The Daily Cardinal And The Badger Herald

Free speech, student engagement, critical information dissemination and investigation are all roles of a student newspaper on a college campus.

Most college campuses are fortunate enough to have a student run paper, but The University of Wisconsin-Madison is the only college campus in the country to have two daily newspapers each ranked in the top 50. These papers, The Daily Cardinal and The Badger Herald, have been around for decades and have each cemented a place in campus life. Over time the role and position of each paper have changed, but the impact of each remains significant on campus.

History of the Papers

The Daily Cardinal was founded on April 4, 1892 by William Wesley Young, an editor for campus magazine The Aegis who desired

This is in stark contrast to the rest of Wisconsin, which has become increasingly polarized with time according to Kathleen Culver, assistant professor at the UW-Madison school of Journalism. Journalism Professor Hernando Rojas suggests that this is the result of the understanding that the newspaper staffs have about the effects of partisan media.

“As we start seeing some of the consequences of partisan journalism, our reaction is to say we need to be more professional, more objective, less partisan in our own work,” Rojas said. “This could potentially be a reaction against [the effects of partisan journalism] by reaffirming the values that are central to journalism, such as objectivity.”

As the papers move away from the partisan practices of the past, they can move forward with objective reporting and expanding technology.

What’s

The Badger Herald and The Daily Cardinal have coexisted for close to a half century and have been competing since the Herald was founded in 1969 as a conservative alternative to the Cardinal.

Journalism Professor Hernando Rojas says the competition between the two papers is healthy for the campus in that it pushes the papers to improve themselves and helps diversify the content.

“The more newspapers that cover the campus, the better and that translates to more voices being represented in those newspapers.”

Cardinal and Herald officials say the two papers have recently begun publishing most of their material online as an attempt to gain a larger audience in the student body.

Daily Cardinal Badger Herald editor-in-chief Jim Dayton says the Cardinal will continue to focus on its digital product and Badger Herald editor-in-chief Aliya Iftikhar says the Herald will do the same.

“We want to be digital first and expand our online