News is here forever, unlike me

I have been told that this column should try to get at what my
time at the Daily Bruin has meant to me. But this story I am about
to tell doesn’t start in the Daily Bruin (though it does end
there).

Instead, it starts in Vilanculos, Mozambique.

Vilanculos is a small fishing village on the Indian Ocean. It
doesn’t have much in the way of what one might consider
modern technology. But it makes up for that with white, sandy
beaches and clear, blue oceans.

The main market is an open-air affair with stalls where you can
bargain for things as diverse as laundry soap, fresh bananas and
bottles of gin. Local kids play soccer on the beach using impromptu
goals and hunt crabs burrowed in the wet sand.

Sadly, when I had the luck of visiting there a year ago, I
didn’t spend all my time hunting crabs. Being the journalism
geek I am, I instead went hunting for the local daily. I was
curious to know what it looked like. Was it in color? A tabloid?
Broadsheet?

Try billboard.

In the middle of the village, on a wooden board beneath a small
awning, someone had pinned sheets of white paper with hand-scrawled
headings for international, national, local, sports and lifestyle
news.

Beneath each headline, in meticulous, careful handwriting, was
the news. I couldn’t read much of it because it was in
Portuguese, but I do remember seeing Colin Powell’s name
somewhere on there (yes, America, we can make the front page even
in tiny Vilanculos).

The Vilanculos press was an amusing novelty at the time. But it
comes back to me pretty poignantly now, perhaps in light of more
recent events.

I’ve had all sorts of people tell me this is a trying time
for journalism, newspapers in particular. The past year or so, I am
told, has been rough.

Ad revenue is falling, journalists are getting fired left and
right, and your average Joe Six-Pack (or Joe Bruin) barely cares to
read the TV listings anymore, let alone a newspaper. It’s the
newsprint apocalypse.

I’ve heard it and seen it. But I don’t buy into
it.

I admit I never met the resident journalist in Vilanculos who
handwrote out copy and pinned it to the board with thumbtacks.

But to me, it spoke to the pure and simple reason why newspapers
are still important. It spoke to the unflinching belief that the
news has to get out, that the people have to know.

To me, it spoke to the deep-seated desire to simply tell
stories.

It’s a desire I’ve heard echoed in scores of student
journalists every day in The Bruin’s newsroom. My best days
at The Bruin have been when I picked up the day’s newspaper,
read it and learned something.

I learned something because every Bruin staffer who worked on
that issue, from the reporters to the layout designers, wanted to
tell a story and tell it true. To me ““ to the Daily Bruin
““ there is no higher purpose than that.

I am sad that I am leaving UCLA, and I am sad I am leaving The
Bruin.

But it comforts me to know that there are two truths The Bruin
has taught me, two truths that hold unwavering, no matter where I
might end up traveling:

There will always be stories in this world to tell. And the
world will always need journalists to tell them.

And we’ll do it, too. Even if we have to use pens and
pushpins.

Proctor starts at the Los Angeles Times in October, and even
if he isn’t working in newspapers his entire life, he still
plans to be reading them.