Pepperdine’s trademark “journalism junkie,” Dr. Michael Jordan, is retiring this spring. Jordan’s tenure spans over two decades, but his professional standards for journalism live on through his students and Student Publications. Jordan’s zeal for journalism helped chart the future of the Graphic to emerge as today’s thriving enterprise, Pepperdine Graphic Media.
These efforts will culminate April 12.
The all-encompassing “J-Day” will be dedicated to Jordan. On the day celebrating journalism, the Graphic will launch their iPhone app in Joselyn Plaza. During Jordan’s reception in the afternoon, a wall bearing all Graphic advisers since 1937 will honor Jordan’s retirement.
The 61-year-old Washington native came to Pepperdine in 1991 with a goal to resurrect the fading journalism program.
Twenty-one years later, Jordan retires as Professor Emeritus of Journalism and Media Law. He passes the torch to a former student and Graphic editor he recruited to Pepperdine out of high school. This fall, new journalism faculty member Christina Littlefield will re-animate Jordan’s narrative.
“When Christina applied and was hired, it just kind of validated that this is the right time,” Jordan said of his retirement. “It just feels like strong bookends to a good story, and that’s what a journalist always wants: a good beginning and a good end.”
With a green marker in hand, Jordan upheld a sense of professional journalism his students would value beyond their deadline. To have a story come back “bleeding green” is Pepperdine jargon for Jordan’s signature (and vigorous) edits.
“In reality, we all learned humbleness at the end of Dr. Jordan’s green felt pen…[and] became a better journalist[s] because of it,” Littlefield wrote in a letter to the Graphic in 2007.
Jordan stepped down as the Graphic’s adviser in 2004. His former Graphic staff members continue to cite Jordan as their most influential teacher at Pepperdine. He spearheaded a journalism camp on campus recruiting top high school reporters, like Littlefield, to Pepperdine. This effort has diversified and produced one of the leading journalism programs in the nation.
Prior to, and early in, Jordan’s tenure, the Graphic was produced in a trailer parked where the current CCB building is. The sweeping changes Jordan drove in his next five years as director began with his first impression of the single-wide platform – the tattered and worn carpet. Before his first day, Jordan sat at his typewriter and wrote a memo to Communication Division.
“I can be strident in my advocacy, but I’m always respectful and I try to teach that in my journalism classes – you make your case,” Jordan said. “The memo said the carpet is the first impression to the public, faculty, staff and parents they see of Student Publications and the Graphic. And first impressions are important when you’re in the business of being credible. So it all began.”
It wasn’t long before Jordan’s staff became recognized as a credible news source both within Pepperdine and nationally. As adviser, Jordan led the Graphic to regularly top the Associated Collegiate Press Pacemaker, the “Pulitzer Prize” of college journalism. Jordan said the foundation he still sees in the Graphic is a personal badge of honor.
James Riswick, ‘05 alumnus and Jordan’s final editor in chief, wrote that encountering Jordan’s “enthusiasm and obvious passion” as a high school senior had ultimately led him to Pepperdine. Riswick would become the only student to write in every Graphic issue from 2001 to 2005. He would also go on to meet his future wife, the Graphic’s first news assistant and ’05 alumna, Sarah Carrillo. In 2011, Jordan officiated their marriage ceremony.
“There wasn’t anyone else that meant as much to both of us, and who’s had a bigger impact on both our lives today,” Carrillo wrote in an email.
Both Riswick and Carrillo agree that from their time as freshmen to his retirement as Graphic adviser, Jordan “was” the journalism department.
“What he’s done with the media law and journalism classes have been so successful in the past several years,” said Elizabeth Smith, director of student journalism and Graphic faculty adviser. “He’s made it exciting and done a good job of introducing us to the new world of journalism.”
This included transforming into his alter-ego, Judge Error Jordan, for media law’s mock trials. His students argue a First Amendment case before the tough judge in the School of Law courtroom.
“Students consistently say, regardless of their major, that [media law] is their favorite class and he’s their favorite professor,” Smith said. “As I have planned his retirement party, I can’t tell you how many students talked about that law class more than anything else, other than the Graphic.”
But Jordan’s journalism accomplishments extend far beyond Pepperdine. His experience as a journalist allowed him to interview cultural icons like Muhammad Ali to Caesar Chavez. And since the fateful day he contracted the “journalism virus” in junior high school, Jordan has yet to find a cure.
