CHRISTINA LITTLEFIELD
Former Graphic Editor
It’s been ten years since I first stepped into the Graphic’s decrepit trailers in July 1997. A senior in high school, I was in the last class of students to fall in love with the paper and with Pepperdine through a journalism summer camp established by then adviser Dr. Michael Jordan.
Camp gave me my first real whiff of what it meant to be a news junkie– and I was immediately hooked. In my years in the journalism department at Pepperdine, I learned a lot about newspapers and about the world, about faith and about seeking the truth. But the one thing the professors couldn’t teach was the one thing you must have to survive in the news business— a deep, uninhibited need to know.
And news hounds abounded at the Graphic.
Next to the comparative majesty of the new com pad, the facilities then were less than ideal— temporary trailers probably a decade or two old with computer equipment that was older. But the conditions in turn gave our fledgling newspaper staff the scrappiness we needed to be great reporters.
The same fortitude that gave us strength to fight with the printer at 3 a.m. to get the paper out similarly fueled our desire to keep digging where we smelled news or to look deeper into a story that needed to be told. The persistence always paid off. Fellow student journalists at one area conference called us “trailer trash,” but we swept the awards. We then wore the insult as a badge of honor, even drawing our “trailer trash” family on the walls before they tore those temporary buildings down in summer 1999. If that dark room could’ve talked …
Armed with the idealistic realism that Pepperdine is so fond of, we Graphites learned the power and responsibility of the pen, how journalism can educate, entertain, enthrall and evoke needed change. We took our inspiration from Pepperdine’s own affirmation that “Truth, having nothing to fear from investigation, should be pursued relentlessly in all disciplines.” At times, this put us at odds with administrators— and more often Student Government Association officers— who didn’t like to have that statement quoted to them when they didn’t want to answer our questions.
We didn’t, however, take ourselves too seriously. Although one reader wrote in to call us “pedantic misanthropes” in protest to a staff editorial, several of us had to look up exactly what that meant, being taught to write at an eighth grade reading level and all. In reality, we all learned humbleness at the end of Dr. Jordan’s green felt pen. One of the best editors the Graphic ever had had her first story as a freshman so ripped up by Dr. Jordan he attached wings at different sections to explain all of the changes. It bled green. And she became a better journalist because of it.
The beauty of the Graphic compared to other college papers is that it was small enough that you could get on staff as a freshman, learning more about journalism there than we ever did in our classes. I was, for instance, made news editor as a sophomore. It was only a few days into the job that I realized that was because it was the hardest, most time consuming position on staff. The core of us who ran the paper in my latter years— including Julie Leupold and Laurie Babinski— learned to live on diet coke and developed a tradition of swing dancing in the trailer if we were still working at 4 a.m. And we didn’t just work together – we were there for each other. Julie and Laurie were at my sides when I got news of my cousin’s death in the newsroom, when my knees crumpled underneath me and I couldn’t stand.
We learned, at times, how hard it can be to separate yourself from the story, such as when planes crashed into the World Trade Towers on Sept. 11 and the only unaccounted planes left in the air were heading toward Los Angeles. The entire staff spent the day reporting on everything from safety measures at Pepperdine’s international campuses to students whose families were from New York, and it was only in the wee hours of Sept. 12 did a trio of us left in the newsroom really feel the impact of what had occurred. I sat staring at statistics comparing the attacks to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, unable to work or think or hardly move as emotions washed over me in waves.
Perhaps the greatest lesson at the Graphic was unintentional, at least by the editor who assigned me an arts and entertainment story on a group of faculty brats who started their own band. The band, at that time, had potential but even their professor parents didn’t think they would amount to much more than a teenage garage band. But what intrigued me were the lyrics to one of their songs, “No Plan B.” It was based on a statement of faith by Pepperdine’s Terry Giboney, before he passed away from a long bout with cancer.
Giboney affirmed, in his great suffering, that God was his plan A and there would be no plan B. I never knew him, but his faith was what moved me to investigate, and ultimately accept, Christianity. The story on the band, which I am happy to report is still going strong, was my first ever for the Graphic. In all my truth seeking, the greatest truth I have ever sought is God’s truth.
I am currently taking a break after four years in the daily newspaper grind to pursue that higher truth in Cambridge, England, studying for a PhD in Western Religious Culture. But I’m finding that the same lessons I learned at the Graphic still apply.
Keep digging. Keep questioning. Keep pursuing the stories, the truths, that make us human, that make us vulnerable, that make us real. Truth, having nothing to fear from investigation, should be pursued relentlessly.
As another Graphic motto went, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
12-06-2007
