On a Sunday afternoon, I venture down into the basement of Welch Hall and promptly get lost in its narrow hallways—until Will Sussbauer, JE ’27, one of The Yale Herald’s current Editors-in-Chief, calls my name from the end and steps out of Room A06. I’d missed the blue duct-tape arrow on the adjacent wall. Beyond a floor plan of 305 Crown Street—the Herald’s longtime headquarters until the end of the 2025 school year—tacked to the door, the space is otherwise unassuming. Inside, a giant chalkboard greets me with a half-erased message: “Welcome to the Yale Herald.” I find myself in a scrappy, starkly lit room: two stray Solo cups from some first-year gathering (we are on Old Campus, after all), and a gray file cabinet lined with miscellaneous plushies.
Those same cabinets house the publication’s forty-year archive, with issues stretching back to Volume II, Fall 1986. When I pull one open, pinching both sides of the latch at once as Will shows me, a faint musk of aged pulp and bleached ink spills forth, catapulting my mind backward through the years.
In the spring of 1986, co-founders Stephen Lange-Ranzini, YC ’86, and Richard So, YC ’87 set out to create a free, weekly alternative to the Yale Daily News, first assembling the paper in their off-campus apartment on Valentine’s Day. The front page of the earliest issue in the archive announces itself as “THE YALE HERALD” with a vignette of Harkness Tower rising from the skyline, subtitled “An Undergraduate Publication.” Its tall, vertical newsprint feels worlds away from the colorful, near-square issues now stacked outside dining halls. What strikes me most is its editorial compass that was perhaps less Yale-centric with a decidedly worldly bent. The front-page headline, “Women of the Ivy League Pose Questions,” responded to Playboy’s infamous Ivy League pictorials. Below it, an “Around the Globe” digest sketched major geopolitical flashpoints—Afghan rebels launching a massive attack on Kabul; the Chilean government tightening its crackdown on the opposition. Inside the cover, an “Open Forum” section takes up a larger question: whether free speech can—or should—transcend popular opinion.
How much can change in forty years for a campus publication? Almost everything, and yet not quite. Over the decades, the Herald has reshuffled its sections from reporting-forward politics and world news to newer homes like Voices and Reviews—without losing its attention to national and global issues, even as it turns inward toward personal voice and narrative. The magazine no longer prints dense graphics and pie charts parsing local elections or Senate races, but it continues to situate Yale within its broader political contexts. In spring 2024, the Herald took an unequivocal stance in support of the student protests at Yale and across the country protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Alongside their peers, the Herald called for Yale to divest from weapons manufacturing. “We are told that we are too idealistic. Good! What else are young people for?” wrote then Editor-in-Chief Arthur Delot-Vilain, YC ’25.
I sat down with current Co-Editors-in-Chief Sussbauer and Oscar Heller, ES ’26.5, at Book Trader Café to learn about their understanding of the publication today and its evolution from a newspaper into a culture magazine. “Thankfully, we’re given a ton of creative freedom to run this magazine,” Oscar tells me. “And by one hundred percent creative freedom, I literally mean one hundred percent.”
That commitment to expression and experimentation didn’t appear out of nowhere. The Herald may not have adopted the “Most Daring” tagline until the 2010s, but the freedom it signals is part of a longer lineage. To trace it, you have to return to the archive, to the moments when the Herald first began staking out what “daring” could mean.
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Since its founding, the Herald has treated its pages as a laboratory of sorts. The December 5, 1986 issue feels noticeably heftier (by eight extra pages) thanks to a “trial affiliation” with Nadine, a music magazine. Across the archive, the paper keeps testing what it can hold. A churn of ads doubles as a time capsule: Yale Political Union elections; a Merrill Lynch undergrad recruiting event; LSAT tutoring; Japanese, Thai, and Chinese restaurant spreads. Sports coverage, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, runs robust and graphic-heavy—down to callout boxes tallying Tyng Cup standings and, in 2003, a two-page hand-drawn diagram dissecting Harvard and Yale’s offensive formations for The Game. Elsewhere, the paper swings hard into irreverence: a February 8, 2002 issue leads with the headline, “Single bulldogs, well endowed, seek bone.” And for years, the only color in the whole paper lives in the comics spread—lush through the 2000s and 2010s, noticeably thinner now.
In the 2000s, even as sections and headlines swung wildly from issue to issue, the Herald kept documenting the many firsts on this campus while growing into itself. The January 21, 2002 issue, for instance, chronicles Yale’s first official celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. By that spring, the paper had expanded into a 32-page weekly print run, staffed by a roughly 80-person editorial team working out of an office on Park Street. For its “sweet sixteen” anniversary issue, then Editor-in-Chief Justin Chen, SM ’03, pauses to take stock of the Herald’s evolution: “Our newspaper is the purveyor of breaking news, the premier forum for student opinions, the most comprehensive and thoughtful critic of Yale’s ever-burgeoning art scene, and the real behind-the-scenes look at University athletics.”
The Herald, Chen argues, is defined by much more than what ends up on the page in a given week. “Yalies from virtually every corner of campus, every academic discipline, and every political ideology converge on our humble office on Wednesday and Thursday nights” with a shared aim: “producing the freshest, highest quality content for their fellow students.” The paper, Chen adds, has always “prided itself on asking the hard questions”—an instinct he credits with helping the Herald beat The New York Times to a major national story just two weeks earlier.
