Walter Baranger is retiring after creating an extensive journalism resume.
by Annisa Charles
Walter Baranger is retiring after creating an extensive journalism resume. Baranger has been a journalist since high school and worked his way up to become the assistant to the editor for The New York Times. Instead of retiring when he got the chance in 2016, he decided to give back to his alma mater, Cal State Fullerton, by becoming a lecturer and adviser for the student-run newspaper, the Daily Titan.
Baranger’s retirement is ultimately well-deserved.
His journalism career began while he was only a freshman at University High School. He notes his career began upon receiving $10 for a freelanced story for The Los Angeles Times.
“The sports editor rewrote every word, but I got my $10,” Baranger wrote in an email to the CSUF Communications Department outreach team.
Soon after, he continued selling freelance stories to The Times, The Santa Ana Register and Irvine’s local twice-weekly newspaper, The Irvine World News.
In 1989, Baranger joined The New York Times, traveling over three million miles worldwide to cover stories. He was hired as the assistant to the editor, then was promoted to senior writer and finally moved his way up to senior editor for news operations.
A little over six years ago was the last time he said he was retiring. His retirement only lasted seven months before he was presented with the opportunity to teach at CSUF and acquire the role of adviser for the Daily Titan.
“It seemed like a good fit…I had enrolled at CSUF in 1980 and served on Daily Titan as [a] reporter and managing editor, then graduated in January 1986. Over the intervening decades, I served on the dean’s roundtable, worked on Daily [Titan’s] various reunion efforts, launched the Jay Berman Daily Titan scholarship and occasionally visited campus to speak to classes,” wrote Baranger.
He moved back to California to become a part-time lecturer in fall 2017 at CSUF. A year later, he became a full-time lecturer and then Daily Titan’s adviser in spring 2019.
As the adviser, he has assisted in moving the Daily Titan website from WordPress to a more professional web publishing platform called TownNews. This move has helped editors to better understand SEO, create more multimedia portfolio clips, better understand who Daily Titan’s readers are, the best times to post articles and where most of their readers reside.
TownNews also has allowed Baranger and the students to launch the Daily Titan app, where people can read breaking news and get regular updates.
Baranger said the biggest, ongoing story that Daily Titan students covered during his time as the adviser was the August 2019 stabbing death of a CSUF employee. Baranger has found parallels between his time as a student at CSUF and his position as an advisor. “Coincidentally, I had covered the previous murder on campus, the 1984 shooting death of a physics professor in his office by one of his students,” he wrote.
Baranger has taught multiple classes during his time as a lecturer at CSUF. He has taught: COMM 201 Digital Reporting and Writing, COMM 331 News Literacy, COMM 335 Public Affairs Reporting, COMM 471 Daily Titan Capstone, COMM 441 Sports Reporting, COMM 435 Opinion Writing, COMM 438T Specialized Reporting (Politics), COMM 461 Journalism Innovations and two sections of HONR 497 Honors Project.
“The best part of working at Cal State Fullerton, aside from watching students launch their journalism careers, has been working with Dr. Jason Shepard and the family of COMM faculty …sometimes an ever-so-slightly dysfunctional family, but always focused on students,” Baranger wrote.
Baranger is happy that his Daily Titan successor, Frank Russell, will inherit the paper that regularly ranks in the nation’s top ten.
As print costs continue to rise rapidly and as the print shops continue to close, Baranger believes this could predict the Daily Titan’s future in print. He presumes Daily Titan’s print edition will end one day, despite an estimated 2,000 loyal readers and a student-run news staff that enjoys producing a physical newspaper.
Even if the print edition ends one day, students can continue to produce their work through the website and app. Due to Baranger’s hard work to modernize the Daily Titan, there are endless ways for students to continue the news publication, whether through more multimedia pieces or going back to daily production by creating an E-edition of the newspaper.
“But if my legacy is that I positioned Daily Titan for a post-print world, that’s good enough,” Baranger wrote.
Baranger is retiring, and the Communications Department at CSUF would like to wish him a happy retirement and thank him for all his work, from teaching classes that help students further their journalism careers to getting the Daily Titan to where it is today.
