ABOUT THE SHORTHORN

In print since 1919... Online since 1997...

Years before "UT" preceded the "A," years before there was a Longhorn in the family, there was The Shorthorn. No relation, thanks. 

In 1919, cadets at Texas A&M-linked Grubbs Vocational College (one of the University of Texas at Arlington's eight names since 1895) needed a handle for their fledgling literary/humor magazine. With a $2.50 prize from the dean as incentive, the ensuing contest yielded such poetic sallies as KornKob, Swat News, Horse Sense magazine, Grubworm and Tool. In a three-ballot runoff, Shorthorn swamped GVC Shots and Thistle.

The first issue — 48 pages with a bull in a bull's-eye for a cover — appeared in April 1919. The publication came out monthly in a 6-inch by 9-inch format. Its first newsroom masqueraded as a wide spot in the hallway leading to the adviser's office. The area on the third floor of Ransom Hall measured 11 feet by 7 feet. 

From 1976 to 1994, Student Publications filled the third floor and half of the second in the building named for its most celebrated early-day tenant, the school's English department chairman, newspaper adviser and baseball coach, Professor W.A. Ransom. In good times and bad, the paper has thrived despite the world wars, the Depression, threats — the wife of one former president called The Shorthorn a cult — ice storms, flooded pipes, electrical blackouts and debilitating attacks within the student staff of transient hormonal surge. On a campus noted for change, The Shorthorn remains one of the oldest traditions, rivaled only by the Sam Houston Rifles drill team. It went daily in 1977, following stints as a biweekly and a weekly.

Along the way, it also managed to win the country's most prestigious college journalism awards and move six times — to an old house on West Third Street; to University Center; to Preston Hall; to a shotgun temporary structure behind Ransom (where the darkroom and unisex bathroom were the same); back to Ransom in 1976 after a wall-to-wall renovation of the building. 

In May 1994 those rowdy newspaper people relocated for the last time (surely) into personalized new quarters on the University Center lower level, which is to say basement, in the campus' former libation headquarters, which is to say bar. Doesn't look like a bar. Looks like a newsroom, tastefully functional, 500 fewer square feet but so well-designed and -implemented by university craftsmen that efficiency has escalated. Did you keep the brass rail at the bar?, Shorthorn alumni ask. Only in your memory, comes the reply. 

To  the print version of The Shorthorn we've added worldwide distribution via the Internet (www.uta.edu/shorthorn). But at the heart of it all, it's still The Shorthorn.

Our goal is to publish the best possible newspaper daily for the UTA community, believing that an informed community makes good decisions. We're proud of awards we've earned in the past. 

They've given us our reputation. But those awards didn't come easy, and they are the past's. We welcome you, with your promise of hard work and dogged attention to journalism's highest standards, to help carry The Shorthorn's tradition into another generation.