The Yale Daily News is an independent student newspaper published by Yale University students in New Haven, Connecticut since January 28, 1878. The newspaper's first editors wrote:
History and description
Financially and editorially independent of Yale University since its founding, the paper is published by a student editorial and business staff five days a week, Monday through Friday, during Yale's academic year. Called the YDN (or sometimes the News or the Daily News), the paper is produced in the Briton Hadden Memorial Building at 202 York Street in New Haven and printed off-site at Turley Publications in Palmer, Massachusetts. Each day, reporters, mainly freshmen and sophomores, cover the university, the city of New Haven and sometimes the state of Connecticut. An expanded sports section is published on Monday, a two-page Opinion Forum on Friday, and "WEEKEND", an arts and living section, also on Friday. The News prints an Arts & Culture spread on Tuesdays, a Science and Technology spread on Wednesdays, and a Business & Enterprise page on Thursdays.
Staff members are generally elected as editors on the managing board during their junior year. A single chairman led the News until 1970. Today, the editor-in-chief and publisher act as co-presidents of the Yale Daily News Publishing Company. The "News' View," a staff editorial, represents the position of the majority of the editorial board.
In 1969, Yale College became coeducational, and by 1972, Mally Cox and Lise Goldberg were elected as the first female members of the YDN editorial board. Andy Perkins was elected as the first female editor in chief in 1981, and Amy Oshinsky was elected as the first female publisher in 1977.
The paper version of the News is distributed for free throughout Yale's campus and the city of New Haven and is also published online. The paper was once a subscription-only publication, delivered to student postal boxes for $40 a year. Subscriptions declined after the 1986 founding of the weekly (and free) Yale Herald student newspaper, bottoming out at 570 in 1994. The News switched to free distribution later that year.
In 1978, the Oldest College Daily Foundation was created following a capital campaign to prevent the university from buying the Briton Hadden Memorial Building. The News survived for a century "solely on the income generated by subscription and ad sales."
The News serves as a training ground for journalists at Yale, and has produced a steady stream of professional reporters, who work at newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker and The Economist.
In addition to the newspaper, the Yale Daily News Publishing Company also produces a monthly Yale Daily News Magazine; special issues of the newspaper for the incoming freshman class, Family Weekend, Yale's Class Day and Commencement, and The Game against Harvard University; and The Insider's Guide to the Colleges.
In 1920, the News began to report on national news and viewpoints. In 1940 and 1955, when professional dailies were not operating due to unrest among its workers, the News continued to report on national topics. Today, the Nation and World sections publish stories and photos from the Associated Press.
On September 3, 2008, the "Oldest College Daily" "premiere[d] a new look" designed by Mario Garcia of Garcia Media and Pegie Stark Adam of Stark Adam Design. The News' front page design for November 5, 2008, the day after Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 Presidential Election was featured in the Poynter Institute book: President Obama Election 2008: Collection of Newspaper Front Pages by the Poynter Institute.
In 2009, the Yale Daily News won the Associated Collegiate Press Newspaper Pacemaker Award.
On September 10, 2009, the News broke the news of the murder of Annie Le, a Yale graduate student reported missing and subsequently found murdered in the basement of her laboratory, .
In summer 2010, the 78-year-old Briton Hadden Memorial Building was renovated, increasing the amount of usable space in the basement and adding a multimedia studio in the heart of the newsroom.
The Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University has a copy of every issue published between 1890 and 1959.
Contested claim
The News, founded in 1878, calls itself the "oldest college daily" in the United States, a claim contested by other student newspapers.
The Harvard Crimson calls itself "the oldest continuously published college daily", but it was founded in 1873 as a fortnightly publication called The Magenta and did not appear daily until 1883. (The News ceased publishing briefly during World War I and World War II after editors volunteered for military service.) The Daily Targum at Rutgers University was founded in 1869 but was published initially as a monthly newspaper and did not gain independence from the University until 1980. The Columbia Daily Spectator, founded one year earlier than the YDN in 1877, calls itself the second-oldest college daily, but was not independent until the 1960s. Similarly, The Daily Californian at the University of California, Berkeley, was founded in 1871 but did not achieve independence until 1971. The Cornell Daily Sun, launched in 1880, calls itself the "oldest independent college newspaper", notwithstanding the YDN's independence since its founding two years earlier. The Dartmouth of Dartmouth College, which opened in 1799 as the Dartmouth Gazette, calls itself the oldest college newspaper, though not the oldest daily.
