Sex, lies, and VDTs

The Lantern is launched as a privately-published, monthly, 12-page glossy magazine, taking its name from a Paris newspaper, La Lanterne. The goal is “to shed light on all subjects.” 

In its initial years The Lantern is published by members of the English Department and other campus organizations and operated out of fraternity houses and other off-campus  locations (no typewriters yet!).

Editors are elected by the school’s literary societies. The paper is offered by subscription at one dollar a year or 15 cents for single copies. Editors, writers and business personnel share profits and losses.

The Lantern (known as “The Fortnightly Lantern” from 1884-91) is made a weekly paper and is printed commercially downtown.

Heavily in debt, and lagging in student support, The Lantern is re-launched as a twice-weekly paper renamed the “Wahoo.” Because an Ohio State football team had been started in 1890, and the popular college yell was “wahoo,” the editors attempted to capitalize on the name in a bid for greater circulation. The Wahoo’s editor-in-chief was a woman, Catherine Morhart of the Browning literary society.

Under pressure from alumni, the paper is restored to its original name, The Lantern, which has appeared on the masthead ever since.

Courses in journalism are first offered by the university in the then Department of Rhetoric and English

The Lantern describes itself as “the least appreciated and most maligned” of all OSU student organizations. But it is debt-free and on sound financial footing, credited to its business manager, Carl L. Sackett, a law student and dormitory steward.

Among the listed Lantern editorial staff are a “Women’s Editor” and a “Society Editor.” The paper’s phone number is “Citizen16548 –– 3 rings.” The newsroom address is 1633 Neil Avenue, which no longer exists; it was located on South Campus near the current Wexner Medical Center.

Ohio State University takes over operation of The Lantern as a weekday daily laboratory paper and moves the newsroom to the basement of the original University Hall. The basement also houses a print shop with linotype machines. Editorial staff are to receive university credit for the first time.

The university takeover was prompted by Ohio governor James M. Cox’s reaction to a student editorial criticizing him. Cox, who also owned the Dayton Daily News and later ran for president as the Democratic Party nominee, prevailed upon OSU President William Oxley Thompson to rein in criticism of the governor. Thompson established the Department of Journalism (under the College of Commerce) and told its head, Joseph S. Myers, to censor any editorial criticism of Cox. 

Myers, a crusty former managing editor of two Pittsburgh newspapers, exercised close control over Lantern content. “We won’t run that,” he would say now and then after viewing galleys, and when he ran out of material in his teaching class he’d say, “Let’s criticize The Lantern.” But he also grew and strengthened the journalism department and The Lantern along with it.

The first two students to earn Bachelor of Science in journalism degrees graduate — one of them a woman, Louise Converse Griffith of Westerville.

The Lantern continues to publish despite a quarantine that shuts down the university due to the Spanish Flu. The paper prints a set of health department instructions on how students can minimize the risk of infection.

The journalism department and The Lantern move into a brand-new two-story building at 18th and Neil Avenues, the same plot of land as the current Journalism Building. Built at a cost of $95,131, the structure will house the journalism program and The Lantern for the next 47 years. 

A professor described the accommodations as “unsurpassed.” The newsroom was on the second floor, with windows facing east. An enlarged print shop occupied the first floor. The side entrance on 18th Avenue was used as the main entrance, hence the address of 242 W. 18th Avenue.The building was never officially named but was informally referred to as the Journalism Building.

In his final annual report before his retirement as university president in 1925, William Oxley Thompson noted “an increased demand for young men and young women with a college education and special training for journalism.” Journalism was now a full four-year program.

The Department of Journalism becomes a school within the College of Commerce and Administration.

The Great Depression lands The Lantern in debt again. The summer Lantern is suspended, not to resume until 1958. To defray costs, laboratory journalism students are charged quarterly fees of four dollars, although they receive The Lantern for free, unlike other students who pay three dollars for a yearly subscription. A Lantern reporter notes an overflow crowd at the Ohio Union cafeteria, which offers “a balanced meal” for 20 cents, 10 cents for lunch.