Working off what he has called an inherent “need to get to the bottom of things,” at age 16, Jordan began working as a sports stringer at the Tri-City Herald in his hometown of Kennewick, Wash. Jordan moved on to covering the state legislature at the Herald and the sports beat again for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
It was then at the Tacoma News Tribune where his role as a “watchdog” became apparent. Jordan worked as an investigative reporter until his newspaper put up a few dozen billboards with his face and the moniker, “Mike Jordan — Investigative Reporter!” Unknowingly, the Tribune public relations director had blown his cover.
His attention to systemic abuses wouldn’t end there. As a young reporter, Jordan knew the First Amendment promised not only a free press but a fair trial. At what he described as a “sensational murder trial,” the judge had kicked Jordan, the press, out of the courtroom three different times before ordering the bailiff to escort him out.
Instead of exiting quietly, Jordan unintentionally kicked the center divider between the galley and attorneys. He describes it as a “complete accident,” but at the risk of feeling embarrassed, he marks it as the day he vowed to become an activist for the press and for transparency in the courtroom process.
This was also the impetus for pursuing a juris doctorate in media law.
By the age of 25, Jordan had a wife and four young children (he eventually went on to have two more) and took up law school as a full-time reporter. Jordan didn’t secure a law degree to become a lawyer, though. In turn this expertise would prove indispensable to The Riverside Press-Enterprise and Pepperdine University.
Next, Jordan worked as managing editor for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and relocated to The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., in 1985 as city editor and eventually managing editor.
Jordan would go on to play a critical role in the newspaper’s two separate Supreme Court cases, Press-Enterprise I and Press-Enterprise II. Today, the landmark case won in 1986, Press-Enterprise Co. v. Superior Court, is featured prominently in Jordan’s mass communication law textbook. The case established the public’s First Amendment right to witness criminal court proceedings.
He had come a long way since kicking the center divider in the Washington courtroom. His career in higher education came next.
An opening for a journalism professor and Student Publications director at Pepperdine had leapt out at Jordan in Editor and Publisher Magazine. Part teaching desire and part family ties, Pepperdine became the clear choice for his next venture.
Jordan’s great-grandparents and grandparents were at the first Founder’s Day for the groundbreaking of Pepperdine in Los Angeles, as were they close friends with the Pepperdine family.
Jordan explained the heritage he shared with Pepperdine University in his application letter.
“I’ve always felt journalism is a service and a career,” Jordan said. “Service has always been a manifestation of my philosophy about being a media professional — even to the point of one of my retirement parties.”
Instead of a retirement party Jordan asked Pepperdine friends and family to serve with him April 7 at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.
This is the sort of motivation that drives Jordan. This is a love, Smith said of her mentor, for journalism that he has equated to his love for students and Student Publications.
Jordan underwent open-heart surgery to replace an aortic valve in 2004. At the behest of his doctors and after thirteen years, he stepped down as director of Student Publications and passed the title to broadcast professor Dr. Michael Murrie. Newswaves adviser Murrie described the transition “like sitting down to a finely tuned Mercedes and driving it, but all the hard work had already been done. The traditions were already all there. That’s definitely a legacy; he has insisted on quality journalism and aggressive reporting.”
Working as a professor, not as adviser, so close to the Graphic newsroom was admittedly harder than he let on, Jordan said. But just as he shifted roles from reporter to editor years ago, his new job involved a deeper, long-term responsibility.
Current Executive Editor of the Graphic Sonya Singh remembered fondly of her first introduction to journalism at Pepperdine — Jordan’s class. Though initially terrified, she said, Jordan made it hard not to feel comfortable. Taking an editing quiz or sitting in his Beatles museum — a time-honored excursion all journalism students experience in the Jordan faculty condo — Singh was inspired by “Dr. J” and his ability to derive such joy from his passions, which also includes his gorgeous 1951 Buick.
Jordan and his wife, Nancy, will continue living on campus with their 13-year-old daughter, Kendall, and two dogs. He plans to fuel “that fire inside that burns to tell stories” by carrying out his next venture: novel writing.
In 1994, Jordan published his first novel, the well-received “Crockett’s Coin,” filled with pre-civil war themes of romance, family and social justice. Jordan also plans to teach summer school at Pepperdine, and maybe even a freshman seminar on his first love, “Beatleology.” Three of Jordan’s six children are active Pepperdine alumni, as well.
“I know he’ll be sad not to be actively involved in students’ lives to the extent he is now, but I have no doubt he’ll take advantage of his retirement,” Singh said. “We all wish him well, but we have no doubt he’ll have a good time. Of course, I’m happy he’ll still be here. It’s nice to know if something big comes up that Dr. J is still around.”