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The Publication Proliferation
In the 1960s, there were six major Yale undergraduate publications, dominated by the Yale Daily News. In the age of computers and the Internet, just about everybody’s a publisher. (Have you read Rumpus lately?)
by Annie Murphy Paul
March 1996
In 1961, Loomis Havemeyer ’10S, ’15PhD, a professor of anthropology, embarked on a study of a highly specialized culture: undergraduate organizations at Yale College. His survey turned up only six student publications: the Yale Literary Magazine, the Yale Banner, the Yale Record, the Yale Daily News, the Yale Scientific Magazine, and Criterion. Those half-dozen publications were the bearers of a long and proud tradition: Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, and Louis Auchincloss had been among contributors to the Lit, and the Daily News could count Sargent Shriver ’38, William F. Buckley ’50, and Calvin Trillin ’57 among its former chairmen of the board. Thirty-five years later, all save Criterion are still in print, but today Havemeyer would have a whole new generation of publications to examine.
Aspiring reporters enrolled at Yale might now bypass the News in favor of the Yale Herald, a weekly paper that offers its readers in-depth feature articles, or head over to Rumpus, a tabloid-style paper with a penchant for the sensational. Yale poets and critics might these days sidestep the Lit for Zirkus, an offbeat literary magazine, or Nadine, a music journal that bears the slogan, “The magazine that wishes it were a band.” And those interested in writing about ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation, about conservative politics or human rights, can choose from a slew of magazines that would have been unthinkable in 1961: from the Korean American Journal to the Yale Woman, from the Yale Journal of Ethics to the Yale Free Press.
Perhaps a hundred magazines and newspapers have come (and many have gone) in the years since the survey.
Yale’s residential colleges have always produced a number of small literary and humor magazines, often printed on college presses; Havemeyer’s survey shows that a handful of publications, with names like The Gallinipper (1846), The Yale Naughtical Almanac (1872), and The Harkness Hoot (1931), were formed each decade since 1780. The 1960s and 1970s produced several publications that are still thriving, among them The New Journal, a news magazine founded in 1967, and the Yale Daily News Magazine, a spin-off of the newspaper introduced in the mid-1970s.
Since the early 1980s, however, the number of publications on campus has grown at an increasingly frantic pace. Many of these are as quirky as they are ephemeral, lasting one or two issues at most: Geist Magazine, the Great Ivy Bilingual Publication, and Red Shift: A Yale Undergraduate Science Fiction Review each lasted only a year before folding. “A lot of these magazines are started by students who see something new out there that they want to write about,” notes Betty Trachtenberg, dean of student affairs. “They say what they want to say, and then they move on.” Other publications achieve a shaky sort of continuity: The name stays the same, while the magazine itself is revamped, revised, and redesigned by successive groups of editors, or goes in and out of existence, surfacing here and there through the years.
And yet there are a few that have secured an enduring place for themselves in the unstable world of student publications. One of the most successful of these is the Yale Herald, a weekly newspaper intended to offer, in the words of its current editor Fiona Havers ’97, “another forum for student voices” than the one supplied by the Daily News. It has proved to be an appealing alternative. In the years after the Herald was introduced, in 1986, the student readership of the News fell precipitously, reaching a low in 1994 of 570 subscribers. Says Havers: “The Herald was distributed free of charge every week, so students didn’t see why they should pay $40 to get the News anymore.” Journalists at the Herald had a week to research and write their articles, and stories in the News, produced under the pressure of a daily deadline, began to look superficial by comparison. Since the Daily itself became free of charge two years ago, its student readership has climbed; it now distributes 5,000 issues a day on campus.
Editors of the Herald, however, say there’s still a place for their paper at Yale. “We’re sort of a Newsweek to their New York Times, ” says Havers. “We can pull out what’s really important about a news story, instead of reporting every little development on a daily basis.”
It’s clear that the Herald has survived and prospered because it appeals to the broadest possible readership at Yale. Much of the recent growth in student publications, however, can be attributed to a very different dynamic: the increasing diversity and heterogeneity of the student body. Around the time that women were admitted to the College, in 1969, then-President Kingman Brewster directed his admissions officers to begin attracting more minority students and students from more varied backgrounds. “As the population has changed, so have the publications,” Betty Trachtenberg notes. “Yale students have become a much less homogeneous group, and they demand different kinds of expression.”
