The Chronicle of Higher Education is an American newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals, including staff members and administrators. A subscription is required to read some articles.

The Chronicle is based in Washington, D.C., and is a major news service covering U.S. academia. It is published every weekday online and appears weekly in print except for every other week in May, June, July, and August and the last three weeks in December. In print, The Chronicle is published in two sections: Section A with news, section B with job listings, and The Chronicle Review, a magazine of arts and ideas. It also publishes Arts & Letters Daily.

History

In 1957, Corbin Gwaltney, founder and editor of the alumni magazine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, joined with editors from magazines of several other colleges and universities for an editorial project to investigate issues in higher education in perspective. The meeting occurred on the day the first Sputnik circled the Earth, October 4, 1957, so the Moonshooter project was formed as a supplement on higher education for the college magazines. The college magazine editors promised 60 percent of one issue of their magazine to finance the supplement. The first Moonshooter Report was 32 pages long and titled American Higher Education, 1958. They sold 1.35 million copies to 15 colleges and universities. By the project's third year, circulation was over three million for the supplement.

In 1959, Gwaltney left Johns Hopkins Magazine to become the first full-time employee of the newly created Editorial Projects for Education (EPE), which was later renamed "Editorial Projects in Education", starting in an office in his apartment in Baltimore and later moving to an office near the Johns Hopkins campus in Baltimore. He realized that higher education would benefit from a news publication.

Although it was meant for those involved in higher education, one of the founding ideas was that the general public had very little knowledge about what was going on in higher education and the real issues involved. Later on in its history, advertising would be accepted, especially for jobs in higher education, and this would allow the newspaper to be financially independent. EPE sold the Chronicle to the editors for $2,000,000 in cash and $500,000 in services that Chronicle would provide to EPE.

Awards

Over the years, the paper has been a finalist and winner of several journalism awards. In 2005, two special reports – on diploma mills and plagiarism – were selected as finalists in the reporting category for a National Magazine Award. It was a finalist for the award in general excellence every year from 2001 to 2005.

In 2005, its reporter Carlin Romano was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

In 2007, The Chronicle won an Utne Reader Independent Press Award for political coverage. In its award citation, Utne called The Chronicle Review "a fearless, free-thinking section where academia's best and brightest can take their gloves off and swing with abandon at both sides of the increasingly predictable political divide." The New Republic, The Nation, Reason, and The American Prospect were among the finalists in the category.

In 2012, reporter Jack Stripling won a special citation for "beat reporting", from the Education Writers Association (EWA), as well as sharing a second-place Single-Topic News, Series or Feature award with Tom Bartlett and other Chronicle reporters for their seven-part series, "College for a Few". Brad Wolverton, earned a special citation for Investigative Reporting, "Investigating College Athletics".

In 2018, Bartlett and Nell Gluckman were named as the 2017 Runners Up in the Outstanding Higher Education Journalism category, presented by the United Kingdom's Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) Education Journalism Awards.

References

  • Baldwin, Joyce, "Chronicling Higher Education for Nearly Forty Years", Carnegie Results, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Winter, 2006 issue
  • Baldwin, Patricia L., Covering the Campus : The History of The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1966–1993, Denton, Texas : University of North Texas Press, 1995.
  • Connell, Christopher; Yarrington, Roger, "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about: The Chronicle of Higher Education", Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, Vol. 15, No. 8 (November – December 1983), pp. 12–24, 27, journal published for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching by Heldref Publications