The Stony Brook Statesman

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The Stony Brook Statesman is a student newspaper servicing the State University of New York at Stony Brook in New York's Long Island. It was founded in the fall of 1957 as the Sucolian, for the "State University Campus On Long Island" at Oyster Bay, the university's name and location until 1962. The name was changed to The Statesman in February 1958.

The newspaper is published twice a week during the academic year and until recently was also published bimonthly during the summer months, though it did not publish at all in the summers of 2005 and 2006. It currently prints 6,000 issues per run, at two runs per week. It is distributed to many on-campus locations, the Hospital, and over 70 off-campus locations. As late as 1984, the Statesman was published three times per week during the academic year.

The Statesman Association was formed as a non-profit organization approximately 1970 and was incorporated in 1975. The paper is funded by advertising and additional funds from the student government.

The Statesman is often viewed as the campus publication of record, however, its reputation amongst the student body has, at times, been mixed. Student discord with the Statesman in 1979 led to the resignation of several Statesman editors, who went on to found the Stony Brook Press, which is now widely considered to be the main alternative publication to the Statesman on campus. More recently, in 2005, several Statesman editors and staffers resigned and went on to become founding members of the Stony Brook Independent, an online publication that aimed to compete directly with the Statesman by focusing on hard news. However, the Statesman and its editors have, in the past, also won several awards for student journalism, and several past editors have gone on to enjoy distinguished careers in the field of journalism.