Format Broadsheet Founded 1892 | Editor-in-chief Victor Xu | |
 | ||
Type Daily student newspaper Owner(s) The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation Headquarters Lorry I. Lokey Stanford Daily Building
456 Panama Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
United States | ||
The Stanford Daily is the student-run, independent daily newspaper serving Stanford University. The Daily is distributed throughout campus and the surrounding community of Palo Alto, California, United States. It has published since the University was founded in 1892.
Contents
The paper publishes weekdays during the academic year. Unlike many other campus publications, it enjoys a wide circulation of 8,000 and is distributed at 500 locations throughout the Stanford campus, including dormitory dining halls, and in the city of Palo Alto. In addition to the daily newspaper, the Daily publishes two weekly supplements: Intermission, a weekly pullout entertainment section, and Cardinal Today, a weekly sports "outsert" during football and basketball seasons. The Daily also published several special issues every year: "The Orientation Issue," "Big Game Issue," and "The Commencement Issue." In the fall of 2008, the paper's offices relocated from the Storke Publications Building to the newly constructed Lorry I. Lokey Stanford Daily Building, near the recently renovated Old Student Union.
History
The paper began as a small student publication called The Daily Palo Alto serving the Palo Alto area and the University. It "has been Stanford's only news outlet operating continuously since the birth of the University."
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as baby boomer college students increasingly questioned authority and asserted generational independence, and Stanford administrators became worried about liability for the paper's editorials, the paper and the University severed ties. In 1973, students founded The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation, a non-profit corporation, to operate the newspaper.
A significant event leading to the paper's independence was the 1970 publication of an opinion piece entitled "Snitches and Oppression." The author of the piece named two witnesses to the protests that led to his arrest and concluded "take care of snitches." The university president, Richard Lyman, called the piece a "journalistic atrocity" and indicated concern that the university could be held liable for the content of the newspaper and its consequences. During the fall of 1970, the newspaper also announced an editorial policy of destroying unpublished photographs of demonstrations so they could not be used as evidence in court.
In April, 1971, little more than a year thereafter, the newspaper's policy led a local district attorney, James Zurcher, to initiate a search of the Daily offices. This occurred shortly after the occupation of a Stanford Hospital building had been broken up by police, some of whom were attacked and injured by the demonstrators. Believing that photographs of these assaults existed in Daily files, detectives spent hours searching the darkroom and staff members' desks. The newspaper, aided by the noted constitutional expert Anthony Amsterdam, filed suit claiming a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution. Zurcher v. Stanford Daily went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against the paper.
In 1991, a volunteer group of alumni incorporated The Friends of The Stanford Daily Foundation to provide support for the newspaper.
In 1982, after the Stanford football team officially lost the Big Game against cross-bay rival University of California at Berkeley ("Cal") due to what has become known as "The Play," The Daily published a fake edition of The Daily Californian, Cal's student newspaper, announcing officials had reversed the game's outcome. Styled as an "extra," the bogus paper headlined "NCAA AWARDS BIG GAME TO STANFORD". The Daily distributed 7,000 copies around the Berkeley campus early in the morning, before that day's Cal student paper was released. The prank has been credited to four Stanford undergraduates: Tony Kelly, Mark Zeigler, Adam Berns and the Daily's editor-in-chief, Richard Klinger. To cover printing costs, the Daily made souvenir copies available on the Stanford campus for $1 apiece.
The Stanford Daily's journalism has sometimes had far-reaching consequences; in the early 1990s a Daily staff member, John Wagner, '91, reported and published an investigative series uncovering significant corruption in the management of the Stanford Bookstore. According to Joanie Fischer's 2003 article about the newspaper in Stanford Magazine, "Managers of the independent nonprofit had formed a consulting firm that then leased a vacation home to the Bookstore and embezzled Bookstore funds to furnish it."
In October 2015, the Daily was criticized for failing to investigate misconduct at both the student and University level by Vanity Fair's David Margolick who wrote "The Stanford Daily has proved supine" in a 7,000-word feature on the unfolding scandal at the Graduate School of Business. When GSB Dean Garth Saloner resigned suddenly on September 14, 2015 amid a wrongful termination suit, the Daily was scooped by Poets & Quants, a blog that covers MBA programs around the world. The lawsuit was filed by a former professor married to fellow GSB professor Deborah H. Gruenfeld, with whom Saloner was having an affair. Though the scandal was covered extensively by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and several international outlets, the Daily did not do additional reporting beyond its initial announcement of the Dean's resignation.
The Stanford Daily is an affiliate of UWIRE, which distributes and promotes the paper's content to its network.