Author: Tyler Brown

“Technology, at first, greatly benefited the news media, and then it began to destroy it,” said Joel Brinkley, Visiting Hearst Professional in Residence at Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism (GPIJ), a subsidiary of the Department of Communication.

“When I started, there was no Internet, there was no e-mail… so when I worked for local papers, I worked from sort of a cocoon unless I subscribed to the New York Times or the Detroit Free Press,” he continued. “I had no idea what anybody else was doing. That’s the way it was in the seventies and the eighties and pretty much into the early nineties.”

In 2005, the journalism program’s curriculum still trained students for the nineties newsroom. But now, the Internet is a centerpiece of Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism. According to Acting Director Ann Grimes, during the past five years, the program has rewritten its curriculum to “train students in old media values and digital media skills.”

The program’s brochure now shows Internet cables above reams of newsprint on the cover and advertises a program that “is actively engaged with next-generation media technologies.”

Grimes said a big change is the integration of multimedia instruction with public issues reporting classes. For one course, students pick a Bay Area location where they do what Grimes calls “old fashioned gumshoe reporting on city hall” and publish their stories on the “Silicon Valley Pulse” website, where the stories are sometimes picked up by newspapers and are displayed on websites like Google News.

“Our capstone class in the spring is a class called “Digital Media Entrepreneurship,” she said. In this class, journalism students collaborate with Graduate School of Business (GSB) and engineering students to produce digital media ventures “that hopefully have a sustainable business model.” She said this kind of class is mostly unique to Stanford, because students are immersed in Silicon Valley.

“The other thing that we’re dong is we’re encouraging our students to take advantage of the many interdisciplinary offerings that are on campus so that they can tailor their program to their interests,” Grimes said. “We have students taking the design school boot camp. We have students taking CS105 – learning how to code. We have students taking the entrepreneurial ventures class at the GSB so that they can learn about the industry that they’re entering.”

So that they find jobs after leaving the program, the GPIJ also strives to get its students’ work recognized.

“We’re also working with different outside media organizations – the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Center for Investigative Reporting and Patch.com (an East Coast amateur news site) have all expressed varying levels of interest in our students here,” Grimes said. “So increasingly we are getting our students to produce reports that are picked up or will be picked up by these larger media organizations.”

The program also encourages students to take internships with outside organizations. Because the program is small – there are typically about 15 students per year – it tries to maximize students’ opportunities and help them get the jobs in areas that they’re interested in. This year, students are working at KQED (the Bay Area PBS radio station), VNet.com, Current TV, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Business Times. Students are also working at the Wall Street Journal, National Journal, Gigaom Network and Google News.

“There are still, of course, professional reporters working at large scale newspapers, but newspapers themselves now are multimedia enterprises, as are all journalistic enterprises,” said Fred Turner, associate professor of Communication.

The news media is changing rapidly, and the GPIJ prepares its students to adapt to the changing journalistic landscape.

“What we need to do is let a thousand flowers bloom. And nobody’s really sure yet which flowers are going to grow and which flowers aren’t,” Turner said. “Students who finish the program have a year of training – the core sequence is six courses, with three ‘traditional journalism’ nodes, and three additional nodes for training in new media.”

“Journalistic institutions are changing,” he continued. “We have to train our students for a world in which there are some newspapers, but there are a lot more startups. And we have to train our students for a startup world. That’s really a challenge. And we’re sure getting after it.”

Ted Zayner ’78 appointed to Santa Clara County Superior Court

More than 30 years after graduating from Stanford, Ted Zayner ‘78, a Bay Area resident since he arrived on the Farm, has found his calling.

On Dec. 29, Gov. Schwarzenegger appointed Zayner to a six-year term on the bench of the Santa Clara County Superior Court, whose session begins Jan. 19, sending Zayner’s career in a direction he couldn’t imagine when he first settled at Stern Hall in 1974.

Zayner was drawn from his home on the south side of Chicago to the Farm in part because of memories of watching Jim Plunkett win the Rose Bowl.

He spent his childhood hanging out on the sidelines of the field where his father coached high school football in the public leagues — he was 4 years old when he went to his first game. While football was not the primary reason for attending Stanford, he said it “was one of the things in the back of my mind.”

After graduating from St. Ignatius College Prep, a Jesuit school in Chicago that he described as “almost a magnet school,” Zayner helped assemble an independent intramural sports league where he played football, volleyball, water polo and soccer. But academically, Zayner wasn’t sure what direction to take.

“Like perhaps a lot of 18-year-olds coming out of high school, I sort of had ideas what I wanted to do, but it’s not that I had thought out any kind of career path,” he said. “I kind of defaulted toward science, muddling around in pre-med for a little bit, and decided I wasn’t going to survive in that.”

In college, and even law school, Zayner never imagined being a judge. It wasn’t until fall quarter his senior year, after he had flirted with degrees in biology, physics, math, economics and engineering, that Zayner start thinking about going to law school.

“[At the start of my senior year,] I was an econ major with only a few classes left, and then wasn’t really excited about being an econ major,” he said.

“I wanted to go to law school because I was interested in that,” Zayner added. “I wasn’t certain I wanted to be a lawyer, but I thought law school would be an interesting thing to do.”

Zayner began litigating shortly after he graduated from the University of California Hastings College of the Law in 1983.

“I pretty much got thrown into it and started taking depositions [pretrial interrogation of witnesses] and preparing cases,” he said. “So, at the outset, it was a little nerve-wracking.”

For Zayner, the anxiety hasn’t disappeared, but it has changed character over time.

