During the summer of 1979 a student journalist from Indiana University, Tom French, an Indianapolis native who had attended the Indiana State Fair for years, became intrigued by one of its more outlandish attractions—the World’s Largest Hog competition. He set out to write about it for IU’s Indiana Daily Student newspaper.
French had always considered the Largest Hog event “weird,” wondering why someone would take the trouble to raise an animal so enormous that its legs literally could not support its weight. His editors at the IDS, friends of his and excellent journalists, urged him not to do the story as it was not a serious subject. “By that point I had written hundreds of serious stories and had been bored to tears by most of them,” French recalled. “My question was: What’s wrong with once in a while writing something that people actually want to read?” He went to the fair, observed the winning hog and traveled to the farm in Elwood, Indiana, where it had been raised. Through his reporting, he learned that the story was “really about the American obsession with super-sizing everything. I became convinced that it had something to do with the vastness of the American landscape and American ambitions.”
The article won first place that fall in the features category in the Hearst Journalism Awards program for college students, earned French a trip to the championship that next summer in San Francisco, and helped him land a job with the Saint Petersburg Times, where French, today a professor of practice in journalism for The Media School at IU, won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and a Sigma Delta Chi award for “Angels & Demons,” a series that explored the murder of an Ohio woman and her two teenage daughters. The article became a seminal piece of narrative journalism. Fellow Pulitzer recipient Anne Hull of the Washington Post said French’s series long dominated the craft and served as “a model for the rest of us to follow.” It could never have happened without French’s association with the IDS. “It was the best learning experience I ever had and one of the greatest times in my life,” said French, who also served as the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. “I never really understood how much freedom we had to make mistakes, take chances and do outrageous things.”
Years before French’s investigation of the state fair’s odd attraction, another Daily Student reporter, and future Pulitzer Prize winner, Ernie Pyle, heard news that IU’s twelve-man baseball team had been invited to play a series of exhibition games in Japan. “I’ve just got to go,” Pyle, struck with wanderlust, told his friend Paige Cavanaugh. Pyle obtained permission from Dean of Men Clarence Edmondson, borrowed $200, and, with three of his fraternity brothers, secured jobs on the ship (the Keystone State) taking the baseball squad to Japan. Pyle wrote his parents that he possessed “a pretty level head, so there is not the slightest cause to worry about me. I have trotted around this old globe considerably, and I think I should be pretty well qualified to handle myself wisely.”
The junior from Dana, Indiana, made sure to mail articles about his experiences to the IDS, including pieces on a storm that sailors told him was “the worst they had ever seen on the Pacific with the exception of a typhoon,” and his duties as a bellboy, including carrying ice and water, shining shoes, delivering packages, drawing baths, and tending to the “innumerable queer wants of the passengers.” Pyle and his fraternity brothers even managed to help a young Filipino stowaway, Eugene Uebelhardt, evade detection and make his way onto American soil.
French’s idiosyncratic hog story and Pyle’s audacious Japan trip would no doubt have delighted the original editors of the university’s first newspaper, The Indiana Student, which appeared on February 22, 1867, the same year the IU board of trustees voted to allow women to attend classes. Although in its first issue its editors—Henry C. Duncan, Robert D. Richardson, and Henry C. “Sol” Meredith—solemnly proclaimed the publication owed “allegiance to no faction, subservient to no personal motives of exaltation, pure in tone, seeking the common good, partial and guided by a spirit of truth and justice.”
Among the possibilities considered included the “Bloomington Regulator,” with one of its principal objects to “regulate society, regulate literature, regulate students, regulate the faculty, regulate public exhibitions, regulate Bloomington; in short, it was to be a regulator in the fullest sense of the term.” The article noted that Raymond in particular believed “The University Lightning Rod” would be fitting, as it would be the “means of silently conducting all the superfluous gas generated in the fruitful craniums of certain ‘smart students,’ either to immortal glories in the skies, or . . . to its more appropriate place, the dominions of Pluto beneath the earth.” The men also pondered such names as “My Policy Gazette” (Johnson’s choice), “Collegian, “Review,” “Banner,” “Mirror,” and “Bummer.”
