The Daily Bruin Needs You! Serve on the Comm Board!

Dear Fellow Daily Bruin Alumni,

I’m writing to you today regarding a critically important opportunity for our alumni to help support The Daily Bruin and student media at UCLA: The ASUCLA Communications Board is filling four (4) media professional board seats for the 2024-25 academic year and I’d like to encourage you to step forward and serve.

As the overseer of UCLA Student Media, the Comm Board is responsible for the financial management and provisions of proper newsrooms, and for advising and training students at The Daily Bruin and its sister publications under UCLA Student Media. This UCLA board — consisting of faculty, administration, alumni, student government reps and those four media professional seats — sets the tone and direction of student media, with a say in allocating resources toward preparing those newsroom leaders of tomorrow.

As the UCLA Alumni Association’s representative to the Comm Board, and the immediate past president of DBAN, I’m writing to urge you — the experienced and learned journalists and media management professionals of the Daily Bruin family — to join me on the Comm Board to chart a new course for UCLA Student Media in these challenging times for the free press.

As I explained at the 2023 DBAN Reunion in October, the alumni of our peer collegiate newspapers across the country have been coming back to campuses for decades to serve on the Comm Board-equivalents at their alma maters.

• At the University of Michigan, the Daily’s accomplished alumni and leading journalism professors presiding over the Michigan Student Publications Office renovated their building, created academic curriculum for staffers pursuing the journalism calling, and set up dozens of endowed scholarships for reporters and editors.
• The Syracuse Daily Orange can count on the leadership and guidance of DO alums from The Boston Globe, The L.A. Times, The Atlantic and leading law firms and Fortune 500 companies.
• At Western Kentucky, the alumni of the College Heights Herald have endowed 10 paid summer fellowships for WKU students to work at professional newspapers across the Midwest and the country. Under the leadership of Chuck Clark, an alumnus of The Herald and the Student Media director, the WKU Student Publications Committee is funding the construction of a new building for The Herald and has embarked on a $3 million endowment to provide operational funds for WKU Student Publications.
• At Stanford, the Stanford Daily alumni embarked on 15-year-long effort to construct the Lorry I. Lokey Stanford Daily Building on campus and has launched the Daily@150 campaign to fund the operations of The Daily in perpetuity. Alumni in tech and venture capital digitized The Daily, while working with the likes of Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, to provide paid summer fellowships to their students.

DBAN, the reigning UCLA Alumni Association Network of the Year, has done a remarkable job since our founding in 2018 to catch up with our peers, including expanding our DB Scholars program and arranging the OC Register Summer Fellowship for students.

But big things only happen when accomplished people roll up their sleeves and get to work (including navigating through a university bureaucracy.) So much needs to be done to make sure The Daily Bruin and other media at UCLA continue to survive and thrive.

Since the Comm Board is vital to making sure the right resources are committed to student media, we need media professionals who can share their wisdom and guidance. We need your experience, skills, connections and resources to do what our peers have done at other school papers, in partnership with our UCLA campus partners and the students serving on the Comm Board.

If you think you can step up and serve as a media professional member, please contact me (LawrenceMaEsq@me.com) or DBAN President Connie Guglielmo ’83 (acmewriter@gmail.com). We’re happy to answer any questions and hear your thoughts and ideas.

Let’s get to work!

Thank you,
Lawrence S. Ma ’95
Former President, Daily Bruin Alumni Network
Member (Alumni Association), ASUCLA Communications Board