There are always stories behind the stories, tales that continue to be told long after a newspaper has been put to bed.
And with the dawn of today, Ball State's newspaper commemorates its 80th year of publication - and 80 years of these stories.
What started as the weekly "Easterner," first published on March 29, 1922, has blossomed into today's daily paper - spanning multiple university presidents, several department chairs and countless students.
Yet, this is not a story solely about the Daily News. It is also a chronicle of the faces behind the bylines. It it their stories that make the past 80 years worth reporting.
FACES OF THE PAST
Many people have been associated with the Daily News, but one of the most familiar and influential is Louis Ingelhart, professor emeritus and the journalism's department first chairman.
Ingelhart arrived at Ball State in 1954, but he was already third to advise the newspaper.
He inherited the Daily News from Sharley B. DeMotte, the paper's advisor from 1924 to 1954 and the founder of the journalism program.
In 1922, nine students and Robert LaFollete, then the head of the social science department, started the paper.
When Ingelhart arrived, the paper was only four pages thick and seven columns wide - not nearly enough for him.
So he and his staff shrunk the paper to six columns, but they added four pages. Still not satisfied, Ingelhart found another way to increase news coverage. He decided to increase circulation to twice weekly.
The paper wouldn't become a daily publication until Sept. 12, 1964.
Robert Heintzelman, an associate professor emeritus of journalism, worked for the paper when it started to publish more often. He said the experience was exciting, though it entailed much more work.
"We felt more professional by putting out more issues," he said. "It became somewhat of a full-time job while you were going to school." During his stay as advisor, Ingelhart experienced both the serious and the silly. There was the time the paper, looking for a cartoonist, hired fledgling artist Jim Davis.
"Jim said, "Sure, I'll try," and he turned out two or three cartoons that weren't very good at all," Ingelhart said.
Once, the Daily News, working with the Student Government Association, convinced the state government to file an injunction against the city registrar, who was prohibiting students from registering to vote.
VICTORIES AND DEFEATS.
Ingelhart continued as advisor until 1969. He was followed by several more advisers until David Knott, now an associate professor emeritus, stepped in. When Knott retired in 1999, he had served as the advisor for 23 years.
There were challenges awaiting Knott from the beginning, he said.
Though the Daily News had taken a serious approach to news in the early 1970s, Knott said, it had developed a more feature look and tone when he arrived.
Knott and his staff wanted to return the paper to its more serious roots, and in 1982, they were able to publish a news story that would garner a nomination for the most prestigious award in journalism.
Don Yaeger, now the associate editor for Sports Illustrated, was only 19 years old when he was tipped off about a potential conflict of interest within the university. The tip resulted in a semester's worth of stories that documented investments Ball State had made in local banks, banks with ties to university officials. After investigating, Yaeger discovered Ball State officials could have made more interest had they invested in different banks.
A grand jury was ultimately called to see if any wrong-doing had occurred. "It was heady times, there's no question," Yaeger said. "It was one of those rare times when something changed."
"That was a story unlike any other," Knott said. "It was a wonderful story." The piece was ultimately nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the highest award a journalist received.
When Pulitzer recipients were announced, however, the Daily News was not among them.
"Don got calls from all over," Knott said. "It was disheartening. It was the most disappointing thing I remember." It has been 19 years since Yaeger published his nominated stories, and he said he looks back at those times with fondness.
EVERYDAY ADVENTURES
Tom Davies is now an editor with the Associated Press. Given the volume of stories he edits each day, Davies cannot afford to focus exclusively on one topic. He needs to be a generalist, he said.
Davies honed his skills, he said, at the Daily News, where, as a reporter, he covered everything from murder coverage to the state legislature.
Journalism Professor Mark Popovich became the paper+â-ìs editor in 1963, when it was still the Ball State News.
Popovich can recall the time the paper created a "furor" when it published an article on the exploitation of women and ran a photo of the Miss American pageant alongside a photo of the Miss Nude America Pageant.
That was not the only time the Daily News sparked a controversy. In the mid and late 1990s, several scandals involving race came to fruition. In 1994, the Black Student Association marched in protest against a story in the Daily News, which identified two members of the football team as potentially being suspects in a sexual assault case.
Darnell Morris-Compton, a member of the peace corps and a Daily News editor in 1998, keeps clippings of this and other stories. Morris-Compton, whose last name was only Compton at Ball State, saw his share of conflicts while working for the paper, including the time minority students interrupted an awards banquet in April.
The students would not let administrators leave until they disclosed why Daren Mooko, the former assistant director for the Office of Multicultural Affairs, was fired.
"All the things that occurred gave student journalists the opportunity to practice," Compton said. "It was great training ground."
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