During this decade, all was not doom and gloom. A “Rib ’n Roast” dinner in the spring became an annual affair. At the dinner, a burlesque issue of The Lantern –– called “The Latrine” –– was distributed. Students put on skits in which they lampooned faculty members, including one whom they observed had excess hair growing  out of his ears. The hint was taken for within a day or two, the hair disappeared.

At the end of the dinner came the announcement of scholarship awards, a tradition that continues each spring today (minus the jibes).

James E. Pollard, university news director, becomes acting and later full director of the School of Journalism, replacing Joseph Myers. Pollard would hold the position for 25 years, the longest tenure of any director in the school’s history.

Responding to complaints about its accuracy, The Lantern states that “It is our claim — and we defy anyone to prove otherwise — that The Lantern is better than 95 per cent accurate.” It notes that before it is sent to the composing room, its copy is checked by a faculty member, known as the “laboratory supervisor” (forerunner of the faculty adviser), “a further assurance of Lantern accuracy.”

The university’s journalism degree becomes a Bachelor of Arts. The School of Journalism  is placed under the jurisdiction of the College of Arts and Sciences, where it remained until a reorganization in 1968 put it under the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (one of the Arts and Sciences colleges).

A horseshoe-shaped desk for copy editing, where the copy editing chief sits in the “slot” at the center and copy editors work along the rim, is installed in the newsroom.

An annex to the building at 242 W. 18th is constructed to house the university post office and mail room.

With U.S. entry into World War II, civilian men become scarce on campus and women make up, at one point, all but one of the enrolled journalism students. All four main editors of The Lantern for most of 1943 are women. In February of that year, the paper puts out a “historical edition” of The Lantern, at 24 pages three times the usual size, with “the names of our boys in the armed forces . . . [and] of those who have died in action.” 

In 1944, because the OSU stadium press box was off limits to women, Editor-in-chief Jeanne Sprain successfully convinces the university to build a special booth for Sports Editor A. Loraine Clayton, the first female sports editor in The Lantern’s history. “She Sits Alone,” a Lantern story about her is headlined. She erects a sign outside her small booth that reads, “No Males Allowed.” Her fight to overcome tradition makes news across the country and gives rise to several newspaper job offers, but she turns them down. 

Declaring themselves satisfied with the compromise, the all-female editorial staff writes, “We admit that [sports editing] is essentially a man’s job, and we are sure that it will be done by men once the servicemen have returned to school.”

In 1945, the entire Lantern staff, from editor on down, is made up of women. The paper’s  laboratory supervisor, though, is a man: Wayne V. Harsha, a popular professor described a few years later as “more than an instructor”: a “friend” and “real pal” of every journalism student.

Courses in public relations and broadcast journalism are now part of the curriculum and later become accredited programs in addition to the original “major,” news-editorial. 

Dale Wright serves as news editor of The Lantern and a year later becomes the first African American to graduate from the School of Journalism. He would go on to become the first reporter to integrate the newsroom of the New York World-Telegram and Sun and was runner up for a Pulitzer Prize in 1962.

A Lantern editorial states that a U.S. Senate committee’s recommendation to censure the zealous anti-communist Sen. Joseph McCarthy “reminds us of the mother who slaps her little boy on the wrist every time he steals a cookie from the cookie jar . . . [She] doesn’t slap him hard enough to hurt him.”

The Lantern faculty adviser is Prof. Chester E. Ball, who is succeeded in 1957 by  Prof. Robert Blackmon. One of the adviser’s tasks at this time is to write a daily retrospective criticism of the paper.

