The Stanford Daily - History

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 During the fall of 1970, the newspaper also announced an editorial policy of destroying unpublished photographs of demonstrations so they could not be used as evidence in court.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.

The Stanford Daily's journalism has sometimes had far-reaching consequences; in the early 1990's 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."

The Stanford Daily is an affiliate of UWIRE, which distributes and promotes the paper's content to its network.