“The nervousness now, I liken to competitive nervousness — it’s not something that prevents you from doing the job and doing an effective job, but it enhances your awareness and your focus,” he said.

Zayner recalled a memorable bad-faith insurance case, which involved a yearlong series of trials concerning chemical cleanup liability. His firm was representing an insurance company slapped with a payment to cover cleanup costs for FMC Corporation’s chemical processing sites.

“It was probably the case that shaped my confidence in my skills as a trial lawyer more than anything else,” he said.

In stark contrast to his experience, Zayner believes today’s young lawyers aren’t being “thrown into it” fast enough or getting enough courtroom time. Part of the reason, he said, stems from a criminal case backlog that delays and drives up the cost of bringing civil cases to trial.

“The courts in general are fairly overwhelmed,” he said. “And they’re overwhelmed with criminal cases, which always have first priority, so it’s harder to get civil cases out to trial.”

Zayner attributes the rise in court fees, lawyers’ billable hour rates and other litigation expenses in the last three decades to a culture where a lot of clients, especially large companies, won’t pay for relatively inexperienced lawyers to try cases. Instead, young lawyers “tend to get a lot of experience working long hours and doing a lot of the grunt work that has to be done to prep a case.”

But working behind the scenes, they aren’t learning what it’s like in the courtroom. As Zayner put it, “they don’t get the reward at the end.”

When cases go to trial, Zayner believes new lawyers should sit “second chair” to their more practiced colleagues to gain courtroom experience.

“When you go to trial and learn to try a case in front of a jury, it’s a whole new world,” he said. “It’s a gradual learning curve like anything else — you grow more and more comfortable in your own skin.”

In addition to changing new lawyers’ roles, Zayner said the high expense of taking civil cases to trial makes it more likely the cases will be settled out of court.

“The courts have more strongly encouraged mediation and negotiation alternative disputed resolution (ADR), a more efficient and cost-effective method of trying to get cases resolved early,” Zayner said.

Since 1991, Zayner has involved himself in ADR both as a judge pro tem — a “temporary judge” — presiding over pretrial settlement conferences that sitting judges don’t have time for, and as private practice judicial arbitrator.

Zayner started applying for a full-time judgeship three years ago.

“It’s a pretty daunting process,” he admitted. The application is four pages, “but when you answer all the questions and add a detailed resume of your entire legal career, you end up submitting 50 or 60 pages to the governor’s office. And then they do their own investigation and vetting.

“If the governor’s office considers you a viable candidate, the state bar’s judicial commission interviews and reviews you, and then the governor’s office does its own investigation and brings you up for an interview,” Zayner added. “And then you wait and hope you get a phone call. They won’t ever call you again except to give you an appointment.”

Zayner got the call. He starts overseeing misdemeanor criminal cases at Palo Alto Courthouse on Jan 19.

“That seems to be a traditional first place for new judges to learn the ropes,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

Fall quarter, 114 Minor in Possession of Alcohol (MIP) citations were issued, up by nearly double from last year, according to a report from the Department of Public Safety (DPS). In contrast, alcohol-related medical emergencies during New Student Orientation (NSO) declined compared to last year.

DPS issued 62 MIP citations last fall quarter and 81 the year before last.

“The increase in citations in 2009 to date can be partially attributed to increased staffing during nights when parties are held, [when] alcohol violations and other incidents such as burglaries, thefts and assaults are more likely to occur,” DPS spokesman Bill Larson wrote in an e-mail to The Daily.

Upperclassmen were issued the majority of Driving Under the Influence (DUI) and Drunk in Public tickets. The vast majority of MIP tickets were issued on the Row.

According to Ralph Castro, associate dean of substance abuse prevention at Vaden Health Center, the relative number of freshmen transported to emergency rooms for alcohol poisoning declined to 40 percent of all students transported to the ER for alcohol-related reasons. In previous years, they were the majority.

Castro believes the later fall move-in date for Row houses and revised University party-planning guidelines, both of which went into effect this summer, were instrumental in the decline of early-quarter emergency room transports. He sees the later move-in date as a “protective factor” that gives upperclassmen less idle time before classes start.

With those policies in place, Castro doesn’t see the need for additional changes in the near future.

“At this time, I believe that the policies we have in place are working,” Castro wrote in an e-mail to The Daily. “We have a solid social contract with students. The University assumes that students will make responsible and healthy decisions, and this assumption guides all of our policy decisions.”

In Castro’s opinion, the primary cause of unhealthy decisions is students’ poor ability to distinguish between the alcohol contents of different drinks, resulting in excessive consumption of hard liquor.

“Some students think they can drink hard liquor in volume quantities similar to beer, and this leads to troubling outcomes,” Castro said. “We continue to stress the dangers of hard liquor in our education efforts.”

When students are ticketed for alcohol violations, they are required to enter the Alcohol Education Seminar at Vaden’s Substance Abuse Prevention Program. Castro says the program has been successful since the rate of repeat offense is only four percent.

As alcohol education has become more pervasive, high-risk drinking has declined across campus, especially among freshmen. Castro indicated that while AlcoholEdu, the online alcohol education seminar required for freshmen, cannot be correlated to declining alcohol-related incidents at Stanford, there has been a marked decrease in high-risk drinking since the program was introduced four years ago.

“We continue to enforce the prohibition against Minors in Possession of alcohol,” Larson said. “Also, our sworn personnel work closely with our colleagues at Student Affairs to promote alcohol awareness and education.”

There were no violent crimes committed on campus this quarter where alcohol was implicated as a contributing factor.