A $4,000 gift from Scripps-Howard newspapers in honor of Ernie Pyle, Scripps-Howard’s famous correspondent who was killed in World War II, funds a journalism library in the 242 W. 18th Avenue building. It would later be expanded in the current Journalism Building in 1977 as the Milton Caniff Library, named for the Ohio State graduate and newspaper cartoonist known for the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon comic strips. Today its collections are housed in the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum located in Sullivant Hall on campus, the world’s largest collection of materials related to cartoons and comics. 

Following in the footsteps of Milton Caniff, beginning in the mid-1970s a series of Lantern editorial and other cartoonists would establish a mini dynasty of award-winning cartoonists who also created their own comic strips, including Brian Basset, Scott Willis, Brian Campbell, John “Derf” Backderf, Jim Kammerud, Nick Anderson, Jeff Smith and Steve Spencer. 

The Lantern resumes summer publication. George J. Kienzle succeeds James E. Pollard as director and greatly expands The Lantern’s mission to include in-depth reporting and special features.

Three Lantern staffers, at a press conference, interview Sen. John Kennedy, who would run for president and win two years later.

By the beginning of the new decade, The Lantern is distributed free on campus for the first time. Circulation is 15,000. Seven editors are listed on the editorial page: Editor, managing editor, city editor, makeup editor (no, not the Hollywood type), sports editor, photo editor and wire editor. They are selected by a Publications Committee (based on faculty recommendations) and receive a modest stipend, though given the long hours they put in, the effective hourly wage is small indeed.

In one of the greatest controversies in OSU history, the university’s Faculty Council, under the urging of Alumni Secretary John B. (“Jack”) Fullen, votes 28–25 to decline an invitation to the upcoming Rose Bowl game on the grounds that the university was overemphasizing athletics at the expense of academics. The decision sparks a bitter reaction by Coach Woody Hayes and protests by students, who favor Rose Bowl participation. The Lantern takes no official position on the issue, but Sports Editor Len Downie –– later the longtime Executive Editor of The Washington Post –– covers the matter extensively and writes a long analysis of the type rarely seen in The Lantern before then.

Senior Lantern writer Phil Ochs, bitter at having been passed over for editor-in-chief, leaves for Greenwich Village and becomes a founder of the folk and protest movement of the 1960s.

The Lantern, Nov. 25, 1963

OSU President Novice Fawcett is quoted as saying that “students have complained to me on different occasions that they disagreed with Lantern editorials and did not want money from their fees to support the newspaper.” The sentiment reflects the tenuous relationship between the paper and the student body that has existed for more than a century. N.B.: The Lantern was not then, and is not now, supported by university funding or student fees. As an independent paper, it relies on advertising income and increasingly, today, on donor money. 

John J. Clarke, a former reporter and copyeditor in Scranton, Pennsylvania and member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter team for the Providence Journal, joins the School of Journalism as an associate professor. He also becomes The Lantern’s faculty adviser. Clarke later pioneers the use of computers in journalism instruction in the 1970s and remains a faculty member until 1986. 

The Lantern’s printing facilities are relocated from the first floor of the building at 242 W. 18th to a plant on Kenny Road. This is in anticipation of the switch later in the year from a “hot type” press (which involved melting metal and shaping it into letters) to a “cold type” process that prints photographed content onto photo paper. The photo paper is cut into strips and glued onto a layout board for the next day’s paper. The change will enable circulation to exceed 30,000. 

“Paste up” at the Kenny Road print shop

But cold type “paste up” isn’t without its downsides: if the editor’s estimate of column inches from typewritten copy doesn’t precisely match the length of strips of photo paper produced for layout, that leaves either too much “white space” or creates the need to cut content on the fly at the print shop.

Members of the Black Student Union, protesting second-class treatment of African Americans by the university, take over the Administration Building for 10 hours and are targeted by university officials for prosecution on trespassing and kidnapping charges. The Lantern, in an editorial titled “It’s Time for Action not Overreaction,” opines that although the disruptive activities “cannot be tolerated,” the university’s “first priority should be to remedy the iniquities which induced such behavior.”

