The term "newspaper of record" was first used by The New York Times in 1927 for a readers' contest that asked entrants to elaborate on the contest's title, "The Value of The New York Times Index and Files as a Newspaper of Record."
Since then, the term has been expanded to mean any newspaper which meets a certain subjective level of quality. As the University's only newspaper and its first daily publication, the Tufts Daily set out on its 25th anniversary to see whether it qualifies as Tufts' newspaper of record.
From those the Daily spoke with, the sense was that the Daily was never meant to be a newspaper of record; rather, it has been intended as a voice for the Tufts community that comes from the perspective of its students.
Forty-four Tufts publications have existed at one time or another throughout the University's history, according to the Tufts University Archives, and the Daily's 25-year history pales in comparison to the Tufts Observer's 110-year one.
But Anne Sauer (LA '91), the University's archivist and former student, does not believe that Tufts has ever really had an on-campus publication "of record." The closest that the school had, in her opinion, was the Tufts Weekly (which later became the Tufts Observer) in the first part of the 20th century. The Tufts Weekly, Sauer said, referred to itself as the school's newspaper of record for a time.
The Daily's current editor-in-chief, Mark Evitt, disagrees. "Twenty-five years from now, if someone is looking to find out what happened at Tufts this spring, he isn't going to ask the administration or check Tufts E-News," Evitt said. "He's going to look at the archives of the daily paper."
"On a day-to-day basis I don't think of the Daily as being a newspaper of record. I'm more concerned about just getting the paper out, period," Evitt said. "But because of the Daily's position as this campus' primary source of news it naturally falls into the 'newspaper of record' role.
Were the Daily a once-a-week rather than a five-times-a-week publication, would it have a better claim to being the University's newspaper of record? According to Pete Sanborn (LA '99), the Daily's editor-in-chief for the 1998 spring and fall semesters, the Daily approaches its highest quality in its current form.
"I've heard the arguments for reducing the Daily to a weekly paper - more in-depth coverage, fewer errors, more 'bang for the buck,'" said Sanborn, now Tufts' Assistant Director of Public Relations. "Despite their criticisms, I think most Tufts students would miss their daily dose of campus news - or at least the crosswords - if the paper published just one issue a week."
The Daily's (or any other publication's) inability to serve as a journal of record may not be a bad thing. Daniel Okrent, the New York Times public editor, wrote last April that it was impossible and unwanted for a paper of any size to attempt to fit every piece of information into its pages.
Okrent cited the sheer amount of banal facts in a Times article from the 1940s as evidence of the "deadening effect" attempting to serve as a newspaper of record can have.
Sauer said that she uses back issues of the Daily and other publications to examine the school's trends. "The Daily is about undergraduate student life, and covers that," she said.
Former Provost and University Professor Sol Gittleman said much the same, stating that he looks to the Daily to follow the student point of view of the University, but would not consider it a good "newspaper of record."
History Professor Daniel Mulholland, however, feels that the Daily is closer to achieving the status of newspaper of record than other campus publications.
"Like everyone, I'm appalled at the frequency, indeed regularity, of quoting people wrong, but usually the fault is pretty venial rather than mortal, as it is with the Primary Source," Mulholland said.
