The school archives / One school year, with a 1928 Tiny Times and three stapled issues
Trinity's Student Newspaper Was Saved by an Editor's Uncle
In 1890 students at a Manhattan school pinned the news to the classroom wall. Within two years they had a mimeograph, a Latin title and a relative paying for the printing.
In 1890, Upper School students at Trinity School in Manhattan began posting the day's school events, and news of the coming presidential election, on the walls of their classroom. They called it Daily Doings. It started out as the Trinity War Cry, because, as one contributor said, "we will put up a holler about some things."
In November 1891 they decided to make it a newspaper. They copied the first issue by hand. Only four handwritten issues were made, one for each Upper School classroom.
By January 1892 they had a hand-cranked mimeograph. The title changed with each issue: Trinity Illustrated Weekly, Trinity Weekly, Ephimerida.
In the spring of 1892, according to the school archives, one of the editors persuaded his uncle to pay for professional printing. The paper became Acta Diurna, Latin for Daily Doings.
Every student publication in history has needed one of three things: a stapler, a mimeograph or an uncle.
Acta Diurna stopped in 1895, and came back in 1904.
In 1922 the younger students started their own paper, the Grammar Crier. When its editors moved up to the Upper School in 1924, it turned into the Trinity Times. In 1928 came the Tiny Times, a short-lived supplement for the lower grades.
The archive has a scanned January 1928 issue: eighteen pages, five cents. Its editorial has a business plan. First make the boys want a paper, so they will write for it, and then they will buy it. Then, a few lines later, it asks readers to please also support the Trinity Times, the older students' paper, with their purchases and their writing. Near the back is a short poem announcing that the editor himself paid for the space it fills.
Sell your paper, recommend the competition, buy your own ad. That is the entire history of journalism in eighteen pages.
Today the Trinity Times is written, edited, designed, photographed and produced by students, with a faculty adviser.
The middle one started a magazine this fall with two friends and our stapler. Issue one sold four copies. Three were to me. Issue two had an ad on the back page for a lemonade stand owned by one of the editors. I asked whether the stand had paid for it. He said yes, in lemonade.
Issue three is in production. He has asked if I would fund professional printing. I asked who he thought I was. He said, "You're the uncle."
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Trinity School Archives: The Tiny Times, January 1928 trinityschoolarchives.omeka.net
- Trinity School Archives: Daily Doings at Trinity trinityschoolarchives.omeka.net
- Trinity School Archives: Grammar Crier to Tiny Times trinityschoolarchives.omeka.net
- Trinity: Student Publications trinityschoolnyc.org