IDS turns 140

Some years ago, Indiana Daily Student editors started scrawling a message on the drawer of Ernie Pyle’s desk on their last night in the newsroom.\n“Remember freedom also means responsibility,” wrote summer 1996 editor in chief Reid Cox.\nOne editor in chief left her mark in red felt-tip: “To the dream, nightmare, & reality known as the IDS. Love always, Marijke Rowland, EIC spring ’97.”\nThe desk used by the World War II reporter during his time at the IDS has been a fixture in the newsroom for almost a century of the paper’s 140-year history. Ernie Pyle’s old rolltop is just one example of the long and colorful tradition of this newspaper. And, in the same way its role in the newsroom has changed, so has the newspaper itself. \nWhen Marjorie (Smith) Blewett was the editor of the Indiana Daily Student for eight weeks in 1948, she used Pyle’s desk. She also worked with reporters who were World War II veterans.\n“These guys came back, they came stomping in like they knew what they were doing,” Blewett says. “The women said ‘Wait a minute! We can do this! Women can do this, it’s OK.’”\nIt wasn’t OK for at least one veteran.\nBlewett told a night reporter to go to the Gables on Indiana Avenue and pick up dinner for everyone, as was their tradition. \nBut the reporter wouldn’t take orders from a woman, so he quit the IDS.\nLooking back on her editorship, she says her life revolved around the paper. \n“Kacie, I just did it,” she told me. “You knew how, so you did it.”\nOver the years, IDS staffers defaced the desk. It was once painted yellow, but is now restored to its original wood finish, and serves as somewhat of a memorial in the newsroom. \nWhen the IDS was founded in 1867, it only published once or twice a month, but has evolved with the needs of its readership. The paper began publishing on a daily schedule in 1899.\nThe IDS Web site launched in 1996 shortly before Marijke Rowland was named editor in chief. She doesn’t recall the site being a huge part of the newsroom, especially since many computers in the office were the kind with the black screens and green type.\n“You’re not getting on the Internet with those,” she says.\nThese days, as an entertainment reporter at the Modesto (Calif.) Bee, she can’t imagine journalism without the Internet. \nIDS publisher Dave Adams says the new technology is one of the biggest differences between today’s staff and earlier staffs.\nWendy (Weyen) Wallace, fall 1984 editor in chief, says each staff tries to continue the IDS’ award-winning tradition.\n“It looks different and so much better in many ways,” she says on the phone, taking a break from her work as director of the High School Journalism Program at The Poynter Institute. “You look back at what you did and think it was so fabulous. The reporting was probably comparable, but it seems to be that the staff has upheld the tradition of excellence.”\nWhen I checked Pyle’s desk drawer to see what she had written, I had to laugh.\n“See you at Nick’s,” it reads.\nShe didn’t write that in 1984 – she wrote it in 2004 during a visit. Last semester, she was in town again, and she met me and a few IDS staffers at Nick’s English Hut for a brew.\nI haven’t decided what I’ll write on Ernie Pyle’s desk drawer in May– It’s just an honor being a part of this great tradition.