The Arkansas Traveler

About The Arkansas Traveler

The Arkansas Traveler — often shortened to the Traveler — is the student newspaper of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, publishing since 1906. A student-operated publication distributed free on campus and around the city of Fayetteville, the Traveler covers campus news, Razorback athletics, student life, and events across Northwest Arkansas. Founded on October 10, 1906, as The University Weekly and renamed in 1920 after a student naming contest, the paper has printed with scarcely an interruption for well over a century — surviving a flu epidemic, wartime paper shortages, a fire that consumed its own offices, and the financial crises that have felled many student papers. Its website, uatrav.com, publishes daily, and the paper's motto — "About you, for you" — has guided its student journalists through every era of the university's history.

History and founding

University of Arkansas students had been publishing literary magazines since 1895, but the campus had no newspaper until the fall of 1906. On October 10 of that year, The University Weekly published its first issue — a student newspaper supported by student subscriptions and operated entirely by students. Its first editor was Joseph Othel York, a senior from Bellefonte, Arkansas, who published the paper weekly through the end of the academic year. Early issues covered the university debate team, reports by faculty members, sports stories, and news from the campus's three residence halls — the modest beginnings of what would become one of the South's leading student newspapers.

The young paper experimented with its physical form as readily as its content: it began on tabloid-size paper, briefly printed in magazine format during the 1909–10 school year, switched to broadsheet during the 1920s and 1930s, and returned to tabloid during the 1940s. The format changes reflected both the economics of student publishing and the evolving ambitions of successive editorial staffs.

The name

In 1920, the paper's editors decided to publish more than once a week and concluded that The University Weekly no longer fit. They sponsored a contest to select a new name, and the winning entry drew on Arkansas folklore: The Arkansas Traveler, the name of a story by Sandford C. Faulkner that was later set to music in the song of the same name — a tune so beloved that it served as Arkansas's official state song from 1949 to 1963. The losing entries, preserved in the paper's historical lore, included "Who-e-e Pig" and "Razorback Hunt" — names that would have given the paper a very different character. The Traveler name stuck, and it has identified the paper for more than a century.

Early innovators

The Traveler's early staffs included figures who went on to notable careers. The first woman to edit the newspaper was Elizabeth Adams, who ran the paper during the 1913–14 school year — a milestone at a time when women in journalism leadership were rare anywhere, let alone on a Southern college campus. The paper's first cartoonist, Stuart Carothers, worked on the Traveler during the same period before leaving for the Chicago Herald Examiner in 1914–15, where he drew a cartoon strip called Charlie Chaplin's Comic Capers that was syndicated to 60 metropolitan newspapers — an extraordinary national reach for a cartoonist who had learned the craft on a student paper.

These early achievements established a pattern: the Traveler as a training ground where talented students could do professional-caliber work. That reputation has sustained the paper's recruiting for generations.

Crises and resilience

Few student newspapers have been tested the way the Traveler has. The paper briefly suspended operations in 1917, when a flu epidemic forced the university and the surrounding Fayetteville community into quarantine. During World War I, the staff had to halt publication again in the fall of 1918 because of paper shortages, resuming at the beginning of 1919. The 1930s brought financial crises: one year's editor, Johnny Erp, agreed to forgo his $300 salary if necessary to keep the Traveler publishing, and staff members worked outside jobs — "waiting tables, sweeping floors and stoking coal furnaces," according to a former editor's thesis — to keep the paper alive through the Depression.

Perhaps the most dramatic episode came in 1969, when Hill Hall — which housed the newspaper's offices and printing plant — caught fire. The blaze consumed the Traveler's own facilities, yet the staff still managed to print an edition about the fire that had destroyed their newsroom: journalism about the disaster, produced from the ashes of the disaster. It remains one of the great war stories of American student journalism.

Landmark coverage

The Traveler's archives document the University of Arkansas's journey through the twentieth century, including moments of genuine historical significance. In 1948, the paper reported on the admission of Silas Hunt as the first African American student in the UA Law School — a landmark in the desegregation of Southern higher education. The following edition's editorial stated that the Traveler board favored the decision, though the paper's own historical account acknowledges that African Americans were rarely mentioned in its pages in the years that followed Hunt's admission — a candid admission of the gap between editorial principle and newsroom practice that many papers of the era shared.

