Paper Trails

How the Daily Bruin Became a Training Ground for Leadership and One of the Best-Known College Newspapers in America

Tony Auth '65 was a year out of UCLA and the chief medical illustrator at a Downey hospital when the Daily Bruin saved his professional life — and launched a 35-year career.

Though Auth had penned lighthearted editorial cartoons about campus life and sports while an undergrad, he'd recently become interested in politics, which meant he needed a public canvas to display his political cartoons and help him get hired by a professional newspaper. So the young illustrator offered his services free to the Bruin, and its editors bit, even though, he confides, "I would have paid them."

For five years, Auth drew three cartoons a week (but kept his medical day job), hand delivering every one to the Bruin newsroom in Kerckhoff Hall. When a position opened at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Auth was able to send them a choice sampling from a now-thick political cartoon portfolio. Five years later, Auth won the Pulitzer Prize. Now, still at the Inquirer after more than three decades, Auth is considered one of the finest political cartoonists of his generation.

Inspiring? Yes. Impressive? Undoubtedly. Unusual? Hardly.

The Bruin, as old as the university itself, has long served as UCLA's unofficial journalism school, even when the university actually had a journalism school (which it hasn't for more than 30 years). Like Auth, many former Bruin Bruins have gone on to greatness, a list that includes three Pulitzer Prize winners and one recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Society of Professional Journalists named the Bruin the best U.S. daily college newspaper in 2003. So did the prestigious Associated Collegiate Press — twice in the past four years.

"Any medium-sized town would be glad to have a news publication as good as the Daily Bruin," former Los Angeles Times Editor John S. Carroll said when naming it Southern California's best college newspaper in 2003.

Along the way, the Bruin, once a black-and-white tabloid of six pages and now a 12–40-page color broadsheet, just like most metro papers, has chronicled and sometimes created change, fierce debate, colorful characters and, of course, controversy.

"We feel very decidedly that we have passed that Cub stage."

The first issue of the University of California, Southern Branch's student newspaper was delivered Sept. 29, 1919. The top stories in The Cub Californian, as it was called, carried the headlines: "Old State Normal School Becomes Branch of U.C.," "Y.W.C.A. Offers Hearty Welcome to University Women" and "Many Distinguished Persons Now in Faculty." The faculty story began, "Dr. Cloyd H. Marvin comes to us from Harvard University, where he took his degree. He is chairman of the Commercial department." It almost goes without saying that the Cub had a much different attitude than the Bruin would. (It's also odd to imagine something called a Commercial department.)

It was initially a weekly, then twice weekly and in 1925, daily. Before U.C. Southern Branch adopted the Bruin mascot, the student paper changed its name to The California Grizzly. The logic was explained in this editorial from March 21, 1924: "It is not our desire to take on the outward accoutrements of a Grizzly if inwardly we are still in the Cub stage of growth. But we feel very decidedly that we have passed that Cub stage; we sincerely believe that the change of totem brings to us only what we merit as a result of our achievements as Cubs."

On the banner of the next issue, not only had the paper's name changed, but so had its location. No longer was it the "student publication of the University of California, Southern Branch"; it was the "student publication of the University of California at Los Angeles." Switched back to "Southern Branch" after two issues, it appears the students were leading the charge to distance the campus from big brother Berkeley by branding UCLA. The name-change gambit was quickly followed by another, more successful, attempt to influence, as the Bruin heavily promoted Amendment 10, a statewide voter-approved bond that financed the Westwood campus and moved the Bruins from Vermont Avenue.

But throughout its history, UCLA's student newspaper has butted heads with the administration as much as, and probably more than, it has marched alongside it.

"Clancy, are you a Communist?"

Conflict with UCLA administrators was most pronounced during the Red Scare, when the contention wasn't editorial wisdom but actual governance. Dean Milton E. Hahn did his darndest to root out any whiff of pinko-sympathy from Kerckhoff and constantly fought the Bruin staff's nominations for editor and managing editor, which back then were voted on by the Student Executive Council, a group some Bruin staffers considered university henchmen. Clancy Sigal '50 felt their attacks firsthand when the Bruin staff nominated him in 1949 for a second tour as managing editor.

