100 years later, Skiff still sailing university waters
The Skiff is still afloat after 100 years of service to students and faculty. From its humble beginnings to the present, the Skiff has strived to be an honorable newspaper.
By Alisha Brown
Associate Editor

One-hundred years ago today, the first edition of the Skiff was sent to press as a financial endeavor of a young football player.

“It won’t last three weeks,” Ed S. McKinney, founder of the Skiff, was told when he started the TCU newspaper Sept. 19, 1902, in Waco, according to past Skiff articles.

McKinney, a football player for the university, arrived in Waco with $13 and a determination to earn a college education. By charging 25 cents for a semester’s subscription, he hoped to finance his diploma with the Skiff, a Saturday newspaper meant for the faculty of TCU.

President E. V. Zollers recommended that McKinney be allowed tuition, room and board for publicizing the school in the Skiff, which only had 300 students at the time.

The chances for the financial success of a weekly newspaper seemed meager, but 100 years later the Skiff remains afloat.

The first edition of the Skiff had four pages of four columns each, with only a third of the pages’ space devoted to “real” news. It was printed by B.H. Simpson who ran a print shop near the TCU campus.

“Rowing, not drifting,” was the newspaper’s motto, and it was and still is the Skiff’s policy “to do business through merit, not pity; to give honor where honor is due, and gravel in the dust for none.”

In 1905, Alonzo Ashmore, also a football player, became the editor. L. Edwin Brannin filled the position as business manager. Ashmore and Brannin personally received all the profits from the Skiff. This practice of the editor and business manager splitting whatever profit they made continued for the next 23 years.

The business manager was appointed annually by the Committee of Publications and the editor was elected.

In 1906, the Skiff had a circulation of 2,000 copies a month. Dean Colby D. Hall, whom the freshman women’s dormitory is named after now, was the faculty adviser. During this time, the Skiff’s greatest rival in college journalism was the Baylor University Lariat.

The Skiff was taken under the journalism department’s wing in 1928. It began publishing twice a week in 1958 and became a daily newspaper — publishing Tuesday through Friday — in 1971.

The first offices of the Skiff were in “cubby holes” in the administration building until the early ’40s when it moved under the same roof as the journalism department — the basement of what is now Clark Hall. In 1949 the first photography lab was built for student publications. The Skiff moved again with the department in 1957 to a room on the first floor in the south wing of Dan Rogers Hall. From 1925-57, however the newspaper was housed with the department in temporary wooden structures behind Mary Couts Burnett Library, an area referred to as “Splinter Village.”

Journalism professor Doug Newsom said at that time the newspaper was using “hot type” to set the pages.

“They nearly burned the place down once,” said Newsom, who went on to become chairwoman of the department in 1980.

The first on-campus print shop was built because of a fund-raising campaign in 1955 in honor of J. Willard Ridings, the first dean of the college. The equipment consisted of a proof press that was donated by the All-Church Press, two-typesetting machines, a Model 8 Linotype, a model 14 Linotype, make-up tables and fonts of foundry type for larger headlines. One of the first color photographs ran in 1962 of Homecoming candidates.

The Skiff became a member of the Associated Press since 1963 and covered some of its most controversial stories during this time. Students picketed for racial desegregation outside Ridglea theater and the Palace in the same year.

In the 1970s, race relations and new technology were the hot topics for the press.

Preparing for the move into the J.M. Moudy Building, Newsom ordered 200 electric typewriters for the department which were outdated by the time they arrived. The department sent the typewriters back for a refund.
“I never even took them out of their boxes,” she said. By that time the need for computers was evident.

In spring 1981, Anantha Babbili became department chairman and the last move for the Skiff was made Aug. 25 into the J.M. Moudy Building, where the office rests, comfortably, now in Room 291.

Assistant professor of journalism Earnest Perry remembers when the section editors wrote, edited and printed all the copy for their page in the 1980s.

“We didn’t have a reporting class to do the writing for us,” he said. “We wrote because that’s the way it was done. We didn’t have pagination. We worked off waxers, light boards and exacto knives.”

More technology upgrades came under current journalism department chairman Tommy Thomason’s watch.

Babbili said, “We had finally caught on to the ballgame. We were pulling in a little more of our resources and were ahead of the curve by the ‘90s.”

The latest technology upgrade was made just last January with the addition of two new servers and an upgrade in staff computers from Macintosh G3s to G4s. Now nearly all pictures are taken with digital cameras. And producing and designing the pages can be done from the newest toy, a Powerbook.

The Skiff has won many awards in its 100 years of service to the university, including the Associated Press Managing Editors Best Students Newspaper in Texas, the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association Sweepstakes Award and the All-American Award.

The Skiff is now governed by the Student Publications committee, a group of 15 faculty, administration and student members who select the editors and advertising managers of both publications. However, the editors of those publications control the content. The newspaper and magazine are not laboratory publications, but journalism department classes contribute to the content and editing of both.

The student publications are funded by the university as part of the College of Communication, which is under the university oversight of the vice chancellor for academic affairs.

The “dream boat” that McKinney founded 100 years ago, by which Skiff editors, faculty and staff hope will carry the newspaper’s reputation, remains committed to excellence in journalism for the next century to come.