Maria Marron recalls certain articles, individuals and contributions of leadership from Central Michigan Life over the seven years she has been with Central Michigan University.

As the Journalism Department chairwoman, she has witnessed virtually a new cohort of students cycle through the paper’s staff on a regular basis.

Despite this, Marron said various aspects of CM Life “pop into mind” about how the student medium has impacted CMU’s campus.

“I think CM Life is an important contributor to news and information about the university,” she said. “It keeps people informed and it circulates ads that are relevant to the student population and other constituencies on campus.”

Dean of Students Bruce Roscoe said the paper has been a means of communication through various factions of CMU, and that there is no real negative consensus regarding the paper’s responsibility to write the facts as they exist.

He also acknowledges CM Life’s ability in “reporting the facts rather than conjecture” in several controversial topics.

“I think a lot of administrators and faculty view CM Life as the main means of obtaining and receiving information,” Roscoe said. “I give CM Life a lot of credit for covering stories that are maybe not complimentary to CMU.”

Associate Professor of Journalism Jim Wojcik was the adviser to CM Life for around 30 years, and he said the publication’s reputation around campus, especially with CMU administration, is one of the many aspects that hasn’t changed.

“CM Life’s job is not to make administrators happy,” he said. “It’s the paper’s role to tell people what is happening and what is the impact of what is happening on them.”

It also has to do with the size of the university’s population, Wojcik said, and the variety of perception people might have.

“You’re on a campus that has 20,000 students and 2,000 faculty and staff. I’m sure of those 22,000 people, not everybody is in love with CM Life,” he said. “You judge by a couple of things, you judge by how many people pick up your paper. I don’t see a whole lot of them laying around.”

Through his experiences, Wojcik said the overall impression is that CM Life is a newspaper that is not afraid to deal with some hard issues and raise questions.

He said the reputation the paper turned around in the late-1950s and the paper moving to a thrice-weekly paper over time has helped make it better.

But the real “instant jolt of credibility” came in 1972 in a change of the paper’s structure.

“I think one of the first things we did that really impacted Life is we changed it from a tabloid to a broad sheet,” Wojcik said. “It looked and felt like a real newspaper, even though when it was a tabloid, it use to cover news really well.”

The main purpose of CM Life, Marron said, has been to specifically serve its campus community, leaving outside news to other regional sources despite the interest readers might have in those subjects.

“I think the newspaper’s essentially a campus newspaper. I know it’s distributed in the city of Mount Pleasant, but I would certainly regard it as a student media production that involves campus more so than, say, the city or the nation,” she said. “Rarely do national and international stories make it into this newspaper.”

Roscoe said he’s received notes from CMU alumni and other affiliates in the past who have commented on areas of the publication’s performance, a good example of which is its online coverage.

“(The Web site) is a terrific resource as an archive when a topic occurs that I want to learn more about,” he said. “I received a note from someone who graduated in the late-1980s.”

Roscoe said he has also run across local comment about successful coverage of university athletics.

The inclusion of women’s teams in comparison to men’s teams was a pleasant surprise, he said.

“There’s very good coverage of women’s sports, more so than at other university papers,” Roscoe said. “I’ve been here a long time … (and) I’ve been struck by what high quality it is.”

In an interview with CM Life, University President Michael Rao said an important part of building CMU is asking students to couple the experience learned in the classroom with a business environment.

“We strongly encourage students, if they are journalism majors and they think they are going to be reporters, to start writing for CM Life now,” he said.

news@cm-life.com

E-mail the author: Jackie Smith