By snoadmin
For a look a Daily 49er history from 1949 to 1979, click here.
For the Daily 49er, the 1980s was a time of growth as well as a time of challenges. Without funding from the Associated Students, the newspaper had to rely on advertising revenue. Ads in the 1980s came from a variety of sources. Restaurants, car dealerships, and fitness clubs were frequent advertisers. Full-page ads for alcohol were common until the late ‘80s, and even the Central Intelligence Agency placed advertised in the Forty-Niner.
The ads, combined with an abundance of photos, stretched the number of pages in each issue of the Daily Forty-Niner. 24-page issues were regularly printed, and special editions could be even longer. We also published more frequently: Monday through Friday until 1983, when a drop in ad revenue demanded the sacrifice of the Monday paper. Weekend issues were produced, and special editions were more common than they are today.
In the early 1980s, stories often appeared above the Daily Forty-Niner flag. The practice was common among newspapers during this era, but stopped around the mid 1980s. The flag was consistently labeled as “Daily Forty-Niner”. Special issues of the paper were sometimes printed in color, though usually only on the front page.
In the early 1990s, the Daily Forty-Niner was rebranded as the Daily 49er. The new flag, featuring a large “49er” in the top left, was used with a few variations until 2007. The campus saw some turmoil in the early ‘90s, with the loss of football, the closure of campus during the 1992 L.A. riots, and budget cuts and fee increases across the CSU system.
Not all was bad, however. A number of construction projects were completed during the 1990s, including the Walter Pyramid, the first parking structure, and a central plant designed to meet heating and cooling needs while lowering emissions.
The 49er broke new ground itself with the launch of a weekly Web edition in September 1994. Dubbed the “Online 49er”, the site was one of the first in the country to be launched by a college newspaper. You can still find the Online 49er archives, dating all the way back to 1994, here.
In 1999, former Daily Forty-Niner writer Chuck Philips won the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting. His stories exposing corruption in the entertainment industry appeared in The Los Angeles Times.
The 49er underwent many changes during the new millennium. In 2003, the newspaper became independent of the journalism department, and ceased to be a “laboratory” newspaper. A controversy erupted in 2007 when a study was initiated to investigate the feasibility of going online only. The resulting debate drew attention from observers across the nation.
Although the Daily 49er’s print circulation still far outpaces our online audience, we’ve experienced huge growth on our Web site and other electronic distribution channels. In the last 2 years, traffic on daily49er.wpengine.com has grown from about 700 to 900 pageviews a day to 1600 to 3500 pageviews per day. Last year, we established a weekly video program, Beach News, and we recently began offering our print edition through iTunes U.
Check back next weekend for an in-depth look at an article from 1987.