"Wednesday night I witnessed one of the most revolting proceedings of my entire career at the University," Sigal wrote in a following column, quoted in "Loud Bark and Curious Eyes," an early history of the Daily Bruin by George Garrigues M.A. '70. "Wednesday night I saw the hand of the vigilante and heard the voice of the inquisitor ... When I entered the sacred chambers of Memorial room for my interview (!) by SEC, the very first question put to me was: ‘Clancy, are you a Communist?' "

A few years later came one of the most inspired bits of mischief. After the administration proposed that the entire student body elect the paper's editor in 1954, the Daily Bruin held a mock funeral for itself.

Not surprisingly, sometimes the exploits that aroused the ire of campus leaders were just raucous, like in 1929, when 13 staff members were suspended for their involvement in the semiannual — and precociously racy — publication Hell's Bells, according to "Loud Bark." Or decades later, when the Bruin published the photo of a student activist holding a sign that said "F--- Hate" — only his sign didn't drop the U, C or K. That decision stirred trouble, but nothing like in 1970, when the Bruin published a naked man and naked woman positioned on top of a grave. They weren't actually having sex, but the graveyard humor didn't, to put it mildly, go over well.

"Our education was on the paper."

"Over the years, the Daily Bruin has been a place where people work who care about ideas, who are word people, who know how to write and want to. Those people are generally leaders," says Frank Mankiewicz '47.

He should know. Editor of the paper after returning to UCLA from the Battle of the Bulge, Mankiewicz joined the Washington press corps after getting his master's in journalism at Columbia University; went to Berkeley Law School and became director of the Peace Corps in Latin America; served as press secretary to Robert Kennedy; wrote four books during the mid-'70s; lost a bid for Congress only to be chosen president of National Public Radio, a title he held for six years before joining the predecessor of PR giant Hill & Knowlton, where at 82 he is vice chairman of a place The Washington Post has called "one of the lobbying and public relations firms that defines establishment Washington." And oh yeah, his father wrote Citizen Kane.

Again, inspiring, impressive, but hardly unusual for Bruin alumni, who took their stints seriously — more seriously, sometimes, than their classes.

Ask Bruin alums what their major was and the answer is likely to be "the Daily Bruin." Sigal would enter Kerckhoff at 7 a.m. and often not find his way out until midnight. "I have no idea what I did during that time," he says. Like many of those before and after, Sigal was constantly absent in class. On occasion, he forgot which he was enrolled in and had to run out to Kerckhoff Plaza, where students' class schedules were available in large boxes, and check the dates for his midterms and finals.

"I am amazed that anybody got grades on the Bruin. Our education was on the paper," says Sigal, a 30-year correspondent in Great Britain for the BBC, The Observer and The Guardian, who wrote the movie Frida. "You learned how to write, collect facts, organize facts; you learned a lot about the technical aspects of putting out a paper. That was a full-time job."

This singlemindedness, of course, has its downside. After all, these are university students.

"Whenever I meet with Daily Bruin staff, I try to remind them of the absolute necessity to complete why they are here, which is not to work at the Daily Bruin but to complete their academic degree and further themselves for either graduate work or starting a professional career. All I have to do is point to myself as someone who occasionally lost sight of that and almost blew it," cautions John Sandbrook '91, M.B.A. '93, Bruin sports editor in 1970–'71, who spent 18 years as special assistant to former UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young and is now the executive officer to the vice chancellor for business and administrative services.

Like Sandbrook, many noteworthy Daily Bruin alums don't proceed to decorated careers in journalism. Bruin columnist Ralph Bunche '27 became the United Nations undersecretary general and won the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize. Brian Weiss '68, whose bearded face graced Time magazine during the Summer of Love [see sidebar, page 37], started a marketing writing company.

But for others, UCLA's unofficial journalism school is just that — training ground for a life in news. Recent Bruin grads are scattered across the nation, working for the likes of The Arizona Republic, Los Angeles Times, The Orange County Register and The Washington Post. (I'm a general assignment reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News.) We're carrying out the legacy set before us by Gilbert Harrison '37, who was editor and publisher of The New Republic from 1957 to 1974, and Flora Lewis '41, who became European bureau chief of The New York Times; by David Shaw '65, the Los Angeles Times' longtime media critic, and Bruce Russell '27, its editorial cartoonist — both of whom won Pulitzer Prizes. And, of course, by Tony Auth.

The Bruin is as much an apprenticeship as it is an academic exercise. "I refer to us as a grassroots school," says the student media adviser, Amy Emmert '96, who has served in that post since 2002. "We've structured the curriculum so it is a lot more practical and efficient than mainstream journalism programs. We are not just filling students' heads with ideas. We are also giving them the opportunity to practice."

