Yale Daily News
From Freepedia
"The innovation which we begin by this morning's issue is justified by the dullness of the time and the demand for news among us,"
Financially and editorially independent of Yale since its founding, the paper is published by a student edit and business staff five days a week, Monday through Friday, during Yale's academic year. Called the YDN (or sometimes the Yale News, 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 offsite. Each day reporters, mainly freshmen and sophomores, cover the University and the city of New Haven. An expanded sports section is published on Monday; "scene", an arts and living section, on Friday.
Staff members are 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 paper. The "News' View," a staff editorial, represents the position of the majority of the editorial board.
The paper version of the News is distributed for free throughout Yale's campus and the city of New Haven; it is also published online. The paper was once a subscription-only publication, delivered by mail for $40 a year. But subscriptions declined after the 1986 founding of the weekly (and free) Yale Herald student newspaper, bottoming out at 570 in 1994. [1] The News switched to free distribution later that year.
The YDN's claim to be the oldest college daily is contested, with varying degrees of vigor and persuasiveness, by other student papers. It is actually the third oldest college daily, behind the Harvard Crimson, and the Columbia Daily Spectator. The Harvard Crimson claims to be "the oldest continuously published college daily", but traces its roots to an 1873 bimonthly publication called The Magenta. The Harvard Crimson did, however, assume its current name in 1875. The Columbia Spectator, founded in 1877 and continuously published since, is also older than the YDN, which was first published in 1878. The Cornell Daily Sun, launched in 1880, claimed to be the "oldest independent college newspaper", notwithstanding the YDN's independence since its founding two years earlier. The Dartmouth of Dartmouth College, which opened in 1843 as a monthly, calls itself the oldest college newspaper, though not the oldest daily (nor is it related to a local eighteenth-century paper called the Dartmouth Gazette, though it claims to be).
In addition to the newspaper, the Yale Daily News Publishing Company also produces a monthly Yale Daily News Magazine; special issues of the newspaper before the last home game of the football season and the first home Ivy League basketball game; The Politic, a nonpartisan magazine covering political issues; and the Yale Daily News Insiders Guide to the Colleges.
Alumni
Political
- William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review
- Lanny Davis, advisor to President Clinton and author
- David Gergen, advisor to four Presidents and U.S. News and World Report editor-at-large
- Joseph Lieberman, U.S. Senator and 2000 vice-presidential nominee
- Sargent Shriver, first Peace Corps director
- Potter Stewart, former Supreme Court associate justice
- Garry Trudeau, cartoonist and creator of Doonesbury, which first appeared in the News' pages as Bull Tales
Journalists
- Christopher Buckley, novelist and writer
- Lloyd Grove, gossip columnist for the New York Daily News
- Robert Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post
- Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, co-founders of TIME magazine
- Dana Milbank, White House correspondent for The Washington Post
- James Ottaway, the senior vice president of Dow Jones & Co
- Robert Semple, a member of The New York Times editorial board
- Paul Steiger, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal
- John Tierney, op/ed columnist for The New York Times
- Calvin Trillin, columnist and humorist
- Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate
- Jodi Wilgoren, Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times