The Lantern suspends publication for nearly two weeks in May due to the shutdown of the entire campus on account of student protests against the Vietnam War and the May 4 killings at Kent State. Tanks and military soldiers are present on the Oval during this period.

The Lantern just before the shutdown

Lantern circulation reaches 40,000, an all-time high, making it one of the two or three most widely circulated college newspapers in the nation.

After three years of gutting and renovation of the original Journalism Building, during which The Lantern operated in Bevis Hall on West Campus, the “new” (and current) Journalism Building, as it is officially named for the first time, opens at the same location at 242 W. 18th Avenue. The reconfigured newsroom is moved to Room 271 (phone number 422-5721) in roughly the same location as the prior newsroom (Room 216).

The remodeling adds 55,000 square feet to the building, allowing for a larger Lantern newsroom flanked by smaller rooms for the paper’s adviser, editorial board meetings, wire service machines, photo lab, and clippings library, known as “the morgue.” (No windows in the newsroom, though!) Copy is generated on electric typewriters.

Two Lantern reporters, Jim Yavorcik and Rick Kelly, take up the investigation of the brutal murder of 14-year-old Christie Lynn Mullins in a wooded area in Clintonville north of campus after other newspapers in the city had moved on from the story. Yavorcik and Kelly demonstrate that the suspect arrested for the crime, a developmentally disabled man named Jack Carmen, who pleaded guilty, could not have committed it. They publish their findings both in The Lantern and by invitation in Columbus Monthly magazine, which leads to a new trial and acquittal of Carmen. Another Lantern reporter from the same era, John Oller, performs an investigation and writes a book about the cold case almost 40 years later which leads to the police reopening the case and naming the true killer.

After petulant behavior by Woody Hayes following OSU’s Rose Bowl upset loss to UCLA, the latest in a series of similar incidents, The Lantern calls for him to resign, provoking a negative response from the campus community. 

A few weeks later, The Lantern creates another stir when it publishes a debate over the women’s movement between the curmudgeonly public relations professor Walt Seifert, who uses off-color language to disparage feminism, and Lantern columnist Karen King Doyle, who vigorously defends the movement.

Lantern newsroom, 1977, with IBM Selectric typewriters

Video display terminals (“VDTs”), a type of word processor, are in use at The Lantern. They were introduced on a limited basis in 1974, when The Lantern became the first college paper to acquire them (via contribution from the Gannett Foundation). The VDTs were initially used only by editors and copy editors, who copied typewritten stories into the terminals. The first VDTs produced punched tape that was fed into the typesetting machines in the composing room and printed as columns of copy on photo paper. These were then pasted onto blank layout boards.

The composing room relocates from the printing plant on Kenny Road to a room adjacent to The Lantern. The layout and paste-up process were now being done largely by students in house. Printing was still done at the facility on Kenny Road.

Later generations of Lantern VDTs streamlined the process, dispensing with punched tape and sending coded stories directly to the typesetter. More terminals were acquired for reporters and by the end of the decade typewriters were no longer found in the newsroom (only in the classroom). VDTs were used at The Lantern into the mid-1990s but they, too, eventually became obsolete. Today, both VDTs and the traditional paste-up practice have been replaced by personal computers and digital desktop layout software. 

Journalism professor Martha (“Marty”) Brian, known as “Mad Martha,” and perhaps the most beloved (and feared) teacher in the School of Journalism’s history, dies of cancer at age 51. A former politics reporter for The Columbus Dispatch, she had been a faculty member since 1967 practicing her military style of “tough love.”

A tradition at this time was the annual touch football game between The Lantern (known as the “Mighty Malaprops”) and the Michigan Daily (dubbed “the Daily Libels”), held the night before The Game. Pictured below is The Lantern’s winning 1982 squad, whose 25–6 victory gave The Lantern its third straight win. According to team member John Backderf, after the game, the Lantern guys took the beaten Daily staff to High Street, which was crawling with Columbus police, in riot gear, lining the bar district from 10th to 15th. Two of them started beating an OSU student who had committed some offense, and the Daily photographer took some flash shots of the arrest. Shortly after, he was on the ground and in handcuffs. His camera was “accidentally” smashed by the police and all his film exposed.

