Three years ago I fell in love with The Bruin ““ and since
then, I’ve been asking myself why.
As a freshman on the orientation tour I found an otherwise gray
office marked with wry reminders of its inhabitants and knew at
once that these were my kind of people.
There was a tangled web of white lights over the Viewpoint
cubicle, a coconut that a sports writer had FedEx-ed from Hawaii,
and assorted “Flubber” promotional goodies in A&E
that seemed solely designed to scare small children. On the fabric
walls and desk of Copy, the department I would quickly join, I saw
printouts of Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction” mode
and plants dead from lack of exposure to the outside world.
But as I thought about what my work as a copy editor would be
like, I also imagined the day when I would leave The Bruin and be
expected to have some profound truth to report in a column such as
this. I wondered whether I would be relieved or bitter or somehow
wiser or just happy to have survived. And now, as the nostalgia
begins to smooth away the small frustrations of daily production, I
believe I will take with me a quiet sense of enlightenment.
My work is in details: inserting commas and snipping away at
articles, summarizing a thousand words in a six or seven word
headline, taking care of the paper after hours.
In time it was frighteningly easy to get consumed by routine and
forget why I joined the newspaper.
“Web site” is two words. Spell check. A story is an
hour late. Eat candy for dinner. The computer crashes at midnight.
Spell check.
Why exactly did I say that I loved The Bruin?
But one day last fall during the infamous disabled parking
placard affair, I had a small realization. It was nothing dramatic
but still intrinsic to my understanding of what editors and writers
and everyone else should know.
Details do matter.
At a weekly staff meeting our editor in chief told us about a
chance conversation she had walking with a woman near campus. The
woman was in a motorized wheelchair and asked our editor if she
would get something out of the bag behind her chair. The object
turned out to be a Daily Bruin, and the woman was actually
associated with the Chancellor’s Committee on
Disabilities.
Though unaware that she was speaking to a staff member, she
expressed her happiness to find that The Bruin used the word
“disabled” instead of “handicapped” in its
coverage of the scandal. She said how being sensitive to just a
single word was important to her and to her community.
This story was particularly meaningful to me because the
previous week, a writer’s suggestion had prompted us to make
one among many small changes to our Daily Bruin style manual:
“disabled,” not “handicapped.” This
incident was a small but very real connection for me to the vast
notion of our readership.
And this is the story that I think of some nights when I’m
inserting a slash mark in “Chicana/o” or getting
annoyed trying to squeeze one more word into a headline. I think of
the thousands of people who read this newspaper and wish that
maybe, hopefully, the work that my friends and I have done will
mean as much to them as it does to us.
And I remember why I fell in love with The Bruin in the first
place.