The past year at the Daily Forty-Niner has at times resembled a roller coaster ride. We’ve had numerous ups and downs, some that would turn your stomach and others that left us squealing like a bunch of kids on a Tilt-A-Whirl.
Our “theme park” has been made fun, thrilling (at times dolefully painful and bloody) and just plain interesting by the person monitoring the Daily Forty-Niner ride since the beginning of last summer – Editor in Chief Bradley Zint.
He started his top-gun stint in the newsroom under an umbrella of uncertainty, amidst speculation and conjecture that the newspaper would disappear in print form and be transmitted exclusively as an online product.
Zint weathered the storm valiantly, never falling prey to the tumultuous rumors circulating the Cal State Long Beach journalism community that the print product was a prehistoric enterprise on its way to the tar pits.
He fought tooth-and-nail to keep the print issue alive as a campus staple.
But he didn’t let the online version become an orphan to prove a point. Instead, he and others helped us embrace it as a convergent and integrated form of media and news dissemination, with each complementing the other.
The CSULB community as a whole should be proud of and grateful for the messages Zint and company regularly delivered, mostly deprived of sleep and operating on a shoestring budget.
He showed the type of maturity and dedication to covering essential events that help keep our campus on the map.
Zint is never satisfied with merely running the newspaper from behind a computer monitor. He has to get his feet wet or he feels like a duck out of water.
He led by example and frequently jumped into the fray by actually covering news and non-news events, like nearly dashing to Cal State Dominguez Hills to cover a suspected armed student (who turned out to be an ROTC student heading to field maneuvers).
He hopped in the jalopy and raced to San Diego to bring unique coverage of last year’s wildfires. After helping coordinate news teams to observe and report the budget protests around the state last month, he raced to Sacramento to cover that distant boycott.
And he wasn’t above diving in with human-interest stuff, like writing about his trip to Joshua Tree National Park during popular retiring teacher Bill Webb’s last rock climbing class.
Zint accomplished all of his internal newspaper obligations and more. He did so while working two jobs outside of the newspaper: one as a computer techie for Housing & Residential Life, and the other as a parade support staffer at Disneyland – often sliding into a Goofy costume to entertain park visitors.
A good sense of humor is always a welcome asset during stressful production days. Zint has a way of calming a staff down when hectic passion starts to override common sense.
He managed to continuously bring the newsroom back to center. He concluded every weekly staff meeting with an enthusiastic “let’s kick some ass.”
Heck, the guy wasn’t above occasionally churning out an editorial or opinion article, like the one we published a while back about his contempt for golf courses.
We could go on ad infinitum about the contributions Zint has made to the CSULB campus community through his quality leadership, empathy, ethics and compassion, but that type of puffery makes him blush.
Give him praise and he usually offers only a modest “thank you.”
Suffice it to say that in “Our View,” Bradley Zint has done one helluva job. We are grateful both as his staff and as his fellow students for the time we’ve shared in the learning processes.
We have no doubt that we’ll see his name under important headlines.
With those sentiments expressed, we collectively offer him our thanks with a parting in-house conveyance – “May the Force be with you,” Bradley Zint. Job well done!