The Lantern team finally got him sprung at dawn the next morning.

For nearly the entire month of October, the Lantern masthead includes a banner headline that reads, “Publication Under Protest.” Editor-in-chief Debra Baker and 15 members of her staff sign a front-page editorial on Oct. 2 objecting to the proposed adoption by faculty and administration of a policy giving the school’s director and Lantern adviser the right to review in advance and prevent publication of any material they or legal counsel deem potentially libelous. 

When faculty vote formally to approve the policy on Oct. 27, Baker and two of her editors resign the next day and seven others are fired for refusing to work. “I hope I was respectful at the time,” Baker, by then a lawyer, told an interviewer in 2020. “It’s one of the great lessons of life: Do the best we can with the information we have. And the best I could do in that situation was stand up, decide what’s right.”

The Lantern is one of several U.S. student newspapers to publish a paid advertisement by Bradley Smith that disputed that the Holocaust took place. The paper overrode a 5–4 vote by the Publications Committee to refuse the ad. Although the campus reaction was almost universally negative, including a 250-student protest at the Journalism Building, the editor-in-chief declined to apologize for running the ad, citing its news value. The Lantern had published Smith’s ad along with an editorial deploring it as “a repulsively coherent piece of propaganda” and “racist,” but arguing that “no matter how repugnant, we must allow Bradley Smith to have his say.” In addition to the student protest, the paper received many negative phone calls and endured two altercations, including one involving a student arrested after attempting to force his way into the newsroom.

The Lantern launches a new feature: color! Sporadic at first, it becomes a regular occurrence by the end of the decade.

As part of a major university restructuring spurred by budget cuts, the School of Journalism and Department of Communication are combined into a single academic unit named the School of Communication. The school is later again brought under the umbrella of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Some things never change. Lantern columnist Chris Pollock writes that “Hardly a day goes by without someone writing to call or complain about a story. Sometimes people will even physically confront an editor to push their points of view.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, The Lantern’s editorial page warns against “out of control” media coverage and harassment of Arab Americans. At the same time, mining its literary society roots, The Lantern opines that “America still stands as the greatest beacon of freedom to the world and this must never change. We must use this crisis to bring about a new, more peaceful world. Using the words of Abraham Lincoln, during a time of similar crisis, we must resolve that ‘these dead shall not have died in vain—and this (world) shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth.’ We will rise to this new challenge, and we will prevail.”

Lantern photographer Alex Kotran is arrested and handcuffed by campus police for trespassing while covering the escape of two cows from the Veterinary Hospital that ran loose on campus and trampled several vet students and faculty members. Kotran, claiming First Amendment protection, allegedly disobeys police orders to stay clear of a cordoned off area where the cows were subdued and tranquilized. The School of Communication protests the arrest and Kotran is never charged.

The Lantern’s media partner, Lantern TV (formerly Buckeye TV), Ohio State’s student-run television station, moves into studio space in the back of Room 271, separated from the newsroom by an added wall. The newsroom is renumbered as Room 275. Lantern TV produces weekly video content for a website and on social media.

A terrorist knife attack that put the Ohio State campus on lockdown becomes breaking news around the country, and The Lantern’s coverage competes with national news sources including CNN, ABC News and The Washington Post. The online article receives more than 400,000 page views. Multiple news sources, including The Columbus Dispatch, write articles to praise the way The Lantern covered the incident

For the seventh straight year The Lantern is named Best College Newspaper in Ohio by the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists and Ohio News Media Association.

