In the front conference room at 435 E. Grand River Ave., a group of editors laughed early Monday afternoon as they planned out the week's stories.
Reporters, copy editors and page designers in the nearby newsroom flipped on computers, typed out notes and told stories about their abbreviated Labor Day weekends.
Just outside, in the photo studio near the back of the building, photographers in a dimly-lit room uploaded and cropped football photos they snapped from the sidelines at Saturday's game.
And in front of the building, which housed the Gap just one year ago, a man and a woman drilled a black sign into the front of the building. It read, "The State News."
Since 1958, The State News operated from the top floor of the Student Services Building. But earlier this summer, it moved out.
Workers hauled equipment and supplies from the offices where hundreds of employees throughout the decades worked from the time that computers were typewriters, photos weren't digital and smoking a pipe in the newsroom was as routine as making a deadline.
After nearly 48 years of crowded workspaces, dingy furnishings and many memories, The State News has moved off campus.
State News escapes cramped space in 1958
Starting in 1938, the staff of what was then called the Michigan State News produced the paper from the Union. The newspaper was established 29 years earlier in 1909. After beginning in the basement, the paper eventually moved to a larger space on the third floor along with other publications in a section of the building dubbed Publication Row.
But when the Student Services Building was completed early in late 1957 as part of MSU President John Hannah's aggressive plans to physically build up the university and attract more students, The State News found a new, more spacious home.
In a State News editorial from Jan. 16, 1958, the author explained the move and offered up a preemptive apology.
"If the State News has a few more errors than usual, or the papers are not in the usual distribution spots Monday, don't phone the editor or circulation director," the editorial read. "Our excuses? We're moving."
The State News published out of the offices on the third floor, along with the Wolverine yearbook, which later changed to the Red Cedar Log for seemingly obvious reasons, and a number of student-run magazines, including Spartan Engineer and the MSU Veterinarian.
In an article written for the latest edition of the State News Alumni Association newsletter, former Editor in Chief Mel Reiter recounted the move and the news of the day during his tenure at the paper's top spot.
"To say we crowded in the old location would be an understatement — I shared my office with two other editors - but we all managed," Reiter wrote. "We more than doubled our space by moving, and there was much excitement in finding everything brand new."
Reiter, who is now a vice president and financial consultant with RBC Dain Rauscher in Woodland Hills, Calif., said the hot news was the basketball team, which had upset third-ranked Kentucky in the NCAA playoffs, only to lose to South Carolina days later. In a situation that parallels modern day, the resulting celebration on Grand River Avenue "led to a 'minor riot'" and many students were arrested, he wrote.
The dean of students demanded that the newspaper turn over its photos of the riot, but the staff of 75 students rebuffed, and the offices were searched unsuccessfully by university officials, Reiter wrote. The dean then suspended the sports editor, but after a barrage of stories and editorials condemning the act, MSU President John A. Hannah intervened in the paper's favor.
Similar situations occurred in the days following the riots in 1999 and 2003, when photographers from The State News, along with other newspaper agencies, were subpoenaed by prosecutors. A group of newspapers fought the 1999 subpoena all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court and won. The 2003 subpoena was quashed before the photographer testified.
Civil rights movements, Vietnam War challenge student reporters in 1960s
In the decades to follow, "minor riots" would be overshadowed by much larger campus news. When the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement erupted in the 1960s, State News reporters were often at the forefront of campus marches, rallies and sit-ins.
Jim Spaniolo, an editor in chief in 1967 and 1968, said the stories he remembers most were the ones with national implications.
Spaniolo, now president of The University of Texas at Arlington and former dean of the MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences, was a freshman State News reporter when he and more than 4,000 students crammed into the Auditorium to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. address the university.
More than three years later, Spaniolo sat in with black students as a reporter during a demonstration at Linton Hall after King was assassinated in 1968.
"It was a time when there just was a lot of unrest generally within the country over the war and after the civil rights legislation," Spaniolo said.
During the height of his tenure at the newspaper, he would often spend 40, 50 or 60 hours each week at the newspaper, Spaniolo said.
The staff would often close the newspaper late at night and then head to Coral Gables for drinks. East Lansing was a dry town in 1968, and Coral Gables, which Spaniolo described as "more of a rathskeller in those days," was just outside the city limits.
"We had some good times after finishing the paper at night — some great late nights," he said. "(The State News) becomes the equivalent of a fraternity, and much more."
Spaniolo said he was delighted to hear that The State News was moving into more modernized offices, but added that he was a little sad to see the crowded Student Services offices be abandoned.
"It was like home," he said.
Covering student protest causes loss in annual State News softball game
Nearly a decade after Spaniolo graduated and left the newspaper, Michael Tanimura was tested very early in his job as editor when about 100 students staged a sit-in in at a Board of Trustees meeting in the spring of 1977.
The students were protesting the MSU-Iran film project, a deal signed in 1974 that called for MSU to produce films for National Iranian Radio and Television, a government-controlled monopoly for electronic communications in Iran. The films were set to net MSU nearly $248,000, but protesters opposed the project because it was associated with the oppressive regime of the Shah of Iran.
