The Daily Cardinal

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Type Daily newspaper
Format Tabloid
Owner Independent
Editor Sam-Omar Hall
Founded 1892
Political allegiance Moderate, leaning Liberal
Headquarters Madison, WI, U.S.
Website: www.dailycardinal.com

The Daily Cardinal is the fifth oldest student newspaper in the United States, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It began publishing in 1892 and is financially and editorially independent.

The Cardinal's motto, printed at the bottom of every front page and taken from an 1894 declaration by the university's Board of Regents, is "...the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."

Contents

[edit] The Cardinal Today

The Daily Cardinal is distributed throughout the campus community, with a daily circulation of about 10,000, and is published Monday through Friday during the academic year in both a tabloid print format and in electronic form on the Web. It employs roughly 200 undergraduate and graduate students. Its daily sections include News, Opinion, Arts and Sports, and its weekly sections are Commerce, Features, Food and Science. In 2005, the Cardinal was the recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence award for best daily college newspaper of the year in Region 6 (Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin).[1]

[edit] History

[2]

[edit] The Beginning of Sifting and Winnowing: 1892-1932

The Daily Cardinal was founded by Monroe, Wisconsin natives William Wesley Young, UW-Madison’s first journalism student, and William Saucerman to be a rival to the monthly student paper Aegis. Four hundred free copies of the paper were made available to Wisconsin students on April 4, 1892. For the first month of production, Young would ride his horse down State Street to the offices of the Madison Democrat, which printed the Cardinal.

The name was decided by a vote of university students. "Cardinal" was for the red color associated with the university.

While against World War I at its outset, the Cardinal developed favorable attitudes toward the war, especially following the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice. The Cardinal did not initially support the Second World War either, but later added special military sections to help coordinate the war effort.

[edit] Making an Impression: 1932-1960

The Great Depression was when the Cardinal first earned its reputation for radicalism. Disagreeing with a policy of mandatory military training for male undergraduates and running a letter to the editor signed by Junior Women discussing free love led U.S. Senate nominee John B. Chapple to declare that the Cardinal was controlled by “Reds, Atheists and free love advocates.” The UW-Madison Board of Regents revoked the Cardinal’s title as “official University newspaper” following this discourse and threatened closing the paper down until a compromise added a faculty member and a regent to the Cardinal board.

In 1940, the Cardinal moved out of its office east of Memorial Union to a building on University Avenue, on the land that Vilas Communication Hall today sits on. In 1956, the Cardinal board donated the land to the university in an agreement stipulating that the Cardinal would enjoy rent-free tenancy in the new building. The Cardinal’s offices remain in Vilas Hall today.

In 1942, Cardinal founder Young returned to edit the paper for a day. The New York Times wrote on the occasion, “Despite annual changes in student staffs, a few college newspapers in the country have acquired a definite character. One of these is the Daily Cardinal of the University of Wisconsin. The Cardinal is proud of its liberal tradition. Because it fights cleanly and with a sense of responsibility, its youthful passion for righteousness does not burn less brightly.”

[edit] A Radical Reputation: 1960-1988

In the 1960s, the Cardinal developed a nationwide reputation for its vehement left-wing politics, strongly protesting the Vietnam War and supporting Civil Rights in its editorials. In 1969, a group of conservative UW-Madison students, frustrated by the Cardinal’s unrelenting liberalism, founded The Badger Herald as a right-wing alternative. While both papers have largely shed their ideological rigidity, the Cardinal is still generally perceived to be the more liberal campus paper and the Herald the more conservative. UW-Madison remains the only university with two competing daily school newspapers.

The 1970s saw the Cardinal maintain its strong issue advocacy, but opinion began to shift to more campus, rather than national, angles. In the last half of the decade, the paper continually attacked the university for its reported holdings in corporations that participated in apartheid in South Africa.

In 1983 the Cardinal survived a hostile takeover attempt by the Herald. The same year, it became free, and has remained so until this day.

[edit] Strife and Shutdown: 1988-1995

In the beginning of the difficult stretch for the Cardinal, in 1988 the university announced it would shut down the paper’s presses, then located in Vilas Hall. Luckily for the Cardinal, the university decided to sell the presses to UW Extension, which remained the Cardinal’s printer for the next five years. Today, the Cardinal is printed at Capital Newspapers.

In 1995, the paper’s stunned editors were informed that the Cardinal did not have the financial means to continue printing. The Cardinal suffered through a seven-month shutdown until the necessary funds were secured to return.

[edit] The Cardinal Reborn: 1995-

The Cardinal returned to campus later that year with a cover depicting a cardinal rising from ashes like a phoenix.

In 2000, the Cardinal broke the story that university officials had digitally inserted a black student’s face into a photograph of white Badger football fans. The image had been used on the cover of Wisconsin’s 2001-02 undergraduate application. The story received the National Story of the Year award for student journalism, awarded by the Los Angeles Times.

Today, the Cardinal continues to be distributed 5 days a week on the UW-Madison campus and its surrounding areas.

[edit] Notable Alumni

[3]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Society of Professial Journalists. "SPJ Announces 2005 Region 6 Mark of Excellence Award Winners." April 3, 2006. http://www.spj.org/news.asp?ref=563
  2. ^ The Daily Cardinal Online Edition. "History of The Daily Cardinal." http://www.dailycardinal.com/about.php/
  3. ^ The Daily Cardinal Alumni Association. "DCAA Award Winners." 1999-2005. http://dailycardinal.net/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=2
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