By this time, because advertising revenue from hard copy newspapers has declined and readership habits have gravitated toward online content (both trends consistent with the industry at large), The Lantern increasingly has turned its focus to digital audiences. The Lantern Media Group, which includes print, digital, and broadcast branches, maintains a daily website in addition to the newspaper published twice a week (today, once a week). 

Journalism students continue to be trained in multimedia skills and applications — to write, edit and produce their own videos and podcasts. Although the old “broadcast journalism” major, as a separate sequence, no longer exists today (having been phased out in 1994), all Lantern staffers have become, in effect, broadcast as well as print journalists and rightfully consider themselves multimedia journalists.

Although print circulation by 2018  has reduced to 15,000, online attention has mushroomed, with 3.5 million Lantern page views from 2017–18 and 1.8 million Lantern TV views. 

Spurred by an idea by School of Communication Advancement Board Founding Chair and Lantern alum Sandy Hermanoff, in advance of the annual OSU–Michigan football game, The Lantern and the Michigan Daily team up to co-publish the first special Rivalry Edition. It is a fundraiser that runs preview stories about The Game and solicits donations to the respective papers, a contest being held to see which paper can garner the most dollar contributions. Although the School up North’s paper prevails in 2019 and the next two years, The Lantern would go on to win the contest in 2022, 2023 and 2024. 

Jocelyn Dorsey, who started her career at Ohio State working for The Lantern in the 1970s, is inducted into the Atlanta Press Club Hall of Fame in recognition of her career and role as the first Black newscast anchor in the Georgia market.

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night . . .” Although Ohio State suspends classes and shuts down the campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Lantern steps up again, as it did in 1918, and continues to publish. This time it does so online by adapting to remote work. It has a webpage devoted entirely to its coronavirus coverage to keep the campus community informed. “To me, this is why we all wanted to be in journalism,” explains Editor-in-chief Kaylee Harter. “I genuinely feel like we’re providing this public service right now to the Ohio State community.” 

The Lantern is recorded as having the third most social engagement of any student-run newspaper in the U.S. With the proliferation of digital and television operations and special projects positions, the paper now lists 22 editorial staffers. By 2025 that number would increase to 29.

Akayla Gardner, Special Projects Director for Lantern TV the prior year, and co-founder and president of the OSU chapter of  the National Association of Black Journalists, wins a regional Emmy chapter award for producing an investigative documentary on the firing of a championship-winning Ohio state women’s rowing coach.

In September 2022, the first ever Lantern reunion is held at the Fawcett Center, with nearly 200 alumni in attendance to hear panels, share memories, and in some cases shed tears. A second, equally successful reunion would be held the following year.

OSU President Kristina Johnson abruptly resigns in May without explanation, after less than three years in the position, and no one inside the administration is talking. Speculation is rampant. Lantern Editor-in-chief Jessica Langer, in a signed, front-page editorial, calls upon the university and Johnson to provide answers, writing, “We deserve better.”

When no answers are forthcoming, and the university denies The Lantern’s request for public records related to Johnson’s departure, Langer files suit and wins. The released records disclose a signed agreement between Johnson and Ohio State stating that if she spoke ill about the university, she would lose $927,000 in compensation. The Board of Trustees also agreed not to disparage Johnson. The Columbus Dispatch credits the  “diligent young journalists from OSU’s student-run newspaper” and praised Langer’s persistence. 

“I felt like this was right for the public to know. As a public university, transparency should be at its core,” Langer explains.

On Sept. 12, the School of Communication holds its first all-school reunion, inviting alumni from news-editorial, public relations, broadcast, and graduate student/research disciplines. The reunion is timed to coincide with the dedication of the new, state-of-the art Lantern newsroom, constructed on the first floor of the Journalism Building. Larger and more prominent than the prior newsroom on the second floor, it is the first new home for The Lantern in 51 years (or 101 counting the original second floor newsroom). But regardless of its physical location, the mission of The Lantern will always be metaphysical and will remain the same as it was from the beginning, in 1881: “to shed light on all subjects.”