DR. KEN WATERS
Faculty Advisor
The weekly ritual went like this: I’d write an inflammatory staff editorial or make libelous statements in the first draft of my Graphic column, “The Sunshine Corner.”
After reviewing my prose, Student Publications Director C. Thomas Nelson, would call me into his office. The news room, a dingy building on the corner of Vermont Avenue and 81st Street in South-central L.A., went quiet. Everyone wanted to hear the intensity of the “discussion.”
On one occasion, Mr. Nelson quietly and methodically explained to me that I couldn’t slam the administration over not hiring Frank Sinatra as a teacher (a rumor that circulated one year).
“Student journalists have freedom of speech,” I’d say. “Besides, Dr. Young wasn’t in his office today so I couldn’t get a comment.”
Mr. Nelson smiled. “I saw him at lunchtime.”
I flushed. How did he know that I’d made only one lame attempt to talk to the Pepperdine president and then decided I could get away with shoddy reporting?
“Hi, Norvel. It’s Tom Nelson,” he said, after dialing the president’s house on campus.
“Kenny Waters is working on the staff editorial for the Graphic. It’s about that Frank Sinatra rumor. Can you enlighten him for a second? It’s Wednesday night and we’re on deadline. OK, I’ll put him on.”
Busted.
Of course, the president denied the rumor, gutting the majority of my argument.
Still, like a two-year-old child, which Mr. Nelson sometimes accused me of being, I tried again next week to sneak some backhanded slam at the administration into a column about getting my shoulder length hair cut, or the meaning of the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Each week, Mr. Nelson— a former journalist who mentored dozens of now-successful media communicators— taught me something more about journalistic responsibility, reputation and the canons of journalism.
Like Mr. Nelson, all Graphic advisers have had to talk softly and never use the “Big Stick.” As the publisher’s (read, the Board of Trustees) representative, the student publications adviser could censor a story or pull it from the presses before publication.
But that’s censorship (The Big Stick), and any hint of that type of heavy-handedness— if picked up by the mainstream press— would result in days and days of negative national publicity and perhaps lawsuits for Pepperdine. So the adviser uses common sense— and an appeal to the best of journalism’s values of fairness, accuracy and good taste— to help students like me see the benefits of editing their own copy into something that can be printed.
Despite the tension, this 70-year-old formula has worked. The Graphic is enshrined in the college newspaper association’s Hall of Fame, and is considered among a handful of exemplary papers published each year across the nation. Certainly it has its critics. A few administrators and faculty have refused at times to participate in this educational tool for student journalists, and they routinely refuse requests for interviews.
Sometimes that criticism is valid. Dr. Steve Ames served as adviser from 1978 to 1990. When he arrived on campus his first year, student editors staged a rebellion of sorts. Their stories were often critical and their points were not backed up with proper research. Ames had to “fire” five staff members and rebuild the newspaper’s reputation. Still, three years later, community college transfers recruited by Ames had rejuvenated the paper and it received its second national Pacemaker Award, an honor similar to winning an NCAA national championship.
“Even though I had to make that difficult decision when I first came, students realized I was a ‘players’ manager,’ an advocate for students,” he recalled recently. “Working with students in an informal educational setting is a marvelous way for all of us to learn. I’d never tell anyone this, but I’d advise student publications even if they didn’t pay me.” (OK, Steve, I won’t tell your employers at Cal Lutheran!)
In 1990, Dr. Mike Jordan, a former newspaper executive and legal scholar, assumed the role of the Graphic’s adviser. By then the offices had moved from a large suite in the Tyler Campus Center to ancient trailers perched on the hill where the Center for Communication and Business now stands.
“My goal in assuming this role was to ensure that students adhered to the highest professional standards in their articles and opinions,” he recalls. “But when I saw the decrepit condition of the facility and the ancient computers, I began to wonder if that would be possible. Thankfully, we were able to quickly improve the working environment to give those trailers the look and feel of a professional operation.”
Students who work on the Graphic need to be what Jordan calls “journalism junkies,” people committed to the ideal that working in the news business is a calling, a vocation that is noble and worthy.
“If journalists fail to inform the citizens of the world about the actions of their governments, business and other institutions, then democracy will fail,” he notes. “That’s why I tell our students they are studying journalism, law and ethics in order to shine the light of justice on a world that needs to be saved. Most get it: why else would they stay up until well past midnight on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to get the paper written, designed and printed?”
During Jordan’s tenure, the Graphic continued to rack up impressive national awards and accolades from a variety of judges chosen from the ranks of America’s top newspapers.
“The good news is that student publications now has a world-class newsroom and facility, and this year the journalism major had one of its largest incoming freshman classes in decades.”
And now it’s my turn to sit on the hot seat as I provide interim leadership this year while Dr. Michael Murrie, our director of student journalism, teaches in London. Thankfully, my job is made easy by assistant journalism director Elizabeth Smith, who follows in a long line of assistants, among them Dr. Clint Wilson (professor of journalism at Howard University), John Irby (publisher of the Bismark Tribune in South Dakota), and Dr. JoAnn McLin Ortiz (Executive Director of the Santa Monica College Foundation), who went on to serve as Pepperdine’s student publications adviser from the early to mid 70s.
Today’s Graphic editors, led by editor-in-chief Shannon Kelly, are far more intelligent and levelheaded than I was as a student. Still, I know a night will come when I need to sit down with a student and rationally explain why his article draft is not ready to print. And even thought he passed away years ago, I suspect I’ll feel the presence of Mr. Nelson and hear him chuckle at the irony playing out before him.
12-06-2007