The Daily Trojan

About The Daily Trojan

The Daily Trojan is the student newspaper of the University of Southern California, the primary source of news and campus discourse for the Trojan Family in Los Angeles, California. First published in 1912 as The Daily Southern Californian, it has chronicled more than a century of life at USC, from the rugby tryouts and social announcements of its earliest editions to interviews with presidents, coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and generations of Trojan athletics. It publishes at dailytrojan.com, where its reporting reaches students, faculty, staff, and alumni across the University Park campus and beyond.

Unlike many college newspapers, the Daily Trojan operates without financial support from the university or from student government. It is sustained entirely by advertising revenue, and its student editors and staff run every aspect of day-to-day operations. That independence, defended across more than a century of publication, has made the paper a forum for free and responsible discussion of USC issues and a training ground for journalists who have gone on to some of the most visible newsrooms in American media.

Founding: The Daily Southern Californian

The first edition of the newspaper was published on September 16, 1912, after W.R. "Ralph" La Porte, the paper's first student editor, persuaded university president George Finley Bovard to give USC a student newspaper. The new publication was called The Daily Southern Californian, and subscriptions originally cost $1.75. Typical articles in those first editions announced tryouts for the USC rugby team and recorded the school's and the city's thriving social scene, but the paper documented serious history from the start and would go on to land an exclusive interview with President Richard Nixon, the first interview he granted after resigning from public office.

La Porte's pitch to Bovard gave USC one of the oldest continuously operating student newspapers in the western United States. The paper's centennial in 2012 made it a member of the rare club of American newspapers, student or professional, that have passed the hundred-year mark, a milestone it celebrated with a history project and special centennial coverage examining its role in documenting campus and city life across ten decades.

A century of names and publishing schedules

The newspaper's name and frequency changed several times in its early decades, tracking both the growth of the university and the adoption of the Trojan mascot. In 1915, after the paper began publishing only four days a week, the word "Daily" was dropped from its name and it became The Southern Californian. It returned to five-day-a-week production in 1925, at which point it was renamed The Daily Trojan, reflecting the fact that USC had by then informally adopted the Trojan as its mascot. The name has remained ever since.

The shift to a five-day schedule also marked a change in the paper's ambition. Soon after moving to daily production, the DT began looking beyond campus for news, and in subsequent decades it competed for stories and circulation with major metropolitan newspapers. Professor Joe Saltzman, the paper's editor in chief from 1960 to 1961, later recalled that it was not uncommon for stories broken by the USC student paper to be picked up by larger publications. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited USC in 1935, the Daily Trojan was there, and its reporters covered the campus and the surrounding city through the Depression, World War II, and the postwar expansion of the university.

From the Moneta Print Shop to the digital newsroom

The paper's physical production history mirrors the technological transformation of the newspaper industry. In 1928 the newspaper moved from the now-defunct Moneta Print Shop on Jefferson and University Avenues to its current home in the Student Union, where it has been based ever since. For decades, however, the actual printing was done off campus: production was handled in USC's Graphic Services Department, located west of the Harbor Freeway on Exposition Boulevard, until the 1980s.

The newsroom began using computers in the 1990s and moved to all-digital production in 2005. Today editors build the paper using Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, a far cry from the linotype and paste-up eras that preceded them. The Daily Trojan's first website was created in 1996 and has gone through several redesigns since, reflecting the paper's long and sometimes uneven adaptation to the internet age alongside professional publications of far greater resources.

Organization and editorial independence

While the university is formally the publisher of the Daily Trojan, all day-to-day operations are handled by the student editors and staff. The paper maintains strict editorial independence from the university, a principle spelled out in its published information and policies: the Daily Trojan is a forum for student expression, written, edited, and managed by University students, and the unsigned editorials that appear in its Opinion section represent the views of the paper's semesterly editorial board alone.

The paper's editor is nominated to the student media board by a staff election. That board includes the current editor and editorial advisor of the Daily Trojan, the general manager of KXSC (formerly KSCR), the director of the Student News Service, equal representatives of the faculty of the School of Journalism and the staff of Student Affairs, the president of the Student Senate, and the vice president for Student Affairs, who chairs the committee. The Daily Trojan is part of USC's Office of Student Publications, which sits within the university's Division of Student Affairs and also oversees the publication of El Rodeo, the USC yearbook. Financially, the paper stands alone: it receives no university subsidy and no allocation from student government funds, relying entirely on advertising revenue to pay for its operations.

Funding pressures and the December 2024 cuts

That advertising-dependent model left the paper exposed when the economics of print and digital advertising deteriorated across the industry. In December 2024, the paper's funding was severely cut: student workers would no longer be paid, and the newspaper reduced its print schedule from five edition days per week to three. The cuts marked the most difficult chapter in the paper's modern history and forced a leaner operation even as the staff continued to publish daily online.

The episode was part of a broader crisis facing student newspapers nationwide, but it was especially striking at a paper that had sustained itself on advertising alone for decades. The Daily Trojan's experience underscored how thoroughly the advertising model that once supported student journalism at major universities has eroded, and how papers that once competed with metropolitan dailies for stories now compete with platforms for survival.

