Indiana Daily Student: 150 Years of Headlines, Deadlines and Bylines

By Rachel Kipp

The story of a student-produced newspaper since its debut in 1867—including photos, coverage of historic events, and reminiscences from prominent alumni.

Generations of student journalists, armed with notepads, cameras, and a tireless devotion, have pursued both local and national stories for the student-produced newspaper at Indiana University Bloomington since its debut in 1867.

In Indiana Daily Student: 150 Years of Headlines, Deadlines and Bylines, editors and IDS alumni Rachel Kipp, Amy Wimmer Schwarb, and Charles Scudder piece together behind-the-scenes remembrances from former IDS reporters and photographers, newsroom images from throughout the decades, and a curated collection of notable IDS front pages. From coverage of the end of World War I to the selection of Herman B. Wells as IU’s president to the Hoosiers’ national basketball championship titles to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the IDS has chronicled news from a student perspective. Today, it serves as a training ground for fledgling journalists who have gone on to be monumental voices in American and global media.

Remembrances from some of the most prominent journalists to emerge from the IDS are included here: among them, publisher and journalism philanthropist Nelson Poynter; National Public Radio television critic Eric Deggans; and Pulitzer Prize winners Ernie Pyle, Thomas French, and Melissa Farlow. While at IU, students at the IDS built and maintained beloved traditions they continue to share today, all while offering a full spectrum of coverage for their readers. The first book on the paper’s history, Indiana Daily Student offers a comprehensive celebration of the newspaper’s achievements, as well as historic front pages, photographs, and personal narratives from current and former IDS journalists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253046130

Book preview

Introduction

‘ALLEGIANCE TO NO FACTION’: A HISTORY OF THE IDS

During the summer of 1979, IU student 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 the Indiana Daily Student.

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 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 in San Francisco and helped him land a job with the St. Petersburg Times. Nearly 20 years later, 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 work 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.

The Pulitzer and all that followed 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 IDS reporter and future Pulitzer Prize winner, Ernie Pyle, heard news that IU’s 12-man baseball team had been invited to play a series of exhibition games in Japan. I’ve just got to go, the wanderlust-struck Pyle told a friend. Pyle obtained permission from the dean, borrowed $200, and, with three of his fraternity brothers, secured jobs on the ship 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 to the IDS articles about his experiences, 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 evade detection and make his way onto American soil.

Ernie Pyle as a student, circa 1921. P0022819, IU Archives.

French’s idiosyncratic hog story and Pyle’s audacious Japanese trip would no doubt have delighted the original editors of The Indiana Student, which appeared on Feb. 22, 1867, the same year the IU Board of Trustees voted to allow women to attend classes. In its first issue, editors Henry C. Duncan, Robert D. Richardson and Henry C. Sol Meredith solemnly proclaimed the publication owed allegiance to no faction, and was subservient to no personal motives of exaltation, pure in tone, seeking the common good, partial and guided by a spirit of truth and justice. In that same issue, they also invented a fictional meeting at which President Andrew Johnson, writer Washington Irving, newspaper editor Horace Greeley, publisher James Gordon Bennett, journalist Henry J. Raymond and editor George D. Prentice gathered to determine a name for the IU publication.

Among the possibilities considered was 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."

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 computers, and today breaking news on mobile phones in readers’ pockets. The newspaper has fought to maintain itself economically and reflect its audience throughout its lives—as a for-profit venture for its editors; as a newspaper owned by the university and used as a laboratory to train journalists; and as an independent publication employing students of all types with its editor-in-chief selected by a publications board that includes 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 1990s, You Are the News. The work produced by the newspaper has often been honored with national awards, including numerous Pacemakers from the Associated Collegiate Press, and over the years IDS alumni have earned for their articles and photographs a number of Pulitzer prizes in a variety of categories. 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 Feb. 22, 1867, was likely not an 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 in its early years consisted of editors from the senior class, with junior class members as associates, sophomores serving as office boys, and freshmen relegated to the printer’s devil role, doing the mundane and grubby jobs associated with publishing in that era.

Although the first issue of the IU 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, meeting to come up with a name for 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.

The four-page, three-column, privately owned newspaper struggled to find its way, alternating between monthly and semimonthly publication, and sometimes disappearing for months at a time. It started out under rather unfavorable circumstances, Duncan remembered, but by hard work we managed to make both ends meet, barring a little deficit the members had to foot. But then the honor! Meredith could always be counted on to provide local news, but sometimes he wandered afield in his writing into areas, Duncan noted, not very suitable for a first-class paper. Although Richardson possessed writing ability, and could beat anyone on staff on criticism, said Duncan, he could also be inclined to be sarcastic. As for his own contributions to the Indiana Student, Duncan would only say that they often spurred Cyrus Nutt, the university’s fifth president, to invite the young student to his office for a heart-to-heart chat.

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 IU 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 of a transfer student from Butler University, Clarence L. Goodwin, who sought to revive a campus newspaper. He partnered in the endeavor with a former IU student, William Julian Bryan, then teaching in Virginia. (Bryan later served as IU president from 1902 to 1937, when he was known as William Lowe Bryan after he and his wife took each other’s names following their marriage in 1889.) 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 IU librarian William W. Spangler, who served as business manager, the monthly 28-page Student set out to not only provide some means of recording the doings of the alumni, but also provide an esprit de corps to our students which they would not otherwise possess.

William Lowe Bryan’s senior portrait, 1884. P0073981, IU Archives.

The paper 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 such subjects as accounts of fires, accidents, crimes; reports of lectures, entertainments, public meetings; interview; study of daily and weekly newspapers. The class had disappeared by 1898. The paper finally was placed on solid footing under the editorship of Salem, Indiana, native Walter H. Crim, who in the fall of 1898 received permission from the IU 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 at the Bloomington World-Courier building. In the 1900s, student editors received 15 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 again offered at IU in 1908 and were taught by Fred Bates Johnson, a former Indianapolis reporter. 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. (Piercy retired in 1938 and was succeeded by John E. Stempel, who had worked on the IDS in Pyle’s era as a news editor and editor in chief and later served as a copy editor at the New York Sun.)

John Stempel, head of the Department of Journalism from 1938 to 1968, with a portrait of Ernie Pyle in 1953. The two were IDS staff contemporaries; both were editors in chief. P0027093, IU Archives.

On May 5, 1910, after years of squabbling among editors about finances, most of the student and faculty stockholders of the Daily Student donated their holdings to the IU Board of Trustees. By this time, the newspaper had become a laboratory for journalism students, with a cast of rotating editors to provide experience to more students. In September 1914 the operation moved into new headquarters, occupying half of what had been the university’s power plant. (After World War II, a Quonset hut provided room for the news staff. 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