The Stanford Daily

The Stanford Daily is the student-run, independent daily newspaper serving Stanford University. The Daily is distributed throughout campus and the surrounding community of Palo Alto, California, United States. It has published since the university was founded in 1892.

The paper publishes weekdays during the academic year. The Daily also published several special issues every year: "The Orientation Issue", "Big Game Issue", and "The Commencement Issue". In the fall of 2008, the paper's offices relocated from the Storke Publications Building to the newly constructed Lorry I. Lokey Stanford Daily Building, near the recently renovated Old Student Union.

The paper began as a small student publication called The Daily Palo Alto serving the Palo Alto area and the university. It "has been Stanford's only news outlet operating continuously since the birth of the University."

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as baby boomer college students increasingly questioned authority and asserted generational independence, and Stanford administrators became worried about liability for the paper's editorials, the paper and the university severed ties. In 1973, students founded The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation, a non-profit corporation, to operate the newspaper.

A significant event leading to the paper's independence was the 1970 publication of an opinion piece entitled "Snitches and Oppression." The author of the piece named two witnesses to the protests that led to his arrest and concluded "take care of snitches." The university president, Richard Lyman, called the piece a "journalistic atrocity" and indicated concern that the university could be held liable for the content of the newspaper and its consequences. During the fall of 1970, the newspaper also announced an editorial policy of destroying unpublished photographs of demonstrations so they could not be used as evidence in court.

In April 1971, little more than a year thereafter, the newspaper's policy led Palo Alto Chief of Police, James Zurcher, to initiate a search of the Daily offices. This occurred shortly after the occupation of a Stanford Hospital building had been broken up by police, some of whom were attacked and injured by the demonstrators. Believing that photographs of these assaults existed in Daily files, detectives spent hours searching the darkroom and staff members' desks.

The newspaper, aided by the noted constitutional expert Anthony Amsterdam, filed suit claiming a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution. Zurcher v. Stanford Daily went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against the paper, holding that a state may issue a warrant to search and seize evidence from a third party who is not a criminal suspect (although "particular exactitude" must be exercised when First Amendment considerations are at play). This ruling caused the legislative branch to respond with the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which increased protections for nonsuspect third parties in legal cases.

In 1991, a volunteer group of alumni incorporated The Friends of The Stanford Daily Foundation to provide support for the newspaper.