One success is never enough
After 17 months of organization, planning and development, I can say that May 8, 1999 was the first concrete success of the Daily Cardinal Alumni Association.
With all of the alumni and staff present, celebrating the joys of being together and being part of the Cardinal, it looked like we had done what we set out to do.
But we have only just begun.
With this issue, the DCAA begins the long haul: to continue to bring closer together and closer to the Cardinal and to help the Cardinal become the ideal of our own ideals as the best place to learn and teach the trade and business of journalism.
We are starting our first annual fund-raising campaign. Our goal will be nothing short of recapitalization and revamping the entire newsroom: to have the students' newsroom experience lack nothing their paid, professional counterparts possess.
We are doing this in the name of someone that those of us planning the award dinner got to know well: the late Miriam Ottenberg.
Miriam, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who credited her start to the Cardinal, exemplified the best possible result of student experience at the Cardinal. She went on to break ground at all levels of the trade, received its highest honor and got the utmost respect of her peers and sources, including Robert F. Kennedy.
This new newsroom will be her newsroom: it will be the best environment for students to develop into the next generation of groundbreakers. With your help, we can do this. And, Miriam, we think, would be proud.
No more than just another great idea
This was not my idea. Really.
The idea of an alumni association for The Daily Cardinal has been brought up before: seven years ago, at the centennial reunion and twelve years ago, at the 95th reunion. It is an idea whose time has come, so I have been told -- many times.
Why should it work this time?
This organization can do a lot of good. It can purchase new computers. It can give students scholarships; provide internships and jobs. It can rebuild and strengthen old friendships. It can honor those who have best represent the ideals of William Wesley Young.
What am I saying?
"It" cannot do anything. An organization is nothing without its members who contribute and make the the successes possible.
Is that going to happen this time?
Will we all help the Cardinal in every way we wanted to when we were at the Cardinal? If you were anything like I was, you would have said the same thing, "If I had x I would do y for the Cardinal."
Now is your chance. Donate your time, money, experience or voice. Mentor a student. Write an article. Give someone an informational interview. Convince the UW of the good that the Cardinal education does for the UW. Get a few old friends together to discuss how to make the best part of your past the best part of someone else's future.
Just remember, this should be our idea.
--Anthony T. Sansone is DCAA President. He held multiple jobs at the Cardinal, and now works in Lisle, Ill.
Preserving 107 years of history
Work continues to collect and perserve the history of The Daily Cardinal. The Archive Project was started by alumna Allison Sansone.
The Daily Cardinal Archive Project began as nothing more than an attempt to catch up.
The stuff had been sitting around in boxes for years, in filing cabinets, folders, clip files to cumbersome to move and too obscure to throw away, in the old green metal safe which no longer locked, under desks and behind tables.
During a colossal cleaning out in the summer of 1995, the Cardinal's past emerged from the dusty corners of a seldom-straightened office.
Twenty-year-old resignation letters, pulled from a desk drawer, still crackled with bitterness and regret: "Here are my keys. My desk is cleaned out..."
Inside a rusting old metal box, the files kept on the Cardinal by the CIA and FBI still testified to the relentless FOIA requests from Gilliam Kerley that unearthed them in the first place.
More than a century of microfilm, incomplete and diordered, sat in a box on the office floor, waiting for someone to trip over it.
And gradually, from these pieces, this scraping together of echoes, a story emerged.
The Daily Cardinal Archive Project's first task upon being founded in 1997 was to get caught up binding and microfilming the newspapers themselves, a task which had fallen by the wayside, deemed non-essential and too expensive when belts tightened at the Cardinal several years ago.
Eleven years of the Cardinal had not been filmed, leaving a large gap in the most reliable and durable form of record of the newspaper's existence. Two years remained unbound.
Luckily, through the intervention of University Archives -- which needed the bound and microfilmed Cardinals almost as much as we did -- that job proved to be surprisingly expedient and relatively inexpensive.
University Archives Director J. Frank Cook, who has been serving as the project's unofficial troubleshooter since the beginning, helped us piece together the missing newspapers to be bound and microfilmed.
We also arranged to have the library system pick up half the cost of microfilming the backlog, which totalled $2,700.
One of the first tasks after this was convincing the board of directors that money should be set aside in the budget for binding and microfilming the newspaper on a yearly basis.
Getting caught up on the binding was a start. But it wasn't even close to enough.
A student newspaper is a transient place, which is its strength and its weakness. Institutional memory is all but impossible. Aside from the slender official history, which contains as much innuendo and office legend as fact, the story of the Cardinal is in essence the story of the people who are there at any given time. If they leave nothing behind, no proof, no records, only they can ever prove their time existed.
The project was founded in part to ensure that institutional memory, that record, that proof; to provide a resource for those looking at an idea they thought was novel and wondering, "Has this ever been tried before? Did it work?"
It also was founded to chronicle campus history, in stories and photographs: with bylines that have assurance, leads that have voice and passion and columns that have personal outrage and purpose. The project also sought to instill respect for the newspaper's history and the campus it covered, to give it weight, to make working at it, running it, living in it a responsibility as well as a joy.
But what does the project do?
We began with the letters.
The Cardinal has received numerous plaudits over the years, from Congressmen Scott Klug and Gaylord Nelson and Senators Joe McCarthy and Russ Feingold. J. Edgar Hoover once wrote a brief missive to then-editor Jack Zeldes, graciously declining to write a guest editorial. President Harry S. Truman, in a letter to the Cardinal, congratulated the University of Wisconsin on its centennial.
We found these while sorting through boxes and framed some of them, to hang on the office walls. Others we filed, along with other correspondence, financial records, promotional materials, major advertising campaign materials, and any and all material relating to Cardinal history.
The project, now housed in its own corner of Cardinal offices in Vilas Hall, contains over 200 files on editorial, business, advertising and directorial matters -- not to mention printing plates, antique photo equipment, vintage newspapers, and 107 years of bound and microfilmed Cardinals. A student archivist oversees the project and is in turn overseen by the board of directors.
The project also provides a safe framework for recording information like staff lists, any publicity the Cardinal receives, major editorial or business policy changes and records of Cardinal events. It ensures a safe place for donated memorabilia, more of which comes in every day from generous alumni who wish to help us complete the Cardinal's story by lending their voices and information.
We keep it all and keep track of it all as best we can in a paper catalog and in the files. Even as we gather papers, stories and tales from the past, the project looks for more ways to make the information already possessed more useful and accessible to the university and alumni.
The DCAA and University Archives have presented a grant request to the Evjue Foundation through the Office of the Chancellor to catalog and index all 107 years of The Daily Cardinal, every article, every page, to make information about the campus's past -- and the stories you wrote -- easier to find. At present, no such index exists.
The project is actively seeking space more conducive to its purposes; generous donations of material have little room in the Cardinal's offices.
This project, though off to a good start, is a work in progress. We have 107 years of history to catch up on, 107 years of voices to listen to, stories to read, facts to research, fables to prove or disprove. And once we're finished with that, we have a story to write, that of the Cardinal itself.
Your time at the Cardinal is part of that story. We hope you will continue, as you so generously have done in the past, to share with us your own Cardinal histories.
Please note: Project donations should be sent to the Cardinal offices. Questions should be directed to the author via the DCAA's toll free number: 877/THE DCAA.