The first ever Johns Hopkins News-Letter was published on April 28, 1897. It was an eight page broadsheet that sold for 15 cents a copy.
Since then, the News-Letter has been the paper of record for undergraduates, churned out by a glorious tradition of student editors and reporters. Along the way it has faced its fair share of controversy, upheaval and financial mishaps but has always found a way to get to press.
The News-Letter was founded by James Thompson, class of 1897 and V. Edgeworth Smith, class of 1896, after they petitioned the Academic Council and Board of Trustees for approval.
The paper received reluctant support, "provided that the plan be carried out in a manner satisfactory to the President," at the time none other than Daniel Coit Gilman.
Thompson and Smith originally conceived of the News-Letter as a literary paper that would publish news items as well. As was common in many newspapers of that period, the News-Letter started off by printing various poems, short stories, and satires alongside regular news stories.
At first, the paper was published four times a year, but in 1909 it moved to its current weekly format. In 1921, publishing frequency increased to twice a week before moving back to a weekly in 1933 due to the Depression.
Through world wars and the social revolutions of the sixties, the News-Letter has gone through continual transformations. By maintaining its independence from the university, the News-Letter editors have strived to report the news as accurately as possible, even when it didn't necessarily please the administration.
When, invariably, the administration disapproved of certain articles, editors were continually threatened with suspensions - or worse. In 1940 the administration threatened then editor-in-chief John Higham '41 with expulsion if he published a story on the arrest of a communist professor.
In a sly move, Higham resigned just before publication and the remaining editors, unknown to the administration, banded together and published the story anyway.
In 1966, Milton S. Eisenhower suspended two editors for a weekend after they ran a parody that included President Lyndon Johnson with several serial killers as finalists for the "Man of the Year" award, as a protest of the Vietnam War.
Countless editions of the News-Letter have been put together in the Gatehouse, at the corner of Charles Street and Art Museum Drive, since 1965. Before then, editors worked in the Merrick Barn and the basement of Levering Hall.
The News-Letter has produced many accomplished journalists, including Pulitzer Prize winners Murray Kempton '39, Russell Baker '47 and Richard Ben Cramer '71. Kempton edited the New Republic in the sixties and won the Pulitzer in 1985 for his columns in Newsday. Baker served as a columnist for the New York Times from 1962 to 1998, and won Pulitzer Prizes in 1979 for his column and again in 1983 for his autobiography. He was also the host of PBS' Masterpiece Theater.
Cramer, who has published books on Joe DiMaggio and the Middle East conflict, won the Pulitzer in 1979 for reporting in Lebanon for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Other accomplished alums include David Schneiderman '69 who went on to become editor-in-chief and publisher of the Village Voice in New York. Russ Smith '78 and Alan Hirsch '77, founded the Baltimore City Paper, which spawned a network of alternative weeklies in other cities across the country.
Smith, who later went on to start the New York Press, actually spent an entire summer living in the Gatehouse attic, where the articles he taped to the walls still hang.
Late at night and on deadline, the editors have sometimes had to resort to drastic measures to get enough content to fill the pages. In a 1996 interview with the Johns Hopkins Magazine, Schneiderman recounted an episode in 1967 when an editor spray-painted a building with an anti-war slogan, took a picture of it, and turned it into a story.
"Yes, we made the news as well as reported it," Schneiderman told the Magazine.
The paper has employed other creative ways to find content. During the 40s and 50s, the paper would often fill in blank space with pictures of pretty young women whom they called "hostesses" of various social events.
Since 1897, legions of dedicated students have slaved away at their typewriters and computers, striving to put out the best possible newspaper they could. So if you pass the Gatehouse late one night and see the lights still on through the windows, you can tell that another band of muckrakers are still trying to get the story right.