And, not so much fun, life at the Bruin also mirrors the precariousness of life in every print medium these days.

"It's even wrong to call it a paper."

UCLA's student body is up 20 percent since the 1970s, but the Bruin's current circulation of 10,000 is down 60 percent since then. Circulation fell 5,000 copies last year alone. "The editorial and financial fortunes of the Daily Bruin have been moving in opposite directions," says the student media director, Arvli Ward. Breadstix, once the paper's largest private client spending between $30,000 and $40,000 a year, left Westwood years ago and hasn't been replaced in ad buys. Another ad stalwart, ASUCLA, has reduced ad buys to $60,000 — from $250,000.

The crisis reached a head last year when student media considered financing the paper with student fees. This would have been a return to the way things were done decades ago, but those were different times. Bruin editors feared the move would jeopardize their editorial independence. Instead, they opted to reduce circulation and trim the already meager paychecks for staff reporters and editors by 33 percent. Financially, the paper recovered well. But there are other challenges, just as critical to its survival. Chief among them is the 21st-century upheaval that has shaken the media, especially newspapers, to their core.

The revolution in media technology that allows you to TiVo Bruin games you can't watch on Saturdays, download the latest episode of Desperate Housewives on iTunes and catch up with your favorite daily newspaper through its Web site, is also shaking up student newspapers, including UCLA's. This transformative force is "convergence," the idea that all forms of news and entertainment are converging — or should converge — into one information stream delivered a multitude of different ways.

Enter Jeff Schenck, current Daily Bruin editor. A short man with a constant five-o'clock shadow and hair like comedian Jack Black's, Schenck joined the paper as a freshman because "it was something to do." He was a copyeditor and viewpoint editor before being elected editor in chief last spring.

Under Schenck, the Bruin is in a familiar spot: right in the middle of the convergence revolution. (That's why, for example, BruinNews, the campus' closed-loop news channel, was rebranded DBTV and now produces video news segments that appear on dailybruin.com, either as self-standing items or embedded in articles.)

"All stories are different, and it takes different media to cover them properly," Schenck concludes. "A red-carpet thing doesn't work well in print, so we cover it in video now. The Regents approving something can't be covered well on video, but we are doing that in print. It's even wrong to call it a paper: It's a news source now."

Well, sure. But it's also an almost 100-year-old, rabble-rousing, voraciously consumed news source that is one of the most colorful and long-standing elements of the UCLA legacy.

The way the Daily Bruin is run, the way it thinks, the way its staff dresses sloppily and doesn't get enough sleep — all point to a newspaper still sustained by a transcendent belief in its essential mission.

"They desire this like crazy," media adviser Emmert observes of her charges. "There is no reward except personal reward."

---

Boom Time

In 1968, Time magazine went looking for the archetype of collegiate rebelliousness, the personification of the tension, social awareness and political indignation fomenting on American campuses. "Some of these graduates will become draft dodgers. Many smoke pot. Fewer remain virginal," the magazine reported. "Yet it is also true that the cutting edge of this class includes the most conscience-stricken, moralistic and, perhaps, the most promising graduates in U.S. academic history."

The national newsweekly bypassed the likes of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, who also were college seniors then. The magazine wanted the tiny editor (5' 7" and 125 pounds) of a student newspaper on the Left Coast. Daily Bruin chief Brian Weiss '68 was the student on the June 7, 1968, cover of Time. Mortarboard and gown, tassels hanging to the left, Weiss bore a scruffy beard and dangled a peace-sign pendant from his neck. His mug was accompanied by the question: CAN YOU TRUST ANYONE UNDER 30?

Likely not. But the students could. And according to the Time article, Weiss was so influential that students called the Daily Bruin the Daily Brian. Though often the subjects of his scornful pen, administrators also respected Weiss. "Chancellor Franklin Murphy," Time reported, "praises Weiss as a conscientious editor who has made the paper ‘a provocative and enzymatic force on campus.' "

For Weiss, it was no stroll through the Sculpture Garden. He was the typical Daily Bruin staffer — studying something besides journalism, working for peanuts, morally determined.

"People were there because things were happening at the paper and the paper played an important role of being a voice for people on campus," Weiss says. The paper was deeply caught up in antiwar coverage, and Weiss was flying each month to San Francisco for Regents meetings, not to mention overseeing the production of each day's paper. "It was a little nuts. There was, of course, class — some of us went occasionally."

— B.G.

Published Jan 1, 2007 8:00 AM