The Bowdoin Orient is the student newspaper of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Established in 1871, the Orient is the oldest continuously-published college weekly in the United States.
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The Orient currently has an on-campus print distribution of approximately 2,000 and sends the paper to hundreds of alumni, parents, and other friends of the College. The paper is published each Friday while classes are in session and is distributed to the dining halls, the library, the student union, and various other College buildings, as well as in a number of businesses and restaurants in downtown Brunswick.
Since sometime in the late 1990s, the Orient's content has been available free of charge on the World Wide Web. The website underwent major redesigns in 2001, 2004 and 2009.
"The Bowdoin Orient is a student-run weekly publication dedicated to providing news and information relevant to the College community. Editorially independent of the College and its administrators, the Orient pursues such content freely and thoroughly, following professional journalistic standards in writing and reporting. The Orient is committed to serving as an open forum for thoughtful and diverse discussion and debate on issues of interest to the College community."
The Bowdoin Orient was established in 1871 as Bowdoin College's newspaper and literary magazine. Originally issued bi-weekly, it has been a weekly since April 1899. It is considered to be the oldest continuously-published college weekly in the U.S., which means that it has been in publication every academic year that Bowdoin has been in session since it began publishing weekly. (Other college weeklies stopped printing during certain war years.)
In the beginning, the Orient was laid out in a smaller magazine format and included literary material such as poems and fiction alongside its news. In 1897, the literary society formed its own publication, The Quill, and the Orient has since primarily focused on reporting news. In 1921, the Orient abandoned the magazine format and moved to a larger broadsheet layout to keep up with the trend of the times. Since then, it has variously moved between broadsheet and tabloid sizes and has seen major format updates every decade or two.
In 1912, The Bowdoin Publishing Company was established as the formal publisher of the Orient, and remained independent of the College for many years, while using college facilities and working with faculty-member advisers. The Bowdoin Publishing Company was a legal, non-profit corporation in the State of Maine for many years, at least from 1968 to 1989, though it was most likely an independent corporation since its inception. In 2002, the college forced the Orient to close the Bowdoin Publishing Company's off-campus checking account, which represented the final step in the company's dissolution.[1]
The Orient building has its own archives, with issues dating back to 1873, but it is missing several periods of time. The Hawthorne-Longfellow Library at Bowdoin College has a nearly complete archive of past Orient issues, both in print and on microform. Virtually all print issues are available from 1871 to the present in the library's George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives. Bound copies from 1871 to 1921 can be found in the periodicals section of the library. The Orient is available on microfilm for issues from 1921 to the present.
In 2010, the editors created an accompanying website for the Orient, titled the Orient Express, affectionately known as the OE. The Orient Express delivers breaking news, multimedia and more features daily--capabilities that are beyond the function of the weekly paper.
Sections of this page have been adapted from a history of the Orient written by Belinda Lovett, member of the Bowdoin College class of 2002 and a former editor-in-chief of the paper.
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