Tanimura and many other State News employees were playing in a softball game when they heard what was happening.
"Half of the team went straight over and we stayed there and covered the sit-in," Tanimura said. "We lost that game by forfeit."
The university was about to begin finals week and the newspaper wasn't printing, but at Tanimura's order, some reporters covered the 24-hour sit-in from within the International Center while others contacted administrators and police by phone from Student Services.
A lead reporter on the coverage was Carole Leigh Hutton, now the vice president/news at Knight Ridder and former editor and publisher of the Detroit Free Press.
The newsroom put out an entire special section of the event's coverage.
"We felt like The State News was doing things. You felt all the good things about journalism," said Tanimura, who now owns a Chicago-based marketing communications company. "That kind of idealism is quickly shattered when you get out into the professional world.
"We were all idealists."
Clashes with the greek system, troublesome advertisements highlight the early '80s
Jim Mitzelfeld said the Student Services Building "is always going to have a special place in my heart."
The former 1982 and 1983 editor in chief spent five years working for The State News, where he met his wife, who at that time was just an intern.
"I like to walk by that building with my kids and tell them that they wouldn't be there if it wasn't for that building," Mitzelfeld joked.
He said his most vivid newspaper memories involved the transition from typewriters to computers and the multiple clashes he had with the greek system. He received three death threats after he wrote a column condemning the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity for kicking out a member after the student revealed he was gay.
"Oh my lord, they went insane," he said. "I really enjoyed it."
On a less joyful occasion, he was put in the limelight after the State News advertising department published a Greek Week edition featuring a photo depicting members of the Theta Chi fraternity gathered around a black jockey statue identified as "Willie" in the caption.
Although Mitzelfeld had no editorial control over the advertising section, he soon found himself under the scrutiny of Detroit television reporters and angry student protests.
"We had to attack our own paper," he said. "It was an awful feeling to be so out of control."
Mitzelfeld later left the newspaper business after working at a number of Michigan newspapers, including a five-year stint at The Detroit News where he won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting. After winning the Pulitzer, The New York Times offered him a job, but he said he turned it down and went to law school partly because he never experienced the same passionate journalistic atmosphere in the professional world that he fell in love with at The State News.
"There was really a sense that (The State News) was passed from year to year, that it was something serious and you took it seriously," Mitzelfeld said. "You were temporarily given the trust of something extremely important.
"You wanted to do the best you could, but you also wanted to train the next group of people to carry on the tradition."
Edgy '90s reporting staff leads way to top college awards
Detroit Free Press real estate writer Suzette Hackney said her time at the newspaper was characterized by constantly scooping its largest competitor — the Lansing State Journal.
Hackney was the editor in chief in 1993 and 1994.
The State News printed a list of candidates for the 1993 university presidential search that had been kept secret. The State News also published a confidential memo from senior associate athletics director Clarence Underwood to MSU President M. Peter McPherson asking that he be allowed to fire former MSU men's basketball coaching legend Jud Heathcote.
"The LSJ was always chasing after us," Hackney said.
Under Hackney's leadership, the paper was recognized by the Associated Collegiate Press and the Newspaper Association of America Foundation for excellence in college journalism with the awarding of the Pacemaker. The newspaper has received the award - often described as the "Pulitzer Prize for college newspapers" — 14 times in its 96-year history.
The newspaper faced an obstacle in May 1998, when a riot erupted on Munn field and 17 students were arrested. At 9 p.m. on Friday, May 1, Editor in Chief Jonathan Brunt decided to publish a special Saturday section chronicling the event.
"It was an extreme rush that I haven't experienced since," Brunt said. "Not only was it getting the staff together to write the stories and take the pictures, it was 'OK, can you stick around to help deliver the paper?'"
Brunt, who is now a reporter for the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., said that working at The State News was as much a social experience as it was a professional experience. Newspaper employees went to the Peanut Barrel Restaurant, 521 E. Grand River Ave., every Thursday after they finished producing the last paper of the week - a tradition that continues today.
"I made lifelong friends there," Brunt said. "For a work, social, learning experience, it couldn't have been better."
Bittersweet farewell to cramped newsroom on campus
On the last day of summer production at The State News, employees gathered in the newsroom at 343 Student Services for a ceremony to say goodbye to the building, write their names on the wall and give a champagne toast to the past.
Editor in Chief Amy Bartner was the last to leave, after realizing that she had some leftover tasks to handle.
"I took my box of stuff from my desk, walked out the door and turned out the lights," Bartner said. "I never realized it would be so hard."
Bartner said the new location and increased public visibility will benefit the readers and the city, and the state-of-the-art facility will "show in the newspaper's quality."
And as the newspaper staff continues to work out the bugs and the paper evolves, new traditions will form and the offices at 435 E. Grand River Ave. will be the setting for many future experiences.
But for Bartner, the last editor in chief to work in the congested Student Services Building offices, the memories have already been made.
"When I think about my memories of The State News, they won't be in this new building," she said. "My education came from 343 Student Services."
Don Jordan can be reached at jordand3@msu.edu
