Type Daily newspaper President Carter Coudriet | Format Broadsheet News editor Sydney Schaedel | |
Owner(s) The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc. Opinion editor Alessandro van den Brink | ||
The Daily Pennsylvanian (The DP) is the independent daily student newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania.
Contents
It is published every weekday when the university is in session, by a staff of more than 250 students. During the summer months, a smaller staff produces a weekly version called The Summer Pennsylvanian. The DP also publishes a weekly arts and entertainment magazine called 34th Street Magazine and a weekly newspaper mailed to parents and alumni called The Weekly Pennsylvanian. The DP operates three principal websites—thedp.com, 34st.com, and underthebutton.com—as well as a variety of opinion, news, and sports blogs.
History
The Daily Pennsylvanian was founded in 1885 as a successor to the University Magazine, a publication by the Philomathean Society. The newspaper has been published daily since 1894, except for a hiatus from May 1943 to November 1945 on account of World War II. The DP broke away from the university in 1962 to become an independent publication, incorporating in 1984 to solidify its financial and editorial independence from the university. Also in 1962 the previously all-male daily began to accept female students. Among the early few women were Mary Selman Hadar, formerly an editor at the Washington Post; Clara Bargellini, today a professor of art at the National Autonomous University of Mexico; and Susan Nagler Perloff Susan Perloff, a Philadelphia freelance writer. Today the newspaper's budget is funded primarily through the sale of advertising by a student business staff.
Description
The DP is sometimes called Penn's "unofficial journalism department", because the university has no journalism department (though it does have the prestigious Annenberg School for Communication), and because many of its staff members go on to pursue careers in the print, broadcast, and electronic media. DP alumni can be found at a number of major daily newspapers and national magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Time, and Business Week. .
Awards
The Daily Pennsylvanian has won many of the most prestigious awards in college journalism. In 2008, the newspaper was awarded the Society of Professional Journalists' National Mark of Excellence Award. In the same year, the paper won the Spring 2008 Columbia Gold Crown, awarded to only eight college newspapers nationwide, an award it has won many times before. It also received first place in the Associated Collegiate Press's Kansas City Convention Best of Show Competition in 2008. In 2004, the DP won the Pacemaker, awarded by the Associated Collegiate Press and the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, for a fourth consecutive year. It also won the award in 1990, 1997, and 1998, and most recently in 2007. Several of its writers win Gold Circles from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association every year. It was also ranked as the "most read" college newspaper by The Princeton Review in 1990, 1997, 1998, and 2001. In 2006, College Publisher awarded the DP first place in the category of Best Online Sports Coverage and, in 2008, it was awarded an online Gold Crown for thedp.com.