Campus Newspaper collection

The first campus newspaper was a short-lived production entitled The College World in 1892-1893. After that, students wanted a newspaper that reflected their experience. The first student newspaper of Buena Vista College was probably The College Yell, but there are conflicting accounts and, depending on the source consulted, the lineage varies. It seems most certain that The College Yell was followed by The Commercial Review, although the archives owns no issues of this latter title, and there are suggestions that students may not have been highly involved in this publication. Some accounts discuss The College World as having followed The Commercial Review, but, this has been proven to be untrue. A literary society, the Philomatheans, published a paper, and some accounts point to this as the forerunner of The Tack, but as there are no extant copies, this cannot be proven. In any case, The College Yell published briefly in early 1895, and the first issue of The Tack appeared in December 1895, and although paper issues ceased in 2012, a digital edition continues to be published.

Over the years, publication patterns have varied from weekly to monthly to bi-weekly to only a few issues per year, and occasionally, students published alternative papers with issues often appearing near the first of April.

The newspapers were supported by subscriptions and advertising in the early decades, with subscription rates set at $2.00 per year in the early-1920s and dropping to $1.00 in 1927. Between the summer of 1930 and the fall of 1931 paid subscriptions seem to have ceased. Advertising in The Tack had been plentiful for decades, but in the later decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it significantly decreased.