The Daily Collegian is a student-produced news outlet, with a newspaper and website, that is published independently at the Pennsylvania State University. The newspaper is printed once a week during the fall and spring semesters, and not at all during the summer semester. It is distributed for free at the University Park campus as well as mailed to subscribers across the country.
Collegian Inc., which publishes The Daily Collegian, is an independent, non-profit corporation and has a board of directors that is composed of faculty, students, and professionals. The mission statement of Collegian Inc. is "to publish a quality campus newspaper and to provide a rewarding educational experience for the student staff members."
The Daily Collegian has historically been considered one of the top student-run college newspapers in the United States receiving multiple notable journalism awards including National Pacemaker Awards, top rankings from The Princeton Review, and Sigma Delta Chi Awards.
History
The Daily Collegian traces its founding back to the Free Lance, a monthly student magazine published by students and faculty of Pennsylvania State University, which began printing in April 1887. The Free Lance struggled structurally and financially eventually disbanding in April 1904. The next semester, in October 1904, the State Collegian emerged with much of the same leadership as the previous publication. The name of the publication was changed to the Penn State Collegian In 1911 and the paper began publishing on a semi-weekly basis in September 1920. The success of semi-weekly printing lead the paper to began publishing daily in 1940, changing its name to The Daily Collegian. Moving into the modern age, the Collegian pushed for a larger digital presence creating The Digital Collegian in 1996, the publications website that provides online access to articles digitally and print stories dating from 1988–present. Daily printing continued until 2017, when the Daily Collegian announced it would move away from printing five days a week and would instead print twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. The shift was made as a majority of the publication's readership was coming from its online publication.
The Free Lance
The Free Lance was a monthly news magazine at Pennsylvania State University which was first published in April 1887. The first copies of the Free Lance were shipped to State College, Pennsylvania by the Bellefonte Central train. The arrival of the first issue of the publication was celebrated by a large group of students who waited for the train and paraded down College Avenue in Downtown State College to purchase their copy. The first issue of the news magazine was twelve pages long and was sold for fifteen cents a copy.
Most of the articles inside of the Free Lance were opinion pieces on national events penned by professors and alumni of the university. Much of the news coverage coming from the publication had already become public knowledge by the time each monthly edition was released. The Free Lance mostly took an approach to filling in holes in stories and giving opinion on events rather than reporting them first hand.
The Free Lance transitioned away from news and moved its focus to become a literary magazine publishing essays, poems and short stories in 1895. This move would inevitable lead the already cash strapped publication to collapse. In April 1901, as subscribers declined the Free Lance begged for support from the university, students, and alumni to continue its publication. Throughout the next three years editors continued to asks for financial support and payment from delinquent subscribers. The requests were not met and the magazine concluded publication with its April 1904 edition, which did not appear on campus until May of that year.
The State Collegian
The semester after publication ceased on the Free Lance its former editor and much of the former periodical's staff founded the State Collegain, a weekly newspaper. The newspaper was established independent of University control and produced its first issue in October 1904. In its first edition the State Collegain Editor William B. Hoke penned an editorial outlining the decline of the Free Lance and how this new paper would be different. Hoke outlined a mission to have a paper that contained news and events from around the community citing the failure of its predecessor to its shift away from news based content.