1922 First publication of a newspaper at a Ball State school. A weekly paper, the Easterner has four pages and four columns. Robert LaFollette is the first faculty adviser. The paper has a circulation of about 400 copies per issue.
1923 The Easterner publishes first color with a green holly leaf.
1930 The Easterner size changes from magazine-size pages to 16-by-22- inch pages.
1936 The paper changes to the Ball State News after Ball State separated from Indiana State.
1940 The Ball State News takes a stand for civil rights in the newsroom.
1953 The newspaper staff consists of 30 students. The total enrollment at Ball State is 3,300 students.
1956 The Ball State News converts to a tabloid format.
1959 The newspaper doubles its publishing days to two times per week.
1961 The paper is published daily during Homecoming.
1962 Circulation reaches 8,000.
1965 The Ball State News publishes three times per week.
1967 A new system creates an editor in chief, and a five-member editorial board. The newsroom is broken down into news, sports, features, society and photography.
1967 The first color photo is published. The photo is of Ball State President John R. Emens.
1968 The journalism department becomes fully accredited by the American Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Ball State and Indiana University are the only schools in the state to hold this accreditation today.
1968 The paper changes to a five day daily. The paper changes its name to the Ball State Daily News.
1971 The Ball State Daily News begins a fight to gain rights of students to vote in the town they go to college in.
1975 The paper changes from a tabloid format to the broadsheet size seen today.
1976 The first year the paper receives the All-American rating from the Associated Collegiate Press. The DN has won the award every year since.A long-term investigative project by Don Yaeger uncovers a financial scandal in the board of trustees.
1984 The DN is nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for the investigative piece about a financial scandal in the board of trustees.
1994 The DN prints entirely on negative, bypassing the drawn out paste-up process. The DN is the first college newspaper to use full pagination. Later this year the DN begins printing with four color.
1996 The paper receives the Pacemaker award from the Associated Collegiate Press. The award is known as the Pulitzer Prize of collegiate journalism.
1997 The journalism department unites with other departments to form the College of Communication, Information, and Media (CCIM). The new college is the fourth largest of its kind in the nation.
1998 The DN is named one of the World's Fourteen Best Designed Newspapers by the Society for News Design. Still the only student newspaper to receive the honor.
1999 The Daily News wins Pacemaker award.
2001 The Daily News moves into the Art and Journalism Building, its current home.
2001 Daily News reports on terrorist attacks.
2003 The Daily News debuts a new entertainment tabloid, 72 Hours.
2005 Daily News wins 52 Gold Circles at the CSPA convention, the most of any paper in the country and the most it ever received in a single year.
2005 Daily News wins two CSPA Gold Crowns and a Pacemaker, making it the only college paper in the country to win both major collegiate journalism awards that year.
2006 72 Hours is converted from a tabloid to an interactive Web site, 72hrsonline.com.
2007 Daily News wins 57 Gold Circles at the CSPA convention, The most of any paper in the country, besting the previous mark set in 2005.
Civil RightsThe paper sometimes had to combat racism outside the newsroom. One of the staff members in the early 1940s was Sara Carolyn Adams, a black woman whose presence enraged the local sororities. Marie Fraser, editor for several quarters in the 1940s, told the DN in 1997 that the paper faced considerable pressure from the sororities, who demanded that Adams be fired or forced to resign. Fraser refused, and the sororities pulled their society news from the publication. According to Fraser, the paper filled its pages 'just fine' without the society news, and Adams remained on the staff.
VotingBall State students could not vote in Muncie if they weren't residents. The Daily News wrote a series of articles to change the standard. The articles stirred up trouble, but produced little result. Under the advice of Louis Ingelhart, director of student publications at the time, eight students from Student Government Association and the DN went to Indianapolis to obtain the right to vote. The students succeeded, and an injunction passed prohibiting refusal of students the right to vote in Muncie. The injunction became permanent on Oct. 27, 1971. With the new legislation, Muncie and Ball State set a standard for the rest of the state.
CorruptionAfter months of researching university records, DN reporter Don Yaeger discovered members of the board of trustees mismanaged Ball State funds. On Oct. 6 and 7, 1982, the DN published a two-day series on the scandal. The Daily News published more than 100 stories about the scandal after the series. The reports led to an investigation by a grand jury, which found that "technical violations" occurred but no "intentional wrongdoing" took place. The scandal caused the resignation of two board members. The Daily News received a Pulitzer Prize nomination as a result of the investigation.
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