| |
Comment on this article
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."  |
|
