Daily Collegian
The Daily Collegian is a student-produced news outlet, with a newspaper and website, that is published independently at the Pennsylvania State University. The newspaper is printed once a week during the fall and spring semesters, and not at all during the summer semester. It is distributed for free at Penn State University Park, the university's main campus, and mailed to paid subscribers across the country.
Collegian Inc., which publishes the Daily Collegian, is an independent, nonprofit corporation and has a board of directors that is composed of faculty, students, and professionals. The mission statement of Collegian Inc. is "to publish a quality campus newspaper and to provide a rewarding educational experience for the student staff members."
The Daily Collegian has historically been considered one of the top student-run college newspapers in the United States receiving multiple notable journalism awards including National Pacemaker Awards, top rankings from The Princeton Review, and Sigma Delta Chi Awards.
The Daily Collegian traces its founding back to the Free Lance, a monthly student magazine published by students and faculty of Pennsylvania State University, which began printing in April 1887. The Free Lance struggled structurally and financially eventually disbanding in April 1904. The next semester, in October 1904, the State Collegian emerged with much of the same leadership as the previous publication. The name of the publication was changed to the Penn State Collegian in 1911, and the paper began publishing on a semi-weekly basis in September 1920. The success of semi-weekly printing lead the paper to began publishing daily in 1940, changing its name to the Daily Collegian.
In 1996, the Daily Collegian began pursuing a larger digital presence, creating The Digital Collegian in 1996, the publications website that provides online access to articles digitally and print stories dating from 1988 to the present. Daily printing continued until 2017, when the Daily Collegian announced it would move away from printing five days a week and would instead print twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. The shift was made as a majority of the publication's readership was coming from its online publication.
History
The Free Lance
The Free Lance was a monthly news magazine at Pennsylvania State University, which was first published in April 1887. The first copies of the Free Lance were shipped to State College, Pennsylvania by the Bellefonte Central train. The arrival of the first issue of the publication was celebrated by a large group of students who waited for the train and paraded down College Avenue in Downtown State College to purchase their copy. The first issue of the news magazine was twelve pages long and was sold for fifteen cents a copy.Most of the articles inside of the Free Lance were opinion pieces on national events penned by professors and alumni of the university. Much of the news coverage coming from the publication had already become public knowledge by the time each monthly edition was released. The Free Lance mostly took an approach to filling in holes in stories and giving opinion on events rather than reporting them first hand.
In 1895, the Free Lance transitioned away from news and moved its focus to become a literary magazine publishing essays, poems and short stories. This move lead the already cash strapped publication to collapse. In April 1901, as subscribers declined the Free Lance begged for support from the university, students, and alumni to continue its publication. Throughout the next three years editors continued to asks for financial support and payment from delinquent subscribers. The requests were not met and the magazine concluded publication with its April 1904 edition, which did not appear on campus until May of that year.
The State Collegian
The semester after publication ceased on the Free Lance, its former editor and much of the former periodical's staff founded the State Collegian, a weekly newspaper. The newspaper was established independent of the university's control and produced its first issue in October 1904. In its first edition the State Collegiain editor William B. Hoke penned an editorial outlining the decline of the Free Lance and how the new paper would be different. Hoke outlined a mission to have a paper that contained news and events from around the community citing the failure of its predecessor to its shift away from news based content.The paper was published once a week on Thursdays, added photos and began printing in broadsheet form rather than on tabloid-size paper. The paper was printed by Nittany Printing and Publishing Co., publishers of the State College Times, now the Centre Daily Times, where the State Collegian shared a downtown office with the State College paper.
Penn State Collegian
In 1911, the State Collegian made the decision to change its masthead and publication name to Penn State Collegian to be more definite and expressive of its location and mission to report on the university and student issues.In 1914, a subscriptions to the Penn State Collegian cost $1.50 per year. Printing of the publication was interrupted because of materials shortages caused by World War I during the fall semester of 1918. The publication began printing its paper semi-weekly, publishing Tuesday and Friday editions In the fall semester of 1920. Reporters covered all aspects of daily life as well as global events.
