Although West Liberty’s student newspaper, The Trumpet, has seen significant changes over the past 100 years, the newspaper has and continues to be a staple aspect of the university. From 1921 to 2021, student journalists have documented important events throughout the community, campus, the U.S. and the world.

This week we are going back in time to the year 2011. Between the year 1971 — which was covered in last week’s centennial celebration article — and 2011, The Trumpet saw several changes to page numbers, overall layout, specific story sections, as well as the number of archived issues.

In 2011, The Trumpet was advised by former and now retired journalism professor, Tammie Beagle. Spring issues published during the 2010-2011 academic year included eight pages with the only the first page being in color. Fall issues published during the 2011-2012 academic year still included eight pages; however, both the first and eight pages were in full color. Considering no other issue from any year covered this month has been in color nor continually eight pages long, this was a huge achievement for our student-run newspaper.

While the newspaper began to see some sense of story section for hard news, features, opinion and sports in 1971, the content was still a bit disorganized throughout the issues. In 2011 issues, specific pages for specific stories were boldly separated starting with hard news being on page one, “commentary and entertainment” [opinion/editorial pieces] on pages two and three, features on pages four through six [also known as culture in current Trumpets] and Sports on pages eight and ten. If you keep up with Trumpets in the present day, you will notice the layout of specific story sections remains the same with only minor differences.

March 30, 2011 (Volume 94, Issue 9) reported several great additions and updates to the university. Anna Patrick, editor at the time, wrote an article discussing West Liberty introducing a new provost [Dr. Anthony Kroyzis] as well as a Vice President of Human Resources [James Stultz]. Kroyzis replaced Provost Dr. John McCullough reportedly. Page one also included an article by Contributing writer, Chris Parrish, announcing the addition of the West Liberty women’s soccer team. Parrish reported the team was planned to be “headed by Barry Christmas” who remains as head coach today.

In recent years, the library has been able to save and convert Trumpet issues into high-definition PDFs in ways they haven’t been able to with previous Trumpets. Luckily, 2011 was a year with many issues available for viewing in the archives.

2011 issues currently viewable include the following:
· January – one issue
· February, March, April, September, October – four issues
· November – three issues

As reported in the last three weeks, Head of Learning Resources, Katy Zane, began the process of converting each Trumpet issue Elbin Library had on file to high-definition PDFs viewable anytime and anywhere. Recently, the announcement of the new cloud encrypted website MEGA was forwarded to current Trumpet Adviser, Professor Danielle Mehlman Brightwell. However, some of the archives have not been viewable on this website. As a result, Zane is working diligently to resolve the issue and will report back when it is fixed and ready to go. In the meantime, if you are interested in viewing archives of Trumpet newspapers, you can go directly to the library. You can also contact Katy Zane for links to the Google drives at [email protected].

In August 2020, The Trumpet underwent a media convergence process and has switched to a completely digital publishing platform. Current Trumpet staff and interns have been able to produce 16 pages of full content every week, which is a huge milestone for the newspaper and the university. To view certain issues of past Trumpets and all the newest ones, please visit issuu.com/thetrumpetwlu. Celebratory plans for the newspaper’s centennial include the production of a documentary and a coffee table book.

For more information regarding the history of The Trumpet, how to join the current staff or general questions, please email Annalise Murphy at [email protected].