That central tenet—making something worth engaging with for peers—still drives the Herald’s editorial vision. “Even on the smallest of scales, we are trying to develop a brand of, I guess, honesty,” Will reflects. Oscar agrees: “The Herald is as transparent as you can get.” You can find that range in a single issue: a lighthearted meditation on the ubiquity of the word “bro,” alongside an op-ed about the Slifka Center’s institutional support of students mocking Palestinian suffering and pro-Palestinian activism under the cover of Harvard–Yale rivalry humor. This elasticity—serious without becoming self-serious—may be what sets the Herald apart from other voice-driven publications on campus. “We’re a space where, if someone’s got something to say, they can say it with us,” Will continues. “And they should say it with us, because we will edit their voice the least.”
This, too, builds the sense of community among Herald writers, editors, and designers—the very same “complement of creative, hardworking, and fun-loving editors” that Chen celebrated twenty-four years ago. Sitting in Book Trader Café, we kept getting sidetracked, reminiscing about the old Yale Herald office at 305 Crown Street: a dozen or so people perched at awkward angles on graffitied tables with laptops balanced on their knees.
Production nights have since migrated to a large classroom on the second floor of Phelps Hall, but the collective feeling persists. “It really does feel like everyone has some ownership in the magazine, which makes people invested,” Oscar says, smiling.
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On my third trip down to the archives with Features Editor Angel Hu, MY ’28, we dig through issues from the late 2000s and early 2010s. Dark purple floods the November 10, 2006 cover page, catching my eye as I thumb through yellowed pages, still crisp in their carefully labeled folders. The paper has shrunk considerably from its original broadsheet proportions and is starting to look more and more like a magazine. In the February 13, 2004 issue, an ad publicizing a Saybrook College Tea titled, “Sex at Yale: Theory and Practice,” runs opposite an opinion piece on the inaugural Sex Week at Yale, an educational effort on love, sex, and intimacy that was, astonishingly, organized by a single student. These early iterations of the Sex Issue were already solidifying into the annual fixture it will become by the 2010s. Flip the page and I’m suddenly thousands of miles from New Haven, reading an interview with an alumnus who was serving as a political correspondent for the Coalition Provisional Authority during the Iraq War.
Debates under the “Open Forum” section of the 1980s continued in features such as, “Writers ponder political correctness in journalism”— a perennially relevant issue that carries major stakes for how student publications handle coverage of campus activism. In 2015, the Herald published an op-ed by Silliman resident Jencey Paz, YC ’17 titled “Hurt at Home,” in the wake of the Halloween controversy sparked by then-Associate Head of Silliman College Erika Christakis’s divisive email. Responding to an earlier entreaty from the Intercultural Affairs Committee urging students to be more sensitive about cultural appropriation, Christakis dismissed the message as an “exercise of implied control over college students.” She argued instead that students should have room to decide for themselves whether costumes featuring “feathered headdresses, turbans…or modifying skin tone or wearing blackface or redface” crossed the line into offensive caricature—which deepened divisions within Silliman and rippled across the university.
Paz reflects on the aftermath of a student meeting with Nicholas Christakis, then only ten weeks into his tenure as Head of College, who students felt “was using Silliman College as his intellectual sparring ground.” Paz writes, “They have failed to acknowledge the hurt and pain that such a large part of our community feel.” The article sparked much debate on Facebook, where then-Editor-in-Chief David Rossler YC ’17 had issued a statement defending the publication of Paz’s piece and offered a clarifying distinction of a Head of College’s role as a community leader.
By 2017, the magazine’s visual language has tightened into something spare and sleek: Helvetica type and a voice that wears its moment on its sleeve, peppered with references to Facebook and Snapchat. On September 22, the front page carries the familiar three-word slogan, “It’s Your Yale,” now paired with a brand new tagline: “Yale’s Most Daring Publication since 1986.”
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After our conversation, I return to Will’s word: “honesty.” I’d expected something like “truth”—no less aspirational, but perhaps a familiar term for a newspaper—the standard claim of any publication that strives to shed light on happenings in the world. The two terms are often used interchangeably in discussions surrounding journalistic integrity, but the Herald seems to demand a finer distinction. For a magazine now so rooted in personal voice—whether creative nonfiction or reportage—honesty carries its own stakes. The work isn’t only in gathering and verifying facts, but in reckoning with them, turning them over and over, so writers and readers can locate themselves in relation to what they’ve found.
In that sense, the archive assembles not a timeline but a toolkit for sustained experiments in attention—what the magazine and its people choose to notice, and how they learn to look. The Herald has always been less bound to place than other campus publications. “The Yale Daily News mostly covers Yale, The New Journal covers Yale and New Haven, but the Herald covers the world,” Oscar says. And yet, combing through these pages, I’m reminded how “the world” arrives here, having been debated over, joked about, and refracted through countless perspectives.
As I close the last leather-bound volume, I linger over a call for writers beside a cartoonishly personified newspaper, its apostrophe-like eyebrows arched over googly eyes. It pitches the paper with a cheeky line: “Serious journalism. Power and prestige. Free food and fun people.” I’m not so sure about “power and prestige,” but the rest still feels right. Forty years on, The Yale Herald is still changing, still returning to the same demand: be honest on the page, and mean it.