In 1930, the State Collegian moved its offices to "Journalism Alley," on the third floor of Old Main.
Daily Collegian
After the publishers of the Penn State Collegian approved a move to begin printing the newspaper daily the masthead of the paper was changed to the Daily Collegian. The publication began publishing five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday. During this transition the publishing offices of the paper were moved to the basement of the Carnegie Library, now known as the Carnegie Building. The first issue of the newly daily paper was published on September 5, 1940. More than a year after making the switch to daily print, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II. The Daily Collegian cut production days due to wartime rationing and shortages of materials printing weekly instead of daily from 1944 until the beginning of 1947.In 1956, the Daily Collegian became a member of the Associated Press, submitting their stories to the wire service for publication at other member papers.
In 1961, the Collegian moved to 20 Sackett Building.
In 1972, the Collegian moved its office location to 126 Carnegie. In 1979, the Daily Collegian earned the Associated Collegiate Press' Five Marks of Distinction for the second consecutive rating period. The same year, the paper started production on The Weekly Collegian.
Digital era
In a move to the digital era the Collegian launched its first website, The Digital Collegian, in the summer of 1996. This allowed the paper to deliver news articles online and improve access to digitized articles from its historical print issues.Beginning with the Fall 2006 semester, the Digital Collegian was renamed the Daily Collegian Online and debuted a new home page layout. A Web department was formed with the purpose of creating online updates for breaking news and posting stories on days when classes were not in session.
Along with this launch came a project to digitize and make publicly accessible all issues of the Free Lance, State Collegian, Penn State Collegian and the Daily Collegian through 1922. At the time, Collegian Inc. owned some of the last remaining paper copies of the Free Lance but the copies had yet to be scanned to microfilm to preserve them. Penn State's Libraries Special Collections/University Archives, Preservation and Digitization Department, and News and Microforms Library met with Collegian Inc. in spring of 2003 to discuss digitizing the last remaining copies. At the time only researchers, alumni, and students had access to historical print issues through bound issue books located at the University Archives. The proposed project set out to scan all issues April 1887-August 2, 1940, in total 16,000 page images, in a year or less. In spring of 2004, one year from the universities initial meeting with Collegian Inc., the 1887-1940 segment was completed and made publicly accessible online.
After the success of the initial project Collegian, Inc. granted permission to digitize all issues through 1988. The second scanning project was completed over four years, making in total 132,736 total pages publicly available in 2008. Penn State's Library provided all funding for conversion, software/hardware, on-going maintenance and upgrades. The project came in at a cost of $178,541.
The University Libraries allowed Google to crawl its database starting in 2007, making historical content searchable. With this came multiple lawsuits as formerly inaccessible articles on arrest and disciplinary reports became easily accessible to the public.
In July 2010, in what was called a highly unusual move, two Centre County, Pennsylvania judges, Judge Bradley P. Lunsford and Judge Thomas King Kistler, ordered the Daily Collegian and the Centre Daily Times to delete archived news stories about five defendants in criminal cases after a lawyer sought to have the records expunged. The orders were obtained by State College lawyer Joe Amendola, who was quoted in The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying, “What's the sense in having your record expunged if anyone can Google you and it comes up?” The five defendants had either pled guilty to criminal charges ranging from aggravated indecent assault to possession of marijuana, or completed pretrial diversion programs that resulted in no finding of guilt. Amendola said that an earlier client was having trouble finding employment despite having her criminal record expunged. Prospective employers Googled her name and found a 1992 Collegian article detailing her crime.
The expungement orders were eventually revised to remove any reference to the Centre Daily Times and the Daily Collegian on July 8, 2010. Judge Thomas Kistler told The Philadelphia Inquirer, "It was never anybody's intention to restrict .” Kistler Acknowledged the strong protections given the news media by the First Amendment, saying, "I can't tell them what to do." Kistler claimed court officials had not noticed that the newspapers were on the list of expungement orders sought by lawyer Amendola. "It was a breakdown under the rush of the system," Kistler said.