Keep up with The Daily: Vol. 251
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Hi Stanford Daily Alumni,
Spring has been busy at The Daily. Keep reading this second alumni newsletter for updates about Daily@125, the Volume 252 election and the most recent book produced by The Daily. As always, you can stay in touch with The Daily (and find Daily staffers from your era) by joining the alumni Facebook and LinkedIn groups. You can also subscribe to our Daily Digest for a morning email with top news, sports, features and opinions, as well as cruise down memory lane via The Daily’s digital archives.
Daily@125 update
The Daily alumni team has been hard at work planning the celebration for The Daily’s 125thanniversary during Big Game weekend 2017. Daily alum Joel Stein ’93 will be joining us as a featured speaker, as well as others from places like Google, the New York Times and The Washington Post. A save the date with more information will be sent out soon.
Volume 252 election results
Ada Statler-Throckmorton ’18, current Executive Editor, was recently elected Editor in Chief for Vol. 252. Ada has previously served as the managing editor of news. She wrote the story about John Boehner’s comments on Ted Cruz (Boehner called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh” at an event at Stanford) and embedded with the Fossil Free Stanford protesters last year to write a great series of articles on the protests. Her plans for the volume include “standardizing staff development, revamping the email digest and continuing work on the diversity and outreach initiative.”
A 10-unit labor of love
Each newsletter, we’ll feature a story about alumni. Our first feature centers on the experiences of three recent Daily grads who wrote a book about Stanford football.
At first, former Daily staffers George Chen ’15, Joey Beyda ’15 M.S. ’15 and Sam Fisher ’14 toyed with the idea of producing a coffee table volume about Stanford football. The paper’s COO at the time suggested it could bring in some alternative revenue. The three friends — two sophomores and a junior, all of them avid sports fans — imagined a picture-filled look back through the football program’s recent resurgence.
Ultimately, George, Joey and Sam decided on a longer and far more intensive project to chronicle Stanford’s rise from a demoralizing 1-11 season in 2006 to a Rose Bowl victory in 2012. At the encouragement of a journalism professor, they set to work on a full-length book that would become a defining part of their time at The Daily.
Five months, over 30 interviews and nearly 200,000 words of transcripts later, they published “Rags to Roses.”
“There’s not many places where you can build connections with people and in a few quick months pursue something like this,” Joey said. “There’s a community around you [at The Daily] that wants to see awesome work get done … It was our capstone project on our college career.”
When the “Rags to Roses” authors began their work in March of 2013, they were unsure if they could even get the interviews necessary for the story — interviews with the likes of Andrew Luck ’12 and Jim Harbaugh. But once the interviews were secured, Sam said, the story “just told itself.”
“Every interview we did we were getting such rich information,” Sam said. “The players had been part of this remarkable journey … While it was happening, no one expected it.”
Many of the interviewees’ stories, Sam said, hadn’t been told before. The anecdotes the writers gleaned detail both moments of triumph and moments of crisis for Stanford football: The book’s first chapter, “Rock Bottom,” describes a coach who players complained couldn’t hold his team together and resorted to a punitive regimen of bear crawls (“[You wouldn’t] play to win the game; you’d play to not do bear crawls,” “Rags to Roses” quotes one player saying).
In the end, though, “Rags to Roses” told a story of growth that the football team was immensely proud of, Sam said. A newspaper’s relationship with the team they cover can be strained, he noted, but he and his coauthors felt “a lot of love” from the program as a result of writing the book.
“Rags to Roses” ended up capturing the football team at the top of its comeback.
“It was right place, right time, right people,” George said. “I think a year before or a year after, it would have been too late.”
Piecing together a book in five months was, needless to say, challenging, and Joey said he, George and Sam were initially “naïve” about the work required. Promoting the book in The Daily, Joey wrote that “Rags to Roses” was the 10-unit class he and his friends never planned to take.
The staffers wrote the book largely on Google Docs and developed an unusually intensive editing process as they sorted out how to organize all their information and smooth chapters written by different people into one coherent voice. Collaborating brought the three friends even closer; Joey would later say while running for Editor in Chief that if he got married the next day, his best men would be from The Daily.
The writers dove back through six years of Daily photo archives and tapped other Daily staff, from copy editors to layout master Duran Alvarez, for help.
“We really pulled on the whole Daily’s resources,” Joey said.
When “Rags to Roses” published in July, George, Joey and Sam were heartened by its reception. The book went on to sell over 2,000 copies, and its stories and quotes made their way into publications like USA TODAY. For the 2014 Rose Bowl, the Stanford Bookstore helped coordinate a book signing at Santa Monica Pier.
“I was shocked by how many people showed up,” George said, remembering the signing. “A lot of people had already bought their books but came to say hi.”
While the three authors have moved on from The Daily now, they agreed that the skills they honed while writing “Rags to Roses” have not gone to waste.
George and Joey, both former Editors in Chief, have gone into STEM: George is a research fellow at Framingham Heart Study, and Joey is a product manager at tech company Ericsson. Joey said that at work he’s constantly drawing together many perspectives into cohesive stories.
Sam, former managing editor of sports, has found a niche for the love of athletics he cultivated at The Daily. Two years ago he founded Right Call Consulting, which aims to improve software in athletics.
And “Rags to Roses” still pops up in the former Daily staffers’ lives. Just a few weeks ago, Sam was flying to Denver when someone tapped him on the shoulder to ask if he had written the book. The stranger wanted to talk football.
Of course, Sam texted George and Joey about it.
Check out the Rags to Roses eBook on Amazon or the paper copy from the Stanford Bookstore if you’d like to read Sam, George and Joey’s work.
Daily at the Newseum
Stanford hosted an event with Marc Tessier-Lavigne at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. in April as Tessier-Lavigne was introduced to the University alumni community. As part of the event, the Newseum displayed the front page of that day’s Daily alongside the front pages of newspapers from around the world.
Award Winners
The Daily recently announced staff awards and scholarships, which we’re able to offer thanks to the generous support of alumni. Below are the winners:
Harry Press Award: Ada Statler-Throckmorton
William Woo Opinion Writing Award: Amanda Rizkalla ’20
Julius Jacobs Scholarship: Hannah Knowles ’19
Honorable Mention: Alexa Philippou ’18 and Kit Ramgopal ’19
George Caulfield Award: Samantha Wong ’18 and Alexa Philippou ’18
San Jose Mercury News internship (sponsored by the Friends of The Daily): Gillian Brassil ’19
Subscribe for your magazine package
If you’re interested in reading The Daily’s new magazine product, we’re mailing sets of the magazine out for free to Daily alumni! Please fill out this form to receive your collection at the end of the school year.
Alumni notes
Finally, send us alumni updates — we’ll be including alumni notes in future newsletters. If you have someone who you think might make for an interesting alumni feature, email us at alumni@stanforddaily.com.
Regards,
Andrew Vogeley ’17, Alumni Engagement Director, The Stanford Daily
Victor Xu ’17, Editor-in-Chief, The Stanford Daily
Andrew Mather ’16, Chief Operating Officer, The Stanford Daily
Tim Marklein ’91, President, Friends of The Stanford Daily
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