Finally, Raymond, “by a heroic stretch of imagination and herculean wielding of brain power,” came up with “The Indiana Student.” That first issue also included a puckish notice informing students they should bear in mind that marriage notices would be “inserted free of charge,” and a piece advocating for campus improvements (a familiar theme for subsequent IU student newspapers), especially the building of a “walk from the campus gate to the college. Many of our citizens have been deterred from attending performances at the college, in consequent of the deep mud through which they were compelled to wade. This could be remedied at a small outlay, and should be attended to at once, if we desire to keep up our reputation; all it needs is someone to take hold and it can be put through. Who will make the move?”Throughout its more than 150 years of existence, the IDS has changed with the times and technology, from the hot-metal typesetting days of the Linotype machine to scanners and computer terminals and reading breaking news on handheld devices that can be slipped in and out of a pocket with ease. The newspaper has fought to maintain itself economically and reflect the audience it was writing for as it evolved from a for-profit venture for its editors to one owned by the university and used a laboratory to train journalists at IU to an independent publication employing students of all types with its editor-in-chief selected by a publications board including professional journalists and students. “These are our students on display,” noted Trevor Brown, former dean of the IU School of Journalism. “Obviously at times they disappoint us. At other times they thrill us with the quality. But that’s no different from a professional newspaper.”
Mottos used by the IDS have reflected the changes in journalism over the years, with the paper in 1914 using “Best in the Middle West,” in 1929 “He Serves Best Who Serves the Truth” and “’Tis the Truth that Makes Man Free,” and in the late 1990s “You Are the News.” The work produced by the newspaper has often been honored with national awards, including numerous Pacemakers from the American Newspaper Publishers Association, and IDS alumni have earned for their articles and photographs more Pulitzer Prizes than graduates from any other active college newspapers.
Before the Indiana Student made its appearance in 1867, other universities had already started publications offering literary outpourings and news, including the Dartmouth Gazette in 1800, followed by the Asbury Review, the Yale Courant, and Harvard Advocate. The Bloomington campus had seen two other attempts at collegiate journalism, including publications from the 1840s titled The Equator and The Athenian, the latter of which was sponsored by the Athenian Society, a literary group.
The Indiana Student’s appearance on February 22, 1867, was not accident, as its editors might have taken advantage of the pomp associated then with commemorating George Washington’s birthday, including a campus tradition whereby students burned their Latin texts of Horace or buried “Calculus” in late-night ceremonies. Newspaper staff consisted of editors from the senior class, with junior class members as “associates,” sophomores serving as office boys. and freshman relegated to the printer’s devil role, doing the mundane and grubby jobs associated with the printing trade.
Although the first issue of the newspaper had lampooned its naming with its fanciful committee, the truth was more prosaic, with Duncan, Richardson, and Meredith, joined by three other unnamed students, pondering what to name their creation. Reminiscing about the newspaper’s start, Duncan noted that those gathered “puzzled our brains . . . in names beginning with ‘A’ and running to ‘Z,’ but no name appeared suitable until the big senior from Cambridge City—‘Sol’ Meredith—put his giant intellect to bear on the subject, struck an attitude, and sang out ‘Student’—‘Indiana Student!’ And so it was christened.”
Taken over in 1870–71 by the by the Athenian and Philomathean Literary Association, two literary societies, the Indiana Student went out of business in 1874, beset with financial problems and supposed pressure from university president Lemuel Moss, who believed that IU should be a school of arts and no more. For the next eight years students had to rely on Bloomington newspapers for news about campus activities. That changed with the arrival on campus of a transfer student from Butler University, Clarence L. Goodwin, who sought to revive a campus newspaper. He sought a partnership with a former IU student, William Julian Bryan, then teaching in Virginia and later the university’s president from 1902 to 1937. “He brought with him the courage and conviction to start new things,” Bryan said of Goodwin. “And since reawakening the professional schools would have been a bit out of line for him as a student, he brought baseball, The Student, and lecture bureau to the campus.”
