By Waleeja Chaudhry
Trinity Times Correspondent

Trinity Washington University launched its digital news site Trinity Times Feb. 1, 2023, following a nearly 13-year absence of a student news publication.

The original Trinity Times began publication Feb. 18, 1926 and ran uninterrupted until it ceased printing in 2010.

The void in having the students report on the issues of the day has been awkward, said Patricia McGuire, president of the university, who was also the editor of Trinity Times when she was a student at then Trinity College.

Relaunching Trinity Times as a 21^st century digital platform is an important step for the university, McGuire said, adding that it not only offers the school’s student journalists an uncensored platform, but it also provides credible news that impacts the entire Trinity community.

The new Trinity Times will offer news in the traditional article format, as well as digital content in the form of video and podcasting, all while engaging the wider audience in social media, said Chaz Muth, director of the university’s new multimedia newsroom.

During its original 84-year run, Trinity Times was a symbol of intellectualism and community, members of Trinity Washington University’s faculty and staff observed.

Leadership at the university believe the Trinity Times revival will resurface these principles for the current student body.

For decades the original Trinity Times conveyed relevant topics and strengthen the student community.

Sister Mary Hayes, a woman religious with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, who was the college advisor to the student newspaper from 1967 to 1994, began working in Trinity’s history department in 1967 and was assigned to be the faculty advisor to the student newspaper that same year, working with the student editors, providing suggestions, but never imposing censorship.

She also conducted technical journalism workshops at the start of each semester for the student journalists.

Until 1994, the Trinity Times was editorially independent of the school, had its own budget and the staff worked out of an office in the basement of the Main Building, before moving to Cuvilly Hall for the last two decades of its existence.

During its run at Trinity, the newspaper never had trouble recruiting staff members, said Sister Mary, who became the university’s archivist following her 2014 retirement.

Trinity’s archives store every issue of the original Trinity Times, which published about eight times each year from 1926 to 2010.

Many students found the newspaper to be the nucleus of their college experience, not just for their journalistic endeavors but in finding a sense of community on campus, Sister Mary said.

Those student journalists covered a host of controversial issues throughout the decades, she said, and added that some of those topics were at odds with the university’s founding religious community, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.

The students once arranged to put information regarding different birth control methods and abortion facilities within the pages of Trinity Times, covered the civil rights protests during the 1960s and offered advocates for racial justice and LGBTQ rights a place to sleep while they were demonstrating in Washington, something that enraged some of the school’s alumni, Sister Mary said.

It’s her hope that the new Trinity Times will continue the rich tradition of courageous student journalism employed in the previous version of the publication, with the tools the 21^st century has to offer.

The creation of the new multimedia newsroom was made possible from a 2022 grant given to the university by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation.