The Yale Daily News, the nation's oldest college daily newspaper, has been published by Yale University students in New Haven, Connecticut since January 28, 1878. "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," the paper's first editors wrote.

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. 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 Cornell Daily Sun, launched in 1880, claims 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 1799, calls itself the oldest college newspaper, though not the oldest daily.

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
• 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
• 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 Wall Street Journal
• Calvin Trillin, columnist and humorist
• Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate
• Jodi Wilgoren , Chicago bureau chief for the New York Times

External links

• Yale Daily News Online
• Apple Profiles in Success: Yale Daily News
• 125th Anniversary Exhibit