Digital evolution and Daily Trojan Magazine

Alongside the contraction of print, the paper has continued to experiment digitally. In 2023 it introduced Daily Trojan Magazine, a completely digital monthly addendum to the paper, giving the staff a new showcase for long-form and visually ambitious journalism. The magazine joined a web operation that has been running, in various forms, since 1996, and it arrived at a moment when the paper was earning national recognition for its online work, including an Associated Collegiate Press Online Pacemaker award.

The paper has also moved to meet its audience where it reads: a Spanish-language supplement has appeared in its pages, and special issues built around events like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the Lunar New Year, and USC's own traditions have become a signature of the modern DT. These special editions have repeatedly earned first-place state recognition for best special issue or section from the California College Media Association.

Awards and recognition

The Daily Trojan and its staffers earn national, state, and regional awards on an annual basis. Nationally, the paper has won the Associated Collegiate Press Newspaper Pacemaker award, often called the Pulitzer Prize of college journalism, twice: in 1991 and again in 2017. Its online operation has won the ACP Online Pacemaker twice as well, in 2016 and 2023.

At the state level, the California College Media Association's Excellence in Student Media Awards have recognized the paper repeatedly. In 2018 it received 15 state awards, including first-place honors for Best Editorial, Best Multimedia Presentation, Best Social Media for a Single Event, Best Sports Photo, and Best Special Issue/Section. In 2019 it took 22 state awards, with first places for Best Special Issue/Section, Best News Series, Best Podcast, Best Editorial, Best Non-News Video, Best Sports Story, Best Infographic, and Best Interactive Graphic. In 2022 it earned 13 state awards, and in 2023 it collected 17, including first-place recognition for Best Digital Magazine, Best Magazine Inside Page/Spread Design, Best Special Issue/Section, Best Illustration, Best Infographic, Best Headline Portfolio, Best Photo Illustration, Best Newspaper Column, and Best Breaking News Story.

Notable alumni

The Daily Trojan's newsroom has launched some of the most recognizable names in American media. The most prominent is satirist Art Buchwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist, who worked on the paper as a student. Other high-profile former staffers include Paul Feig, the creator of Freaks and Geeks and director of Bridesmaids; Paresh Dave, a technology reporter for Reuters; Jordyn Holman, a retail reporter for Bloomberg News; Herb Klein, who served as communications director in the Nixon White House and later became a top news executive with Copley Press in California; Arash Markazi, a journalist for Sports Illustrated and ESPN Los Angeles; and Kate Mather, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

The breadth of that alumni roster, spanning satire, film, technology reporting, sports journalism, and political communications, reflects the paper's long-standing role as a place where USC students learn the craft of journalism by practicing it at a high level, under the pressure of real deadlines and a real audience.

Covering history: from Nixon to the 1992 riots

Few student newspapers can claim the Daily Trojan's record of being present at major historical moments. Its exclusive interview with Richard Nixon, granted as his first interview after resigning from public office, remains the most famous single story in the paper's history. When Los Angeles was convulsed by riots in 1992, the DT reported from the midst of events unfolding close to campus, documenting a crisis that reshaped the city.

The paper has also chronicled the rise of USC as an athletic and academic powerhouse, the evolution of the University Park neighborhood, and the political and cultural life of Los Angeles as seen from the perspective of students living at its center. Its history project, produced around the centennial, organized this legacy into themes, including "A Trojan Tradition," an overview of the paper's history and its coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and other events where the Daily Trojan made an indelible impact, along with "Where Are They Now?," tracing the continuing careers of Daily Trojan alumni, and a complete list of the paper's editors in chief stretching back to 1912.

The archive: a century of USC history

The full run of the Daily Trojan, from 1912 to the present, is preserved in the Trojan Family Archive, a project of the USC Digital Library created in partnership with the USC Alumni Association. The archive makes every issue of the paper searchable, with high-resolution copies of every photo, article, name listing, letter to the editor, obituary, and birth notice, downloadable page by page or as full-issue PDFs. Alongside the El Rodeo yearbook and USC Trojan Family Magazine, the Daily Trojan archive gives alumni, researchers, and the curious public a way to travel through more than a century of campus history.

For historians of Los Angeles, the archive is a uniquely valuable record: a student-eye view of the city's evolution, from the streetcar era through the freeway age, recorded by reporters who lived where the news happened. For the university, it is the institutional memory of the Trojan Family, documenting the classes, coaches, controversies, and celebrations that shaped generations of alumni.

Reading the Daily Trojan

The Daily Trojan publishes online at dailytrojan.com, where readers can find daily news, sports, arts and entertainment, and opinion coverage of USC and the surrounding community, along with the digital Daily Trojan Magazine and the paper's growing archive of special issues. Print editions, now published three days a week following the December 2024 cuts, remain available across the University Park campus. More than a century after W.R. "Ralph" La Porte persuaded a university president to give USC a student newspaper, the Daily Trojan continues to do what he intended: to inform and entertain the university community, and to give students a place to learn journalism by practicing it for real.