Most accurately put, the News is the oldest independent college daily newspaper.
Alumni
Politics
- Lanny Davis, advisor to President Clinton, author and public relations expert
- David Gergen, advisor to four Presidents and U.S. News and World Report editor-at-large
- Reed Hundt, former FCC chairman
- Joseph Lieberman, U.S. Senator from Connecticut, 2000 Vice Presidential nominee and 2004 Presidential Candidate
- Robert D. Orr, former governor of Indiana
- Andrew Romanoff, former Colorado Speaker of the House, candidate for Democratic nomination to U.S. Senate
- Sargent Shriver, first Peace Corps director
- Potter Stewart, former Supreme Court associate justice
- Stuart Symington, former U.S. senator from Missouri
- Strobe Talbott, president of The Brookings Institution and former Deputy Secretary of State under President Clinton
- Garry Trudeau, cartoonist and creator of Doonesbury, which first appeared in the News' pages as Bull Tales
- David A. Pepper, Ohio politician
Journalism
- Pete Axthelm, famed sportswriter
- Michael Barbaro, politics reporter, "The New York Times"
- Ellen Barry, Pulitzer Prizeâ€"winning Moscow correspondent, The New York Times
- Melinda Beck, Marketplace editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal
- Alex Berenson, business reporter for The New York Times
- Christopher Buckley, novelist and writer
- William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review
- Meghan Clyne is a Washington, D.C.-based writer, recently for The Weekly Standard
- Michael Crowley, senior editor, New Republic
- Charles Duhigg, business reporter for The New York Times
- Charles Forelle, European correspondent for The Wall Street Journal
- Dan Froomkin, White House Briefing columnist for Washingtonpost.com
- Zack O'Malley Greenburg, Forbes staff writer and author of Jay-Z biography Empire State of Mind (book)
- Lloyd Grove, freelance writer, former gossip columnist for the New York Daily News and The Washington Post
- R. Thomas Herman, reporter and tax columnist for The Wall Street Journal
- John Hersey, Pulitzer Prizeâ€"winning journalist and author
- Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post
- Matthew Kaminski, editorial board member, The Wall Street Journal
- David Leonhardt, Pulitzer Prizeâ€"winning economics columnist, The New York Times
- Joanne Lipman, founding Editor-in-Chief of Conde Nast Portfolio magazine and former Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal.
- Adam Liptak, supreme court correspondent for The New York Times
- Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, co-founders of Time
- Dana Milbank, White House correspondent for The Washington Post
- Jodi Rudoren, Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times
- Robert Semple, Pulitzer Prize winner and member of The New York Times editorial board
- Paul Steiger, Editor-in-Chief of "ProPublica," former managing editor of "The Wall Street Journal"
- John Tierney, columnist for The New York Times
- Calvin Trillin, columnist and humorist
- Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate
Other
- Kingman Brewster, former president of Yale University and ambassador to the Court of St. James's
- Lan Samantha Chang, director of Iowa Writers' Workshop
- Theo Epstein, Chicago Cubs general manager
- Thayer Hobson, chairman of William Morrow and Company
- Eli Jacobs, Wall Street investor, former owner of the Baltimore Orioles (1989â€"1993).
- Paul Mellon, philanthropist
- John E. Pepper, Jr., chairman of the Walt Disney Company and CEO of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, former CEO and chairman of Procter & Gamble, and Yale's former vice president of finance and administration and senior fellow of the Yale Corporation
- Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prizeâ€"winning author and professor
- Gaddis Smith, professor emeritus of history at Yale
- Lyman Spitzer, theoretical physicist
- Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and economic researcher
In popular culture
- The characters Rory Gilmore and Paris Geller have both served as editors of the Yale Daily News on the CW TV show Gilmore Girls.
References
External links
- Official website
- 125th Anniversary Exhibit
- Historical archive at Yale University
