The Miscellany News
| Vassar College | |
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| "Vassar College's newspaper of record since 1866" | |
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The November 4, 2010 front page.
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| Type | weekly student newspaper |
| Editor | Emma Jones and Elena Schultz |
| Founded | 1866 |
| Headquarters | The Miscellany News Vassar College Box 149 Poughkeepsie, NY 12604 |
| Website | miscellanynews |
The Miscellany News, one of the oldest collegiate weeklies in the country, has been the student newspaper of Vassar College since 1866. The paper is distributed every Thursday morning during Vassar's academic year to locations across the College's campus, including dormitories, dining and athletic facilities, communal areas, as well as off-campus locations in the Town of Poughkeepsie. The paper welcomes contributions from all members of the College community—students, administrators, faculty, staff, alumnae/i and trustees—and has a regular staff of roughly 40 to 50 student editors, reporters, photojournalists, multimedia correspondents and designers. In addition to its print publication, the staff also publishes articles, videos, and photo essays daily on its Web site and blogs.
The Miscellany News was first published under the name Vassariana on June 27, 1866. The four-page long issue was meant to be a retrospective of the College's first year, more of a yearbook than the student newspaper which it would become. "Now we lay down the editorial pen," read the conclusion of the paper's first editorial, "believing it will be taken up by those who will carry on the work we have begun; who, although the foundations are of a rough stone, will build above with polished marble, and who will maintain the Vassariana in the front ranks of the college papers in the land."
The paper—one of the first student organizations at Vassar—did indeed grow to be the publication for which the charter editors had hoped. By 1872, the paper was renamed the Vassar Miscellany, as it was originally meant to be a mix—or miscellanea—of reporting, essays and poems. Though in its first years the paper published mostly the latter two genres, by the 1890s— with further funding for student organizations from new President of the College James Monroe Taylor—the Miscellany adjusted its focus to journalism. The paper made this transition complete on February 6, 1914, with the historic publication of its first issue as a weekly paper.
The newspaper's 150-year history is chronicled in the book Covering the Campus: A History of the Miscellany News at Vassar College, written by Brian Farkas, a member of the Class of 2010 and Editor-in-Chief of its 142nd Volume. The book begins with a foreword by Catharine Bond Hill, the College's 10th President.
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