40 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE : Kramer: Defiance of oversight merges papers, creates independent DO

Sometimes, when remembering events of 40 years ago, you tend to romanticize. But to be honest, I’m not sure that’s possible when thinking back on the spring of 1971 on college campuses across the country.

It was a highly charged, emotional time when everything was being challenged. No institution went unscathed. The government, the press, the university, the military, corporate America…you name it, it was under duress.

Everyone was angry. And Syracuse University was no different. For students, it really wasn’t about liberal vs. conservative – it was the degree of anger you felt. We were all passionate about wanting things to change for the better, but had different ideas about how to do it.

There were peace marches and there were riots. There were sit-ins and there were building takeovers. There was peaceful protest and there was violence.

My passion in those days, and probably still today, was for journalism. It wasn’t all I cared about – I was a magazine major but a political science minor. But for me the best way to change the world was through storytelling. I had a very romantic notion of being a newspaper reporter, and I believed great journalism and storytelling was my best chance, and the country’s best chance, to change things for the better.

I had already been City Editor of The Daily Orange as a freshman, and I became editor of the weekly Promethean in my sophomore year. But the daily newspaper was where all the power was. Everyone read it, every day. All college students were starved for information in those days. Imagine a world with no Internet, no e-mail, no computers and not even cable television.

I had been disappointed with the direction The D.O. had taken. Sam Hemingway was smart editor but he was knee deep into advocacy journalism. As strongly as I believed in an unbiased but aggressive media, Hemingway believed in advocacy journalism and using the power you have to do what you believe is right. I respect where he was coming from, but I thought it was misplaced and would ultimately damage the credibility of the publication. His masthead had a fist breaking though it!

It was a debate raging on college campuses around the country. As many college dailies had swung to the side of advocacy as had not, and around the country a number of new campus publications were born to offer ‘unbiased’ news as an alternative to the traditional campus daily, which had become part of the ‘movement.’ The Harvard Independent was one, and others popped up at particularly active campuses like the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan.

The D.O. was also supported by the university administration, like most campus dailies of the time. SU ran the paper as a business, installing a paid business manager and selling advertising, but guaranteeing enough money to print every day.

The relationship between the administration and the paper was strained by a continued Daily Orange barrage of criticism over how the school was dealing with highly charged situations, like alleged racism on the football team.

The tension between the administration and The D.O. was up to ‘Alert Level Orange’ by the spring of 1971. The university was refusing to defend the paper against a $938,000 libel suit involving three D.O. editors and was growing more concerned about dropping advertising revenues. The paper, on its path of advocacy journalism, started to see serious erosion in advertising revenues because many advertisers, then as now, don’t like to be associated with highly opinionated content.

The Board of Publications was a body made up of representatives of the administration, faculty and students that was in charge of electing D.O. editors. It had elected Hemingway previously, but elected me as Editor of The D.O. for 1971-72. The D.O. staff was outraged that they were not able to pick the next editor themselves because to them it was as much about continuing the paper’s advocacy. Although I agreed with much of what they believed in, they knew I was less about the movement than about a more purely journalistic endeavor. Hemingway and his chosen successor, Paula Fabian, felt just as strongly that the times demanded a powerful advocate at the helm of the paper. They threatened to barricade The D.O. offices on East Adams Street to keep me from entering.

To be honest, I lost the will to fight them. Life was too short. I understood their point, but disagreed. I agreed to a mediation that I knew was stacked against me (it was a student government committee, which was sympathetic to the existing editors) because I didn’t have the motivation to run a newspaper at war with its former editors and staff.

So Paula Fabian took over the reins and I retreated to freelancing and helping out the next regime at The Promethean.

It didn’t take long for the economics to catch up to The D.O. and the university to cut off deficit funding. In the fall of 1971, several of us made a proposal to the student government to merge the three campus newspapers – The D.O., The Promethean and Dialog (another weekly) – under one independent business structure. I was actively involved with several others in putting the new business operations together, using The Promethean incorporation papers as the entity under which the three papers were merged.

The new paper, keeping the name The Daily Orange, received no direct funding, but the student government negotiated a fee to purchase a ‘bulk subscription’ for the student body, which would pay for free distribution on campus (there was a charge to buy it on an outside newsstand.) Years later, a new generation of D.O. editors eliminated even the subscription fee.

I was proudest of the fact that most of the new staff of the 1971-72 D.O. came from The Promethean. Former Pro editor Bob Heisler and Barbara Beck became Editor and Managing Editor, respectively, and led a talented staff culled from the three papers.

As for me, it was the first time I realized that the success of the people I have helped throughout my career will always be my greatest accomplishment.

Larry Kramer was editor in chief of the weekly campus newspaper, The Promethean, in 1971, which later merged with the Dialog and The Daily Orange to form the new, independent D.O. He is the founder of Market Watch, a website for business and financial news.