The last time The Daily Northwestern printed a newspaper five days a week was Winter 2020, just before the pandemic radically altered our lives and the way we operated our newsroom.

Founded 140 years ago, The Daily is the oldest daily news source on campus and in the city of Evanston. Our reporters and editors have worked almost entirely remotely for the past 18 months, but we’ve continued to produce essential content five days a week, uploading new stories to our website every weekday (and sometimes even on the weekends). We’ve found new ways to serve our community’s needs, like creating a guide to COVID-19 testing sites in Evanston and assisting the Northwestern and Evanston communities in scheduling a vaccine appointment.

Spring 2020 was the first time we completely halted the publication of our print paper. Last fall, we brought back our print product and published physical issues twice a week for the entire 2020-21 academic year. Now, we’re facing issues with the future of our print editions that parallel the struggles many other local newsrooms are grappling with. 

Print advertising was already on the decline before the pandemic hit. Many of our advertisers were local Evanston businesses and restaurants, but the realities of the pandemic have become more pressingly apparent in our ability to publish a daily newspaper. Several of our mainstay advertisers have shut down for good or don’t have enough revenue to pay for ads, leaving us with space in our newspapers and a lack of vendors to fill it.

While we’re moving back into our offices at Norris University Center this week, we hope to more fully embrace our online presence and build on the work of the past year and a half. Rather than exhausting our editors and reporters in producing a physical product each day, we will be moving to a digital-first model that is more sustainable for our staff and less confined to a daily print deadline.

As a result, we’ve made the decision to print a newspaper three days a week this quarter. You can find copies of The Daily on newsstands around campus, Evanston and Chicago every Monday, Wednesday and Friday starting Sept. 22. 

Spreading out our issues will allow us to cover the week more in-depth, giving readers a chance to take in the longer-form content they may have missed or see the work of our talented photographers highlighted across our pages.

Daily readers, we are excited to introduce our new print product, and we are just as excited to push the limits of our online content. As campus life has evolved, The Daily is evolving, too.

No matter the medium, The Daily will always be there to serve the NU and Evanston communities — as we have for 140 years (and counting!). Please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns you have about our coverage and the future of our newspaper, and I promise to listen.

Isabelle Sarraf
Editor in Chief

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @isabellesarraf