The Daily Californian Alumni Association >  Alumni Association Organizational Overview >  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