Indeed, among the fastest-growing categories of new student publications are ethnic and cultural magazines, like the Korean American Journal at Yale, founded in 1985. Says Janice Kang ’96, a former editor: “I felt I could explore and express ideas in the magazine that I couldn’t in a more general publication. Our audience was more limited than that of the Daily News, and so I had the liberty to be more focused in my writing, knowing that the audience was familiar with the issues under discussion.” The years since coeducation have also seen the rise of publications intended for the female population of Yale College, such as Yale Woman, first published in 1991. “The older publications seemed to be stuck in a rut,” says Solange Belcher ’94, the magazine’s founder. “They weren’t willing to try anything new, so I decided to go out and start my own publication.”
Some of the newer magazines diverge from mainstream publications not so much in their focus on ethnicity or gender, as in their philosophy and politics. The current editor of The Free Press, a conservative newspaper founded in 1982, says that many of his writers feel uncomfortable in the “left-wing” culture of Yale’s traditional media. “The Free Press offers an alternative perspective on what’s happening on campus,” says Brian Carney, a senior. “What’s more important is that we give people who write for us an outlet to express themselves that doesn’t stifle their freedom of expression.” Like material published in the gay publication My Tongue or in the feminist Aurora, much of the text of The Free Press is too radical, too irreverent, or too partisan to appear in a more middle-of-the-road journal. And some of the articles published by student editors are simply too specialized to appeal to a general readership. Students are increasingly using campus journals as extensions of their academic or extracurricular interests, publishing treatises like “The ‘New’ Internationalists ” and “The U.S. in a Multipolar World,” two articles in a recent issue of The Yale International Forum, a magazine established in 1982. As the student body has grown steadily larger, so have the audiences for such esoteric topics grown substantial enough to support their own magazine.
Another factor behind the recent growth in student publishing is more pragmatic than ideological: The publications themselves are simply easier to produce than they once were. The increasing accessibility and sophistication of personal computers, which became widely available in the early 1980s, have greatly reduced the rigors of putting out a magazine. According to Philip Long, Yale’s director of academic computing, the University first made public clusters of computers available about a decade ago, around the same time that students began bringing their own computers to school. Computers allowed students to design and create publications that were much more professional-looking than those produced by the cut-and-paste method, and that eliminated entirely the need for an expensive and time-consuming typesetting machine.
Although Yale’s Academic Computing Center offers to undergraduates the use of three computers capable of running page layout programs, Long notes that many students who are editors of publications have their own equipment and their own copies of layout software, such as Pagemaker and Quark Express. And the power and sophistication of such programs keeps growing. “You can do magic now compared to what you could do on a computer ten years ago,” says Long.
Students can even use Yale’s computer facilities to print their publications. The manager of the University’s print shop, Joseph Cinquino, says it publishes about a dozen student magazines a year, in runs ranging from 500 to 2,000 copies. “A lot of the students are connected to the University network, and they just send over their material electronically,” he says. “They show up the next day and we have their magazines ready for them.” Because computers now do so much of the work of producing a publication, students no longer need a large staff or an elaborate office. The magazines can be produced by small groups of people, often right out of their dorm rooms.
Some observers of the campus publications scene argue that the sheer number of student magazines has meant a decline in quality. “With so many magazines, not every one can have a top writer or a top artist anymore,” says Bret Ancowitz ’96, editor of the Yale Scientific. Others see greater democracy at work. “In the old days, there were plenty of talented writers who had to wait to get their work published, or never got it published at all,” says Assistant Dean of Yale College Philip Greene. “Now almost everyone who wants to can get their words into print. Some of it’s awful, of course, but some of it’s quite good.” Still others think that increased competition among publications has actually improved the quality of campus journalism. Ray Deck ’97, editor of the tabloid-style Rumpus, says that his paper’s criticism of the lapses of other publications has resulted in more careful and accurate reporting. “Now editors know that when they’re sloppy, they’re going to get called on it in a very public way,” he says.
Student editors are feeling the heat. “The other publications do keep us on our toes,” says Daily News editor Noah Kotch ’97. “It’s rare that anyone beats us to a story, but when it happens we take it very seriously.” It happened in the fall of 1994, when the conservative magazine Light and Truth (which is written by undergraduates but funded by outside sources) first reported that the $20 million Bass grant was in trouble. The story was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, then by newspapers across the country.
Yale’s more established publications may soon face competition of a technological sort as well: While an exclusively on-line Yale magazine has yet to arrive on campus, computing expert Philip Long has no doubt that cyber publications are “the wave of the future,” especially as more and more residential colleges are hooked up to the University’s computer network. The Daily News and others already have versions of their publications on the screen, however, and the editor of the Oldest College Daily doesn’t sound too concerned about the future of his paper. “The other publications come and go,” says Kotch. “The Yale Daily News is eternal.”  |
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