Flashback
40 years ago
Reporter publishes first issue
Executive Editor A. Wesley Rowland and members of the Reporter staff, January 1970. Photo: UB ARCHIVES
“Look for us each Thursday” is what the UB community was told on Jan. 22, 1970, the day the first issue of the Reporter appeared.
An editorial opinion piece in that first issue posed the question: “Why the Reporter?” The university “lacks a sense of community,” it was claimed. “Communication is too helter-skelter” and too many groups feel alienated.” A newspaper, it was felt, would be a better way to bring the different groups together than expecting “25,000 hippies, Birchites, Buddhists, establishmentarians, anarchists, commies, fascists, pigs, scum, iconoclasts, ignoramuses, radicals and reactionaries” to come together as a community on the old Norton Plaza in 20 inches of snow.
At the time the Reporter began publishing, there were two other official publications serving the UB community. The Gazette, issued by the Office of the Vice President for University Relations, disbanded a few weeks before the launching of the Reporter. Founded in 1952, “Colleague” considered itself “a faculty newsletter for the communication of news of mutual interest to faculty members.” Colleague became a thematic magazine distributed as an insert in Reporter; it ceased publication in 1972.
Robert Marlett, who served as editor-in-chief and then executive editor from 1970 to 1989, explained in a 1981 interview that while the Reporter was supposed to cover “controversy and thorny issues” and serve as a “voice for the administration,” its function evolved into getting, or reporting, information to the university community and letting readers interpret it for themselves. That continues to be its mission.
The past 40 years of UB history—marked by great accomplishments and many occasions for celebration, as well as difficult challenges and times of sadness—unfolds in the 40 volumes of the Reporter available in the University Archives. Here, too, are calendars of events, including the long-running monthly arts report; feature articles about faculty and staff; and special inserts, such as one on the 75th anniversary of the College of Arts & Sciences (April 27, 1989) and the “Report of the President's Task Force on Women at UB” (Feb. 6, 1997). UB’s newspaper has provided a permanent institutional history of the past 40 years and under the leadership of its present editor, Sue Wuetcher, it continues to succeed in “reporting” to the community.
The final paper issue appeared on May 14, 2009. So, on Thursdays we now look online for news of the university in the UB Reporter.
—John Edens, University Archives
Reader Comments