Dedicated staff workshard for readers like you

Monday, June 15, 1998

Dedicated staff works

hard for readers like you

To the student who picks up the Daily Bruin every morning, the
paper’s staff is an enigma. No one realizes that the papers strewn
about campus are produced through the combined effort of hundreds
of students. These students toil every day of the week, including
Sunday, and the last do not finish their work until one or two in
the morning. They do this to ensure that a lively, informative
newspaper is available when you get to campus in the morning. Each
and every member of the staff, from the mighty editor in chief to
the lowly driver, makes personal sacrifices so you, the reader,
will have something interesting to do during class. As a reward for
the selfless service, The Bruin even pays poorly, with the most
dedicated employees becoming virtually indentured servants.

It would no doubt surprise many of you that a whole army of
students slave away every night in the bowels of Kerckhoff Hall,
copy editing, writing the trivia for the sports box, avoiding
ASUCLA’s rented security and even pasting up the final edition of
the paper. Before a story is fit for your consumption, it has been
edited at least four times and passed through a Byzantine maze of
dozens of computers. If you are reading the paper on-line, it’s the
result of another dozen computers and employees who work even later
into the night. In the end, it’s no coincidence the flow chart of
the daily operation of the paper can only be printed on a sheet of
paper as large as the actual newspaper itself.

Despite having worked at The Bruin for almost four years, this
is the first time my byline will grace its hallowed pages. In these
four years I have seen people come and go and watched The Bruin’s
slow Darwinian evolution. Some changes have been for the better,
many others for the worse. Nonetheless, they all make the
organization one of the most exciting and rewarding places on
campus I could have chosen to spend four years. No organization
sits so squarely in the center of campus activity, and I don’t
believe there is a campus organization that is as diverse.

The Bruin does its best to attract intelligent writers and
editors so as to best serve you, the reader. However, what truly
makes The Bruin special is the fact that the reader is actively
encouraged to interact with the paper, up to and including joining
the staff. Many readers are dissatisfied with what is published,
yet few make the effort to right the wrongs that are regularly
published in The Bruin.

The solution to this problem is elegant and trivially simple:
it’s up to you, the reader, to make the difference. Rather than
simply complaining about The Bruin, give it a try yourself and see
how well you can do. It doesn’t cost anything and The Bruin will
even train you. On a campus as large as UCLA, it is difficult to
make your voice heard. Unless, of course, your voice is heard by
the 50,000 readers of The Daily Bruin.

Brian Bodensteiner