About the Daily Californian Alumni Association

More than 400 former Daily Californian staffers have joined The Daily Californian Alumni Association since its resurrection in August 1996. A unit of The Daily Californian Education Foundation, the DCAA exists to bring alumni of the newspaper together as well as to provide mentorship and financial support to the current student staff. Well-known alumni of The Daily Californian include World War II correspondent Marguerite Higgins and countless other leaders in media and business.

Membership is open to all former staff members of The Daily Californian or student publications office staff (pre 1971). A donation of $50 or more to The Daily Californian Education Foundation earns a lifetime membership in the Alumni Association. Membership includes a biannual alumni newsletter, the November 2003 membership directory and invitations to all alumni gatherings. Reunions are held every October during homecoming weekend on the Berkeley campus, and offer a chance for alums to mingle and trade stories with students on the current staff. 2004 reunions will also be held in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento. Chicago and Marin County may also host 2004 reunions.

Karlyn Barker '68, an assistant editor on the metro staff at the Washington Post and a former editor of the Daily Cal, coordinates the Alumni Association along with Dan Jung '00.

The Alumni Association's website is located at http://alumni.dailycal.org.

All monies raised from alumni donations go toward student training in journalism or newspaper management, student scholarships and equipment upgrades at The Daily Californian. Alumni funded projects include a new network of Apple iMac computers for the paper's newsroom, as well as advanced photo-scanning equipment for the Daily Cal's photography department. The Alumni Association's current campaign is to help the newspaper acquire some of the tools necessary to modernize its newsroom.

The DCAA is a chartered club of the California Alumni Association.

About the Daily Californian Education Foundation

Established in 1991, The Daily Californian Education Foundation supports student journalism and newspaper management training at the University of California, Berkeley. No "journalism" major is offered to undergraduates at UC Berkeley, leaving The Daily Californian to fill the training void.

Because The Daily Californian is one of only a handful of student-run newspapers to operate independently of the university that it covers, the nonprofit corporation that publishes the paper exists entirely on advertising revenues generated by a student sales staff. The paper's break-even budget is stable enough to ensure that 23,000 copies hit the streets five mornings a week, but expenditures that are not absolutely necessary often fall out of the equation. Unfortunately, this means that new computers in the newsroom, a travel budget for reporters or training sessions for student ad sales reps - things that are key to the training mission of the newspaper - cannot always be accommodated.

That's where The Daily Californian Education Foundation comes in. All funds raised by the Foundation are strictly earmarked for student training, whether it be sending a reporter to a daylong conference on media ethics, or helping to pay for photo processing equipment similar to that found at larger newspapers where our staffers might someday work. The UC Berkeley campus and surrounding community provide our reporters, photographers and editors with plenty to cover; the Foundation works to ensure that they write, process and edit on the kind of equipment that will prepare them for a career in journalism or related fields. The Daily Californian's newly reorganized advertising sales staff, which employs nearly two dozen UC Berkeley students, now receives Foundation support as well.

Recent corporate contributors to the Education Foundation include the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Daily Californian is the only student-run paper in the nation to have a nonprofit foundation supporting its training mission.

The 12-member Education Foundation board is composed of former Daily Californian staff members and other supporters of the paper and its goals. David Corvo '72, Vice President, NBC News and a former editor of The Daily Californian, serves as chair. The Daily Californian Alumni Association is a unit of the Education Foundation. This network of editorial- and business-staff alumni helps former staffers stay in touch with each other, and provides mentorship and some financial support to the paper's current student staff.

The Alumni Association holds an annual fund-raising campaign that allows alumni to put their membership dues toward a worthwhile project that benefits the current staff. The 2003 campaign seeks to raise $50,000 to help the Daily Californian acquire some of the tools necessary to modernize its newsroom. The Foundation and Alumni Association recently contributed to a $25,000 upgrade of the paper's newsroom computer network.

The Daily Californian Education Foundation is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. All contributions to the Foundation are tax-deductible.

For more information, email foundation@dailycal.org.

The Daily Californian Education Foundation Board of Directors

Larry Wilson, Chair
Michael Lovas, Vice Chair
Bryan Thomas, Editor in Chief & President
Anna Hiatt, Staff Representative
Elizabeth Simons
Robert Bazell
Joyce Chen
Dan Jung
Erik Klavon
Carla Lazzareschi
Allen Matthews
Paul Neal
Monica Valencia
Peter McCarty
Jonathan Rodgers
Janny Hu

The Daily Californian Board of Directors

Allen Matthews, Chair
Bryan Thomas, Editor in Chief & President
Anna Hiatt, Staff Representative
Tim Graham
Patrick Hoge
Henry Lee
Katrina Lee
Ellen Lee
Marian Liu
Helen Marcus
Nick Perlmuter
Linda Schacht
Oscar Shine
Corinne Chen
Andrew Chau

Contact Us

For more information on anything in this site, please contact Bryan at foundation@dailycal.org.