About The Daily Sundial

The Daily Sundial

The Daily Sundial is the student newspaper of California State University, Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Its first issue appeared on 1 February 1957, before the campus, then the San Fernando Valley campus of Los Angeles State College, had offered its first journalism class. The paper famously began without a name: a large question mark filled the nameplate while the staff ran a front-page contest inviting readers to suggest a title tied to the school's sunburst emblem. From that improvised start grew a publication that chronicled Vietnam-era protest, the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the campus's explosive growth, won early statewide honours, and preserved its entire run in a digitised archive at the university library.

Known in different eras as the State Standard, the Valley State Sundial and the Daily Sundial, and today as The Sundial, the newspaper moved from four print issues a week to a weekly print edition with continuous web coverage, and in the fall of 2014 to online publication with a reduced number of print issues. Its story is inseparable from the journalism department that grew up after it, staffed in part by its own alumni and remembered by generations of Los Angeles journalists as their first newsroom.

A Newspaper Before Journalism Classes

The Sundial's founding circumstance is unusual and well documented by CSUN's own anniversary histories: the paper began publishing on 1 February 1957, three semesters before the school ever offered its first reporting class. Students did not wait for a curriculum. Working with the support of Associated Students funding, they produced a weekly campus newspaper for a commuter institution whose students, many of them older, married or attending at night, had little of the residential campus life that usually sustains student media.

First editor Dick Handt recalled the challenge plainly in a retrospective interview: the staff were trying to tell students what was going on and to get people involved on campus, in a place where participation in student activities was thin and where, even then, parking was always a hassle. Beyond Associated Students elections, he remembered, there was not much hard news at first. The paper's early job was therefore to manufacture a campus community in print, giving scattered commuters a shared account of their college.

The Question Mark and the Naming Contest

The first issue greeted readers with a large bold question mark where the name should have been, and a masthead appeal for help in naming the paper. The contest asked for a theme connected to the San Fernando Valley and to the college emblem, the sunburst, and jokingly promised the winner something useful, like a full-grown alligator. The episode, preserved in the digitised first issue and retold by the University Library, captures the paper's founding spirit: resourceful, humorous and openly collaborative with its readers.

Handt, who arrived as editor in chief by the third issue, tired of the blank nameplate and renamed the paper the State Standard, which a few issues later gave way to the Sundial, the name suggested through the contest process and tied to the sunburst emblem. The library's history of the name notes the sequence of titles that followed over the years, including the San Fernando Valley Campus State Standard, State Sundial, Valley State Sundial and Daily Sundial, before the modern short form, The Sundial.

Early Excellence

Within its first years the young paper won first place for general excellence among the state's large colleges and universities in the annual California Newspaper Publishers Association competition, a distinction recorded in the journalism department's milestone history. For a newspaper that had preceded its own journalism programme, the award was a founding credential, evidence that student enthusiasm, properly edited, could meet professional standards.

The journalism programme that followed was built in the paper's image. Erl Erlandson arrived from USC to become the first journalism faculty member and to develop the curriculum submitted in 1958, the year the campus separated from Los Angeles State College to become San Fernando Valley State College. The department later gained national accreditation, and the Sundial served throughout as its public laboratory, the place where reporting students tested their training against real deadlines and real readers.

Chronicling a Campus and an Era

Anniversary histories agree on the Sundial's defining role: it chronicled the prominent people, tumultuous events and collegiate episodes that make up the fabric of the campus's history. Its pages recorded the campus's early growing pains, Vietnam War protests, the enrolment boom of the 1970s and 1980s, and the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which devastated the surrounding community and heavily damaged the university itself. For each of those episodes, the Sundial is now a primary source, written at the time by students living through them.

The paper's fortieth-anniversary history noted the range of figures who had graced its pages, including presidents and presidential candidates, alongside a 1972 parody issue remembered for a naked streaker-era joke at the institution's expense. That mixture of civic record and irreverence is characteristic of the Sundial's voice across decades: serious about campus governance and social protest, willing to laugh at the institution and at itself.

Alumni and the Los Angeles News Tradition

The Sundial has functioned as a pipeline into Los Angeles journalism. Its early editors included Robert Hilburn, who served as editor for three semesters between 1958 and 1961 and became the Los Angeles Times' pop music critic, and Bob Pool, a 1967 editor who became a Los Angeles Times reporter and who said he enrolled at the college because of the Sundial. Handt himself went on to 42 years at the Daily News. Such careers gave the paper a reputation among applicants as a destination in its own right.

That alumni effect compounded over time. Students joined the Sundial because its graduates worked at the region's major papers, and working alongside ambitious peers under deadline pressure reproduced professional newsroom culture on campus. Department histories treat the paper and the programme as mutually reinforcing: the Sundial gave journalism teaching a public product, and teaching gave the Sundial a renewable staff.

From Four Issues a Week to Online

For much of its history the Sundial published four issues every week, a demanding daily rhythm reflected in its best-known title, the Daily Sundial. In recent years before the digital transition, publication was reduced to one printed issue each week with other coverage offered through the website. In the fall of 2014 the paper switched to online publication in its entirety, with a reduced number of issues still published in print, according to the University Library's collection notes.

The change followed the economics and habits reshaping student media everywhere, but at CSUN it was paired with a major act of preservation. Rather than letting the print past become inaccessible as the paper went digital, the university ensured the historic run was captured and searchable, so the online Sundial stands on a fully available archive of its print predecessors.

The Digitised Archive

The Delmar T. Oviatt Library's digitisation of the Sundial took years to complete, with staff photographing every page of every edition and uploading the results to a text-searchable database, assisted by the Online Computer Library Center. When digital services librarian Stephen Kutay joined the faculty, only about half the run was archived; the completed project covers the paper from its 1957 inception through the current year. Publisher Gretchen Macchiarella, who led the Sundial from 2015, described the value directly: student writers covered the university's pivotal points, from the rise of ethnic studies to the Northridge earthquake and explosive growth, and digitisation makes those moments visible.

The University Library presents the collection as an exceptional source for understanding local and national history as experienced by CSUN students. Because the issues are text-searchable, researchers can trace a protest movement, a building campaign or a single student's name across decades of issues in minutes, work that once required weeks at a microfilm reader.

Awards and Continuing Work

The modern Sundial continues to win recognition, including first-place California College Media Association awards reported by the paper itself. Those honours extend a competitive tradition that began with the Publishers Association general excellence prize in the paper's infancy. Competition success matters to a student staff as external validation that campus work meets statewide professional standards.

Today The Sundial publishes online as the student voice of CSUN, financially independent in its modern form after its early decades of Associated Students funding. Its name, chosen by contest to match a sunburst emblem, its archive, digitised page by page, and its alumni, spread across Southern California newsrooms, together tell a single story: a newspaper invented by students before anyone taught them how has become the memory of the university that grew up around it.