Newspaper editor welcomes readers back to campus

Welcome, welcome. Back to Pitt, back to college life and back to The Pitt News. And welcome to… Welcome, welcome. Back to Pitt, back to college life and back to The Pitt News. And welcome to a new Pitt News staff. With many of our staffers graduating, going abroad or leaving for one reason or another, your independent student newspaper has had a lot of turnover.

I’m new, for example. My name’s Jessica Lear, and I’m your new editor in chief. I said “your” there because we’re here for you. The Pitt News is a public forum by students, for everyone. So tell us what you want out of your newspaper. You can call me at (412) 648-7985. You can e-mail me at editor@pittnews.com. And you can visit me at our office in 434 William Pitt Union.

Or better yet, come work for us. We need writers, copy editors, writers, photographers, cartoonists, writers and an assistant layout editor. So if you know how to do any of those things, or even if you’re just interested in learning, stop by or e-mail us to get an application.

Anyway, you can expect to see a few changes in the paper, some more noticeable than others. If you’re really observant, you’ve already discovered that our volume number just changed. No, no, I don’t mean that we just added one because it’s the start of a new year. Nope, we went back a few volumes. All that business about being a century old — “One of America’s great student newspapers since 1906” — yeah, that was a mistake.

The Pitt Weekly (what we were called back when we only printed once a week) started in 1910. Its predecessor, The Courant, started in the 1880s, but didn’t really come out regularly enough to be considered a newspaper. I know this because I spent hours upon hours looking through the archives and microfilm this summer.

So, how did some editor get it into his head that the paper had been around since 1906? Well, the best I can figure is that he was going by the volume number, assuming that it hadn’t been messed up in all those years. Wrong!

Who knows what they were thinking in March 1927 when the volume switches from XVII to XVIII with no explanation? And wow, somebody really didn’t understand Roman numerals in the late 1930s. It goes from XXX to XXXX to XL to XXX to XLL to XXL to XXXI. All that happened midyear, not just when volume numbers would normally change.

Then in 1972, the tag line at the top alternated, almost weekly actually, between “Sixty-one years of collegiate journalism” to “66 years of collegiate journalism.”

It wasn’t until Nov. 10, 1998 — the paper claimed to be Volume XCII Number 51 — that someone decided to add “The student newspaper of the University of Pittsburgh since 1906.”

Why no one thought to do some fact checking on this — I’m looking in your direction, Hal Turner — I have no idea. Turner, then the editor in chief, did think to include an explanation of the layout changes that occurred at the same time, but added no mention of where he got the idea that The Pitt News has been around since 1906. I guess he was just going by the volume numbers.

In any case, whether this is a humorous or an embarrassing mistake, it certainly serves as an important lesson about fact checking and accuracy. We were all set to have a big centennial celebration next year, inviting as many Pitt News alums as there were still alive. But we’ve had to postpone the party, and now I’m setting the record straight.

So to all you observant readers who noticed the change, and to all you future editors who might be thinking of making a stupid change, here it is. We’re now volume 96 (we’ve abandoned Roman numerals because it seems like some people don’t understand them), and The Pitt News got its start in 1910 as The Pitt Weekly. The records are there in Hillman Library and in The Pitt News office.

Thanks for reading, welcome back and we look forward to hearing from you soon.