Through the decades, the paper has covered every convulsion of campus life: wars that emptied the classrooms, the civil rights era, the protests and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, and the university's growth into a nationally prominent research institution. Skip Rutherford, who edited the paper in 1971–72, went on to a prominent career in Arkansas public life — one of many Traveler editors whose campus journalism proved to be a first draft of larger careers.

Modern operations

Today the Traveler is printed four times a week during the academic year, with an online edition updated daily. It is distributed free on campus and around Fayetteville, mixing campus and local news in every issue. The Thursday edition, called the Weekender, previews the weekend's entertainment, sports, and events — a service package aimed at students planning their days off. The paper is an affiliate of UWIRE, the collegiate press wire service that distributes and promotes student journalism to a national network.

The paper and its digital platforms are staffed entirely by University of Arkansas student journalists — reporters, photographers, designers, and editors who produce professional-grade journalism while carrying full course loads. The university describes the Traveler as its "award-winning student newspaper," a recognition earned across decades of regional and national collegiate press competitions.

Coverage and beats

The Traveler's beat is the complete life of a flagship public university and its host city. Campus news covers the UA administration, the Associated Student Government, faculty affairs, enrollment and tuition, and the physical transformation of a campus that has grown dramatically in the twenty-first century. Razorback athletics coverage is a major franchise: football, men's and women's basketball, baseball, track and field, and the other sports that make Arkansas one of the SEC's most passionate fan bases. Student life coverage spans Greek life, registered student organizations, campus dining and housing, and the cultural scene.

The paper also covers Fayetteville itself — a city of nearly 100,000 in the Ozark Mountains, known for its arts scene, the Walton Arts Center, and Dickson Street's entertainment district. Town-gown relations, city government decisions affecting students, and the Northwest Arkansas region's explosive growth all fall within the Traveler's purview.

Digital presence

The Traveler's website, uatrav.com, is updated daily with breaking campus news, sports coverage, opinion, and multimedia. The paper has embraced the digital transition with a mobile app offering breaking news and campus updates, Razorback sports coverage, push alerts for breaking news and safety notifications, lifestyle and culture stories, opinion pieces, photo galleries, and local weather and events — available as a free download on both major mobile platforms. The app launch, announced by the university, was framed as the Traveler "stepping into the digital age," giving its student reporters real-world experience with push notifications, audience optimization, and the digital skills that define modern journalism.

The paper maintains an active social media presence, using it to distribute breaking news and to engage a student audience that lives on its phones. The combination of print editions, a daily-updated website, and a mobile app gives the Traveler a multi-platform footprint that many professional papers would envy.

Community role

For generations of Razorbacks, the Traveler has been the record of their college years — the paper where they read about the game they attended, the protest they joined, the professor they admired, and the friends they made. Its motto, "About you, for you," captures the paper's compact with its readers: this is your paper, written by your peers, about the world you inhabit. For alumni scattered across the country, the paper's archives and website are a connection to Fayetteville that outlasts graduation.

The paper also serves as the university's institutional conscience. Like the best student newspapers, the Traveler covers the UA administration with the skepticism that journalism requires — investigating spending, questioning decisions, and giving voice to students, faculty, and staff who might otherwise go unheard. That watchdog role is the paper's most important civic function, and the one that justifies its independence.

Outlook

The Traveler approaches its 120th anniversary as one of the most resilient student newspapers in America. It has survived flu quarantines, wartime shortages, Depression-era poverty, and a fire that destroyed its own plant — the challenges of the digital age, while real, are hardly unprecedented in its history. Its multi-platform operation, its UWIRE affiliation, and its deep integration into campus life give it structural advantages that many student papers lack.

The paper's enduring strength is its people: the successive generations of student journalists who have chosen, since Joseph Othel York's first issue in 1906, to spend their college years telling their university's story. As long as Arkansas students want to be journalists, the Traveler will have a staff — and as long as it has a staff with the independence to report honestly, it will have readers.