what to do. The people who survive must be willing to dedicate obscene amounts of time for extremely little pay to a mediocre publication for editors who are sometimes rude, immature, unsophisticated, and who tolerated zero dissention in the ranks on any matter of substance. I'll leave for your judgment whether the leftovers prove savvy and wise senior writers and editors themselves.
Lastly, the newspaper building itself is physically a mess. A friend of mine who used to work for the newspaper maintaining their computer systems would tell me horror stories about how the all-important computer network had been mismanaged. The newspaper keeps no organized files to speak of, and only a few very serious reporters keep organized records. And although newspaper newsrooms are notoriously messy, the Michigan Daily's is consistently trashed, littered with crumpled newspaper, take-out food containers, and stacks of irrelevant material. The reporter's mailboxes were dusty and rarely used, since few reporters checked them with any regularity. Last year the sidewalk outside the Student Publications building was littered with broken beer bottles for weeks, thrown out of a second-story window by a very senior editor.
I believe all of these observations are symptoms of deeper problems, and go beyond the chaos one should expect from a student-run newspaper. I don't think in most cases the people who worked for the paper were particularly messy, but few felt any real ownership of the organization, what I think is the natural result of an authoritarian hierarchy. If the input of the average writers is not respected and never sought in decisions about the newspaper as a whole, if only a few top editors can participate in the process of gathering and organizing the news, if intelligent students are systematically "fired" by undergraduates on elaborate ego-trips, it's no wonder the newspaper can't retain talented writers, and the newspaper - physically and otherwise - is a mess.
However, I get ahead of myself. I'll discuss what I think needs to be changed in Part 4.
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