Since 1980, The Tufts Daily has been “where you read it first” — though our official slogan was originally “the first word in campus news.” For the past 45 years, we have prided ourselves on continuously delivering important, insightful and accurate news to Tufts’ campuses and host communities on a daily basis. While our mission has remained the same, the Daily has undergone many changes since our founding. In celebration of the Daily’s 45th anniversary, this editorial board wanted to take a moment to reflect on all the ways that our beloved newspaper has evolved, and how we hope to continue adapting in the next 45 years.
Every Wednesday night, you can find our team of writers, editors and staff working hard in the basement of Curtis Hall to roll out a fresh paper for distribution on Thursday morning. Until 2020, our papers were printed five nights of the week. Though the change was originally made to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic, printing once a week has allowed us to more effectively achieve our goal of producing high-quality journalism. We still publish daily online, and send out a newsletter to subscribers six days a week.
In September 1996, we published our first webpage on the Tufts website. Our first independent site was published on tuftsdaily.com in September 1999 and our current edition was developed in 2023. As our readership has shifted to focus on online content, we saw a growing need for multimedia integration and protection from cybersecurity threats.
The Daily is proud to call Curtis Hall our home. Though a flood in 1988 forced staff to temporarily relocate to Miller Hall, they were back on Boston Avenue a mere two years later.
1988 also saw the first publication of our Weekender edition, which has since come and gone from the Daily’s rotation. 2024 marked the first edition of the Tufts Daily Magazine, a new long-form publication expanding on cultural phenomena on and around campus.
If there is one aspect of the Daily that has been truly ubiquitous since its inception, it’s our devotion to covering hard-hitting topics. In 1985, the Daily reported on a night-long sit-in at Ballou hall organized by an ad hoc committee on institutional racism to protest Tufts’ investment in U.S. corporations operating in South Africa. Five years later, the Daily covered the campus-wide boycotts in protest of the proposed cuts of up to $500,000 in financial aid.
Truly, there aren’t many topics that are as synonymous with Tufts as its high cost. In fact, the front page of the Daily’s inaugural issue was an article on the recent tuition protests written by Mike Feibus, the Daily’s co-founder and first executive editor. Since then, countless articles have covered tuition increases or written about the impacts of them — as recently as this past November, the editorial board called for Dean Bárbara Brizuela to consider instituting a fixed-rate tuition.
The fight for a more affordable Tufts is far from over, and we intend on reporting on it for years to come. Though we don’t know what our newspaper will look like for the next 45 years, we certainly have visions, challenges and goals that we are prepared and excited to see the Daily meet.
This editorial board anticipates seeing the Daily cover numerous events and ideas in the future. In the short-term, we’re watching the second administration of President Donald Trump target education and research; Tufts has joined the response and the Daily is already there to cover it. In a few years, Tufts’ newest residence hall will open on Boston Avenue, which will change the dynamics of students moving off-campus and reduce the dependency on landlord-managed properties that are the site of many stories. Tufts may even see a legislative push against early-decision and legacy-based admissions as more years pass following the prohibition of race-conscious admissions.
The Daily has stood firm through the loss and rebirth of local news publications. We hope the Daily continues its legacy as college newspapers, local publications and journalism as a whole continue to be challenged.
We invite more of our university to be involved in the Daily. Joining a section of the Daily, or even occasionally writing a letter to the editor or op-ed is a great place to start. We especially invite Tufts’ leadership, administration and faculty to share what’s on their minds with the readers of the Daily. Even a story about your favorite weekend activities or new year’s resolutions would suffice.
It would be naive to not comment on artificial intelligence. Just as technology of the past few decades has fundamentally reshaped life, AI moving from a simple voice assistant like Amazon Alexa or Apple’s Siri to OpenAI’s many models that can write coherent, multi-page documents will be a topic that journalism needs to confront.
The Daily may even be there to cover the often-joked-about flattening of Walnut Hill or a renovation of Braker Hall that finally replaces the perennially broken chairs in its basement. Through it all, the Daily is here for our readership at Tufts, in Medford or Somerville and beyond through the world-wide-web!
