In the summer of 2024, I had the opportunity to consult with a team of developers creating a news app designed specifically for college students to increase their media literacy skills as part of Colgate’s Thought into Action Summer Accelerator, an entrepreneurial bootcamp for recent alums to launch business ventures. This collaboration spurred me to reflect on college newspapers and my own pedagogical approach as a librarian to media literacy. I was surprised that I never investigated why the physical version of the student paper was so enduringly popular.
Though available online, The Colgate Maroon-News still publishes a physical newspaper every week and staff distribute it around campus. Unlike the physical New York Times, students pick up and read the school paper, as evidenced by the individual copies left on tables and chairs throughout the library. Student newspapers represent an intentional and active mode of media literacy among the college-age demographic; this is the exact opposite of news avoidance. The physical paper also functions as a nostalgic tether for this generation to the golden age of print journalism and its perceived power, according to Olivia Cohen, editor for the student-run Columbia Chronicle at Columbia College Chicago.
The Columbia Journalism Review underscored this point in a 2024 article entitled “How Print Got Cool Again,” which detailed the surge in papers resurfacing in high schools across the US. Of course, most archives of student newspapers are digital. The Colgate University Libraries has a digital archive of The Colgate Maroon-News, which has cycled through various iterations and names since starting out as the Hamilton Student in 1846; I occasionally receive reference requests for this collection from alums looking up an old football score or from a graduate’s grandchild conducting genealogical research. During reunion weekend, former editors and writers also like to see their youthful work through a lens of nostalgia, (sometimes) embarrassment, and joy. Every now and again, a current student researching an issue related to campus culture wants a historical perspective, which they gain by accessing archived copies of the school newspaper.
Every year I field a version of the reference question, “What’s the oldest student newspaper in the country?” Our own paper claims to be the “Oldest College Weekly,” though I’ve been unable to verify this assertion, and many student papers make similar claims. The Dartmouth student paper proclaims itself to be the oldest; the paper uses the fact that Daniel Webster wrote for the local community paper, The Dartmouth Gazette, while studying there in 1799 to buttress this claim.