The Insider's Guide to the Colleges

The ''Yale Daily News'' is an independent student newspaper published by Yale University students in New Haven, Connecticut since January 28, 1878. It is the oldest college daily newspaper in the United States. The ''Yale Daily News'' has consistently been ranked among the top college daily newspapers in the country.

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'', the ''Daily News'', or the ''Daily Yalie''), 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. The newspaper's first editors wrote: "The innovation which we begin by this morning's issue is justified by the dullness of the times, and the demand for news among us."

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 and culture spread on Wednesdays and a science and technology spread on Tuesdays.

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'' and special newspaper issues for the incoming freshman class, Family Weekend, Yale's Class Day and Commencement, and The Game against Harvard University. The ''News'' also edits ''The Insider's Guide to the Colleges'', a recurring guide to hundreds of American and Canadian colleges including rankings by unusual criteria.

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 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 of that year 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. Later, in April 2016, the ''News'' similarly broke the story of the University's decision to retain the namesake of Calhoun College but eliminate the title "master", as well as of the Yale Corporation's commitment to the namesake of Benjamin Franklin College three years before its public announcement.

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. The library's extensive historical archives, in addition to the archives of the Yale Club of New York City, amounting to some 20,263 issues published between 1878 and 1995, have been published in an indexed and searchable public database.

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 ''YDNs 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.

Yale TV

Yale TV (stylized as YTV) is a student television station on the campus of Yale University. The station began broadcasting in October 1953. At the time, students could watch the broadcasts on a closed-circuit television system, but had to also turn on a radio to hear the audio.

In the fall of 2012, the ''Yale Daily News'' created YTV, which produces a daily roundup of the paper's headlines as well as other videos on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Produced by undergraduate students in a studio located in the ''Yale Daily News'' building, these videos are posted to YTV's YouTube channel, "Yale Daily News Multimedia." YTV was created by Raleigh Cavero, Charlie Kelly, Lilly Fast, and Danielle Trubow, who served as the station's first editors.

Alumni

Politics

* Potter Stewart, former Supreme Court associate justice
* Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court associate Justice
* Joseph Lieberman, US Senator from Connecticut, 2000 Vice Presidential nominee and 2004 presidential candidate
* Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of Treasury under the Trump Administration
* Samantha Power, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, USAID Director
* Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former Deputy Secretary of State under President Clinton
* Jake Sullivan, national security advisor to Vice President Joseph Biden
* William L. Borden, executive director of United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 1949–53
* Lanny Davis, advisor to President Clinton, author and public relations expert
* David Gergen, advisor to four presidents and '' U.S. News & World Report'' editor-at-large
* Reed Hundt, former FCC chairman
* Robert D. Orr, former governor of Indiana
* David A. Pepper, Ohio politician
* Andrew Romanoff, former Colorado Speaker of the House, candidate for Democratic nomination to US Senate
* Sargent Shriver, first Peace Corps director
* Stuart Symington, former US senator from Missouri
* Garry Trudeau, cartoonist and creator of ''Doonesbury'', which first appeared in the ''News pages as ''Bull Tales''

Journalism

* Pete Axthelm, sportswriter
* Michael Barbaro, host of '' The Daily'' by ''The New York Times''
* Ellen Barry, Pulitzer Prize–winning Moscow correspondent, ''The New York Times''
* 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''
* Henry S.F. Cooper, a ''New Yorker'' journalist and author
* 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, Washington Editor of TheIntercept.com
* Zack O'Malley Greenburg, ''Forbes'' staff writer and author of Jay-Z biography ''Empire State of Mind''
* Lloyd Grove, freelance writer, former gossip columnist for the ''New York Daily News'' and ''The Washington Post''
* Briton Hadden, co-founder of ''Time''
* R. Thomas Herman, reporter and tax columnist for ''The Wall Street Journal''
* John Hersey, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author
* Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of ''The Washington Post''
* Matthew Kaminski, editorial board member, ''The Wall Street Journal''
* Thomas Kaplan, Editor, ''The New York Times''
* David Leonhardt, Pulitzer Prize–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, co-founder of ''Time''
* Dana Milbank, White House correspondent for ''The Washington Post''

Martine Powers
senior audio producer and host of
Post Reports
' by ''The Washington Post''
* Philip Rucker, White House bureau chief for The Washington Post
* 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''

Vivian Yee
Cairo bureau chief for ''The New York Times''

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.
* Ted Landsmark, educator and attorney
* Paul Mellon, philanthropist
* John E. Pepper Jr., chairman of the Walt Disney Company
* 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''.
* In ''The Great Gatsby'', narrator and protagonist Nick Carraway says that he wrote a series of editorials for the paper while in college."I was rather literary in college – one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News'" – Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

References

External links

Official website

Yale TV Main Page website

125th Anniversary Exhibit

Historical archive
at Yale University

{{Authority control

Publications established in 1878
Student newspapers published in Connecticut
Yale University publications
Mass media in New Haven County, Connecticut