The Cavalier Daily

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The Cavalier Daily is the fully independent student-run newspaper at the University of Virginia, founded in 1890. It is the oldest daily college newspaper in Virginia and the oldest newspaper in Charlottesville, Virginia.

History

The Cavalier Daily printed its first issue under the name College Topics on January 15, 1890. It continued publication under this name until 1948. In 1924, College Topics began printing six days a week, as opposed to twice a week before, making the paper a daily. However, the next year the printer suffered a catastrophic fire, and the newspaper alternated between two and three publication days a week until 1940.

During World War II, as the University of Virginia almost completely militarized, College Topics struggled for survival. By 1943, it had become a four-page weekly that featured only bulletins. After the war, the paper improved its strength, circulation and content, and was renamed The Cavalier Daily on May 4, 1948.

The admission of women and blacks to the University of Virginia beginning in the early 1970s changed the face of the paper as well as the university community. The increasing diversity of the community challenged what is often characterized as the preexisting “good old boy” attitude at both the school and The Cavalier Daily, resulting in a staff that became more motivated and ambitious. The first woman member of the Managing Board, Mary Love, was elected business manager in 1973, and the first woman editor-in-chief, Marjorie Leedy, followed in 1976. During this time, Managing Board races became highly competitive, and the paper became more journalistically serious. In 1973, when all Managing Board races were heavily contested, the losers of them left The Cavalier Daily to form the Declaration, a weekly tabloid-format publication that exists to this day. In 1976, The Cavalier Daily became the first college publication to receive a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.

Media Board crisis

The University’s Media Board, a body comprised of students and supervised by the University's Board of Visitors, was founded in 1976 to regulate on-Grounds media, but The Cavalier Daily ignored it as a matter of practice. In April 1979, the confrontation came to a head when University President Frank Hereford presented the paper with the ultimatum of accepting the Media Board and the Board of Visitors’ authority or being forced to leave its offices. The newspaper refused to acknowledge administrative supervision, and The Cavalier Daily was evicted from its offices on April 4, 1979, continuing to publish from rented space in the offices of Charlottesville’s Daily Progress.

On April 5, Student protest of the eviction, including a 1,500-student demonstration in front of Hereford’s office on the Lawn and condemnation from Student Council, encouraged both sides to end the impasse, and the newspaper agreed to a compromise on April 6. The Cavalier Daily’s movement toward complete independence emerged from the Media Board crisis.

Recent history & the CD today

The fallout of the Media Board crisis led to the 1983 formation of the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association, with the stated purpose to support the newspaper and aid it in times of need.

In 1979, the University saw the creation of another student-run newspaper, the University Journal, which originally formed in opposition to what many saw as the left-wing editorial stances of The Cavalier Daily. An intense rivalry between the two newspapers for news and advertising grew as the University Journal published three times weekly in the 1980s and then four times weekly beginning in 1991. Amid significant debt, the University Journal cut back production starting in 1996 and ceased to exist by 1998. Since that time, The Cavalier Daily has been the only newspaper at the University of Virginia.

In 1995, The Cavalier Daily Online Edition was launched, and in 1998, The Cavalier Daily began to pay rent for its offices in Newcomb Hall, the last step in the path toward complete independence from the University that began in earlier decades. The Digitization Project, completed in 2001, made all aspects of production computer-based.

The Cavalier Daily in recent years has won dozens of Virginia Press Association awards for its news, opinion, feature and critical content, as well as design, in a competition that places the paper in competition with professional daily newspapers across the state.

Content

The Cavalier Daily prints all-original coverage for its daily news, sports, opinion, and comics, as well as its weekly “Focus,” “Tableau” (arts and entertainment) and health and sexuality sections.

The Cavalier Daily also publishes Hoops and Gridiron, tabloid-format specials released annually before the starts of the basketball and football seasons, respectively.

Operations and governance

The Cavalier Daily goes to press five issues per week in the fall and spring semesters, and once a week during the summer. Daily print distribution is 10,000 copies across the University Grounds and Charlottesville. The newspaper is printed at the press of the Culpeper Star-Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia, and all issues are free.

In an average year, the newspaper’s staff exceeds 200 students, who are all volunteers. The paper’s editors include five members of the Managing Board, several copy editors, online managers and editors, and technology managers, and over two dozen section editors, all elected by the staff each January.

The Cavalier Daily is fully independent from the University of Virginia and alumni both editorially and financially. The five-person Managing Board acts as both the executive editorial board of the newspaper and as the corporate board of directors of The Cavalier Daily, Inc., which operates entirely on advertising revenue.

Notable past staff members

Cavalier Daily alumni are editors and reporters at publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, Congressional Quarterly, CBS, NBC, Newsweek and Time, among other nationally prominent newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks.

Notable alumni of The Cavalier Daily include:

Journalism

• Nancy Andrews (Managing Editor, 1985), photojournalist and author, 1999 White House Photographer of the Year
• Staige Blackford, Jr. (Editor-in-Chief, 1952), former editor, Virginia Quarterly Review
• J. Taylor Buckley, Jr., senior editor, USA Today
• C. Shelby Coffey, III, president, CNN Business News and CNNfn, former editor, The Los Angeles Times
• Katie Couric, journalist and NBC “Today Show” co-anchor, future anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News.
• John B. Morse, Jr., vice president for finance and CFO, The Washington Post Company
• George P. Rodrigue, III (Editor-in-Chief, 1977), journalist with the Dallas Morning News, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner
• Elissa Jo Van Aver, managing editor, Miami Herald
• Mike Vitez (Editor-in-Chief, 1978), journalist with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pulitzer Prize winner
• Nancy A. Youssef, (Managing Editor, 1998) Iraq Bureau Chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers

Other areas

• Alfred Berkeley, III, former president, NASDAQ stock exchange
• Robert W. Daniel, Jr., former U.S. congressman from Virginia, 1973-1983
• Henry Dudley, Jr., former president, Riggs & Company
• William S. Farish, III, former U.S. ambassador to the UK, 2001-2004
• Myron T. Steele, chief justice, Delaware Supreme Court

External links

• [The Cavalier Daily official site]
• [The Cavalier Daily Alumni Association]

 

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