Jack Lipkin was a production assistant, Copy Editor, Managing Editor and Editor-in-Chief for The News-Letter from 1989 to 1992. He now works in a communications role at Novartis. Mira Vayda Edelman was a Copy Editor, Features Editor, News Editor and Editor-in-Chief for The News-Letter from 1989 to 1992. She is now a lawyer at Dish Network in Denver.
Lena Denis was a staff writer for The News-Letter from 2007 to 2011 and recently returned to Hopkins as the Geospatial Data, GIS and Maps Librarian in Data Services at our own Sheridan Libraries.
Okay, I’ll admit it — like many college students, I was partially in it for the free food. When I was a News & Features Editor at The News-Letter, Wednesday evenings were brutal — a long, mad dash to put the paper to bed before sunrise. The Gatehouse’s heavy door was a portal to a place past exhaustion, where a manic giddiness usually set in while my editor friends and I stared blankly at an InDesign page that refused to lay itself out.
Being a part of The News-Letter, as a contributing underclassman all the way through to being Editor-in-Chief, was a singular piece of my Hopkins experience. It ranks with having graduated as a working engineer for the Federal Aviation Agency.
Jessica Valdez attended Hopkins from 2001 to 2005. During her freshman year, she was a writer for The News-Letter. She became a News Editor her sophomore year and was Copy Editor her junior year. After receiving her PhD in English from Hopkins in 2012, she taught in the writing program at New York University Shanghai for one year. She has since been a professor of English literature at the University of Hong Kong for seven years.
Professor Richard Rose began his education at Hopkins in September 1951 and graduated in June 1953. In his two years as a student, he wrote news stories and features for The News-Letter. He currently lives in England and boasts 4,000 books in his library at home.
Charles Kruzansky was a Managing Editor, Baltimore sports reporter and a restaurant reviewer for The News-Letter from 1980 to 1982. Kruzansky was very busy with local Maryland and national political campaigns and was a Political Science major. He went on to business school at Columbia University and then went to work for the New York State (NYS) Legislature on their Ways and Means Committee. After five years of learning all about NYS government, he went to work for Cornell University as a lobbyist.
Benjamin Kupferberg graduated from Hopkins in 2015 and from SAIS in 2016. He worked for The News-Letter all four years he was an undergraduate, from 2012-2015. He started by breaking coverage on Professor Steve Hanke’s uncovering of hyperinflation in Iran, which gave The News-Letter national attention. He was then a News Editor and worked alongside Evan Brooker and Nash Jenkins, “some of the finest men to ever grace the Gatehouse.”
Michael Szeto was part of The News-Letter from 2007 to 2010, during which he was Associate Online Editor. He received a Juris Doctor degree from New York University School of Law and currently serves as university counsel in Stanford University’s Office of the General Counsel.
Tom Connor was a Features reporter for The News-Letter from 1974-75. He is Creative Director/Chief Operating Officer at Weinrib & Connor, Inc., a full-service advertising and marketing agency.
Marie Cushing attended Hopkins from 2006 to 2010 and worked on The News-Letter as the inaugural Layout Editor, Your News-Letter Editor (now Leisure), News & Features Editor and Editor-in-Chief. After graduating from Hopkins she taught for a decade in Memphis and now serves as a research specialist in education for the University of Virginia.
Eric Garland was a writer and editor for The News-Letter during his sophomore year and Editor-in-Chief as a junior. He graduated in 1978 and joined the City Paper startup. He went on to work on a number of magazines, and since 2009 has been a partner in Blue Heron Research Partners, a journalistic-driven due diligence firm for hedge funds and private equity firms.
Yuri Zelinksy (better known as “George” by his News-Letter peers) attended Hopkins from 1973 to 1977, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Social and Behavioral Sciences. During his time at the University, he worked as a staff writer and News Editor for The News-Letter. Today he works in Washington, D.C. as a lawyer.
I walked into the Gatehouse during orientation of what was my sophomore year in 1978 and immediately fell in love. I was a Hopkins legacy but a transfer, having spent a year in an experimental high-school-to-college program at the University of Delaware. I had a desire to write. I had been an editor at my high school paper at Wesley College where the Delaware program was housed, and I had even been a sports stringer for Dover Post, a local paper founded only a few years before.
Not long after the middle of the last century, I became an undergraduate at Hopkins. I had received a rigorous but rather unexciting preparation at Baltimore City College, after which Hopkins felt like an awakening. The courses, of course, provided much of the stimulation, but there was an extracurricular electricity too. It became evident one morning in my freshman year as I walked across the Upper Quadrangle. I looked up and saw that someone had decorated the Gilman Hall clock with a beautifully executed Mickey Mouse face.
My fondest memories of college are related to my time at The News-Letter. I had been an editor of my high school paper in Brooklyn, N.Y. that was released only six times per year. I already knew that I wanted to continue to write for my college paper, and then when I decided to go to Hopkins, the excitement grew, as I had been an avid reader of Russell Baker in the New York Times, and I knew of his Hopkins days.
During our senior year as undergraduates at Hopkins from 1959 to 1960, my News-Letter co-editor Stanley Handmaker and I, as well as our entire staff, did our best to call attention to several "major" issues of the day as we saw it.
I cannot remember a time in my life without newspapers. My parents always had them in the house, and my sisters and I would try to find the hidden Nina’s in Al Hirschfeld’s inimitable drawings. My first job, or at least my first real job where I did not work for my parents, was at Frate’s News Store in my hometown. I had to get there at 5 a.m. every Sunday to assemble the New York Times; back then, the paper was shipped in sections to be collated by kids like me at each store. This was three hours of intense shuffling, hands covered in ink, $5 in my pocket and a new pack of gum for the bike ride home.
My recollections of The News-Letter reach back more than 70 years to when I joined the staff as a reporter in the fall of 1949, my freshman year at Hopkins. I had been editor of my high school newspaper and had worked a couple of summers as a copy boy at the Courier-Post, a newspaper in Camden, N.J. So I was anxious to work for The News-Letter.
Bluish-gray stone walls. Yellow accents around arched windows. A slippery, rundown wooden bridge leads to a front door with white paint peeling off it. And mounted over the door, a plaque which reads “News Letter Office.”