With help from William W. Spangler, university librarian, who served as the newspaper’s business manager, the monthly, twenty-eight page Student set out to not only provide “some means of recording the doings of the alumni,” but also giving “an esprit de corps to our students which they would not otherwise possess.”
After being revived by Goodwin and Bryan, the publication underwent some rocky times, with ownership changing hands among various editors, as well as being taken over by the IU Lecture Association and the university librarian for a time. The university did finally offer a class in reporting in 1893 taught by Professor Martin W. Sampson, with four students being instructed for two hours a week on “accounts of fires, accidents, crimes; reports of lectures, entertainments, public meetings; interview; study of daily and weekly newspapers.” The class had disappeared by 1898. IU’s paper finally got on solid footing under the editorship of Salem, Indiana, native Walter H. Crim, who, in the fall of 1898, received permission from the board of trustees to change the name to the Daily Student (it did not become the more familiar Indiana Daily Student until 1914) and publish it five afternoons a week; printing was done in the Bloomington World-Courier building.
In the 1900s student editors received fifteen credit hours for the work, but the university dropped the policy in 1906, and applicants for the job suffered a considerable drop. Journalism courses were offered at IU in 1908 by Fred Bates Johnson, a former Indianapolis reporter, and at the end of the 1910–11 school year, Joseph W. Piercy, formerly of the University of Washington, came to IU as head of the Department of Journalism, finally retiring in 1938. (Piercy was succeeded by John E. Stempel, who had worked on the IDS as a news editor with Pyle and later serving as a copy editor at the New York Sun.)
On May 5, 1910, after years of squabbling among editors over finances, most of the student and faculty stockholders of the Daily Student donated their holdings to the university’s board of trustees. By this time, newspaper had become a laboratory for journalism students, with a cast of rotating editors. In September 1914 the newspaper operation moved into new headquarters on campus, occupying half of what had been the university’s power plant. (After World War II a quonset hut provided room for the news staff and the journalism department and newspaper finally moved into Ernie Pyle Hall in 1954). Four pages of six columns each were published every morning except Sunday; during World War I, to conserve paper and power, the IDS halted publication on Mondays.
By 1920 the IDS added news from the Associated Press, which came every night via a fifteen-minute phone call from Indianapolis; full AP service came in 1931. Also in the early 1920s, the newspaper established an Indiana State Fair edition (Pyle served as one of the first editors-in-chief), with ten thousand copies printed and distributed free to those attending the goings-on at the fairgrounds in Indianapolis.
Furnishings were by no means plush in the newspaper’s editorial offices in the printing plant. Martha Wright Myrick, a 1932 graduate whose father, Joe Wright, helped run the journalism department with Piercy, recalled a cluttered city room with a “horseshoe shaped desk for rewrite men and headline writers. I remember sitting on those rickety wooden folding chairs in front of an equally rickety typewriter batting out my story for the next after a concert or recital or whatever I had covered that night.” Students could be interrupted at any time by a faculty member storming into the office to point out an error in someone’s copy. Glen Stadler, a 1936 graduate, never forgot one day when J. Wymond French, the newspaper’s faculty adviser, stormed out of his office to tack on the bulletin board a notice pointing out a gross error: “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER write ‘TURN DOWN’ when you mean ‘REJECT!’”
Seeing an article with a byline appear in print for the first time was a memory cherished by many IDS alumni. J. E. O’Brien, who went on after graduating from IU in 1937 to work at the Indianapolis Times and Indianapolis News, achieved his first byline as a freshman after receiving a tip from Henrietta Thornton of IU’s publicity office. O’Brien interviewed Charley Hornbostel, the university’s famed middle-distance runner, about one of his ancestors, who had also been a runner. With “some trepidation,” O’Brien took his story to French. “He read it without changing a word, marked the paragraphs and penciled my byline atop the story,” O’Brien recalled. “I then asked if I could join the staff. To my surprise, French said I could.”
