While the Friends of The Stanford Daily were officially formed as a 501 c(3) non-profit corporation in California in 1991, its genesis goes back to 1973.

The Stanford Daily had just become an independent non-profit corporation in response to The Stanford Daily v. Zurcher 1971 lawsuit. The plaintiffs, including Felicity Barringer, Hall Daily, Richard Lee Greathouse, Ed Kohn, Robert Letterman, Fred Mann and Steven G. Ungar, formed a task force to determine the best course for The Daily organization in light of the police search and resulting legal action. It was determined that The Daily should place some distance between itself and the University so as to better protect its rights as an independent news gathering organization.

A group of the first editors under the new independent Daily decided that The Daily might need a strong alumni group to help the paper in the future, if needed. Charlie Hoffman, Jim Wascher, Christy Wise, Vlae Kershner, Rich Jaroslovsky, Don Tollefson, Bob Bacon and others began organizing alumni dinners the night after Big Game, beginning in 1975. For the first seven years, banquets were held in San Francisco for games at Cal and at the Farm for home games. Since the early 1990s, banquets have been held only for Stanford-Cal home games. Attendance is in the 100-175 range and Daily staff from the 1930’s to the present come together to share stories and listen to interesting programs. Harry Press and Elna Tymes have been instrumental over the years in organizing the banquet and tracking down lost Daily staffers.

With the Friends gaining momentum, the formal organization was created in 1991 and The Stanford Daily pledged $100,000 over four years to seed the organization. For the first time, an appeal was made to alumni, and they responded with nearly $10,000 in gifts. By 1994, the Friends had $110,000 under management and were contributing funds to The Daily each year for writing workshops and trips to educational seminars. In the late 1990s, The Daily became very profitable and made large contributions to the Friends. That and a strong stock market have brought the Friends’ assets to $1,064,000 as of January 2002.

For the first time since their inception, the Friends may serve their anticipated purpose, as The Daily will lose money this year and may need financial assistance. The longer-term challenge for the Friends is to help The Daily with building a new facility in the next five years. The University’s Master Plan calls for the razing of the Storke Student Publications Building to make way for more engineering facilities.

The Friends have a Board of Directors with seven members. More information can be found on the directors page on this site.

The Friends have five funded scholarships in place. More information is available on the scholarships page on this site.

We encourage Daily alumni to communicate with us through this Web site. Daily staffers have received a lot of help from individual Friends over the past 17 years through informal writing workshops, networking for summer and full-time jobs and inspiring speeches at staff lunches. The history of our little group has shown how much we have accomplished together. Hopefully, this Web site will be a springboard to even greater communication, cooperation and accomplishments.