Four years ago, I walked into 118 Kerckhoff Hall for the first time.
It was Thursday of week one during my first quarter at UCLA. I was a quiet, confused and awkward intern-to-be. An entire undergraduate career’s worth of experiences later, I will be walking out of those familiar double doors a loud, but still confused and awkward ex-senior staffer.
The unchanging brick exterior, the eternal griminess of the keyboards, that one bowl of frozen noodles in the back corner fridge that never seems to expire are deceptive. The Daily Bruin is all about evolution.
Three years ago, what was formerly known as Daily Bruin TV got a face lift. The other editors and I had many reasons for this change: the changing nature of media, a new viewer generation, the shift to documentary-style storytelling. All this came in addition to the fact that we were not actually on TV and had not been since we lost our channel a decade ago.
The result was Daily Bruin Video.
“You’re in Video? But the newspaper is made of like … paper.”
This is the typical response I get when I tell people that I work for the Video section. I explain to them that, like many other modern news outlets, the Daily Bruin has an online section.
We have been rebranded with the sophisticated name “multimedia.” We have been dubbed “the new face of journalism” and “a vision from the future.” Supposedly, we are the section that everyone will want to be in five years.
Really, we’re just the people in the office everyone else forgets because we don’t have mug shots and bylines like all the cool kids. And sometimes, we don’t even have content.
The second evolution runs much deeper and encompasses the entire newsroom. At the end of each academic year, the office undergoes a metamorphosis akin to a heart transplant: the entrance of a new crop of editors to replace the old.
As each year ends and the office sends a group of outgoing editors to brave the real world, I always assume it’s the end of an era for the office. What I have yet to realize is that each spring is the start of a new one.
The heart of the Daily Bruin does not die with the graduating class. Rather, it is resuscitated by the incoming people as they breathe fresh life and energy into the newsroom.
So my final column is dedicated to them, the newsroom of 2012-2013 and the years to come. To all of you, including those who have not yet arrived at UCLA, I wish the very best.
Embrace every moment in that windowless office because those experiences are what college memories are made of.
_Du was an assistant video producer from 2009-2011 and a video contributor from 2008-2009. _