O’Brien spent three years at the IDS, working in a variety of jobs, including editor-in-chief. His most satisfying was serving as night editor, effectively the paper’s managing editor, as that post selected what stories appeared on the front page and which receive the biggest play. Although French never questioned the night editor’s news judgment, “the marked-up front page he posted on the bulletin board the next morning usually made the night editor wince,” remembered O’Brien.
The days of the flatbed press ended in 1964, when the IDS became an offset newspaper. By the middle of the 1970s, computers arrived, and reporters typed their stories on special typewriters before feeding them into a scanner that transferred the information to a file in the computer that could then be edited before being sent to the production room for layout. In October 1996 the IDS entered the Internet age with the appearance of an online version on the World Wide Web.
Among the major changes to the newspaper, none may have been bigger than the one that occurred in 1969, when, as part of a change in the curriculum, journalism students were no longer required to work on the IDS. Also, the IU board of trustees approved a charter making the newspaper an enterprise of the university, still owned by IU, but without offering financial support. “It was a time of activism on campus,” said Blewett, who had joined the journalism department in 1965. “Everyone was trying to get their hands on it—student government, every kind of side group, every activist group. You really realized how valuable it was when you saw that all those people wanted it. . . . We had to fight to hold on, to mold the paper as an independent paper.”
Jack Backer of the Niles Star became the IDS’s publisher. A student who worked on the IDS under Backer’s tutelage, Dennis Royalty, a 1971 graduate, often told them, “Progress is crisis-oriented,” and gently pointed out what the fledgling journalists “could have done better while championing our success.” Following Backer’s death from cancer in 1976, Siddons, Bloomington bureau chief for the Louisville Courier Journal, accepted the publisher. Siddons said that Backer had put “the Daily Student on the lips of all the college media advisers around the country. . . . Jack Backer built the ship. All I had to do was make sure that it was steered in the right direction.”
Controversy, of course, has been part of the IDS since its inception, and has included everything from angry Iranian students demanding the newspaper drop its AP service for Reuters International, accusations that the newspaper did not reflect the diversity of the student body, and (change to Media School).
With all the changes in journalism and at IU since the IDS first appeared in 1867, one thing has remained constant—the dedication of the students who have chosen to offer their talents working for the newspaper. It has been that way from the 1920s to the 2000s. For example, in the spring of 1929 reporters and editors were working on the next day’s issue when, at about 10 p.m., the lights in the newsroom went out. “The power house, which was right adjacent to the Daily Student office, was on fire,” said Robert Pebworth, who worked as the night editor. “We went out and by that time, the fire fighting equipment had come, and inquiries of what the devil to do.”
Eventually, the staff gathered all the type and moved it to the Bloomington World to be printed. Pebworth recalled that the staff finished making up the paper at 7:30 in the morning and, despite the fire, it was out and delivered by 8:30. “We had a sense of a team concept,” he said. “We came from different backgrounds, with different interests, but we got swept up in trying to put out a good newspaper.”
Ritchie noted that a number of students, not too happy about being back at school after a long break, would have “complained about being in cramped quarters, trying to put out the first paper of the semester. But not this group. Instead, my colleagues were laughing, working with writers who had come in to edit their stories and genuinely enjoying each others’ company.”
Ritchie’s experience that day proved to her (as Pebworth’s adventure probably had in 1929) that she had made the right choice in choosing journalism as her career. “I wanted to be part of a profession that proved people can accomplish anything with a little bit of teamwork,” she said. “I think of that day often, especially when I hear people question the future of journalism. I know it will survive as long as we all work together, like IDS staffers did that day and for more than a century before that.”
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