Type | Student newspaper |
---|---|
Format | Broadsheet |
Owner(s) | Independent Berkeley Students Publishing Company, Inc. |
Editor-in-chief | Ritchie Lee |
Managing editors | Andrea Platten Adrienne Shih |
News editor | Jessica Lynn Cassandra Vogel |
Staff writers | 200-250 |
Founded | 1871 |
Language | English |
Headquarters | 2483 Hearst Avenue Berkeley, CA 94709 United States |
Circulation | 10,000 (M/Tu/Th/F) |
Website | www |
The Daily Californian (or Daily Cal) is an independent, student-run newspaper that serves the University of California, Berkeley campus and its surrounding community. It publishes a print edition four days a week on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday during the academic year, and twice a week during the summer. Established in 1871, The Daily Californian is one of the oldest newspapers on the West Coast, and one of the oldest college newspapers in the United States. Current circulation is about 10,000 for a campus of roughly 35,000 students.
The Daily Californian became independent from UC Berkeley in 1971 after the campus administration fired three senior editors over an editorial that encouraged readers to "take back" People's Park. Both sides came to an agreement, and The Daily Californian gained financial and editorial independence from the university and is now published by an independent corporation called the Independent Berkeley Students Publishing Company, Inc. The paper licenses its name from the Regents of the University of California.
On November 24, 1982, three days after the November 20th Big Game (now known for The Play), early morning readers of the Daily Cal were chagrined to find in the headline of the front page: "NCAA Awards Big Game to Stanford." Hundreds of copies of the Daily Cal with this fake headline had been strewn about campus in the wee hours. This was in fact a hoax perpetrated by aggrieved Stanford fans.
The Daily Californian has a history of publishing spirited editorials, and in some cases editions containing controversial editorials have been subjected to newspaper theft. In 2002, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates agreed to pay restitution after admitting to having thrown away a thousand copies of The Daily Californian after it endorsed his opponent, then-Mayor Shirley Dean. In May 2003, nearly 5,000 papers were stolen by students protesting coverage of the arrest of a Cal football player. The largest act of theft took place in November 1996 when the paper's senior editorial board endorsed Proposition 209. Nearly 23,000 papers were stolen on Election Day 1996, and in the following days copies of the paper were tossed off the balcony of the newspaper's office and burned in effigy.