Yale Daily News

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.[4]

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.[5] 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."[6]

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.[7]

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.[8] 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.[9]

In 2009, the Yale Daily News won the Associated Collegiate Press Newspaper Pacemaker Award.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12]

The Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University has a copy of every issue published between 1890 and 1959.[13] 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.[14]

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.[17]

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.

• 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.[22]

• Official website
• Yale TV Main Page website
• 125th Anniversary Exhibit
• Historical archive at Yale University