The Carroll News finds the hidden truth in its murky 100-year history
By Mackenzie Clinger
It is a Thursday morning, a month into the new semester and you are well into your regular routine. You go to your 8 a.m. class, swing by Einstein’s for a bagel and pick up a copy of The Carroll News to catch up with the campus happenings. You pick up the paper and see the same bold title with the bell tower trademark printed across the top of the front page. But directly underneath you spot a change: “The News that Keeps us Onward On.”
Until last week, the slogan of The Carroll News read, “The Student Voice of John Carroll University since 1925.” This legacy of student-run news had been celebrated on campus for 93 years by students and faculty alike. The JCU community was proud to trace its students’ passion for journalism back to the 1920s.
However, this all changed when Brent Brossmann, an associate professor in the Communication department and adviser of the debate team, searched through online archives of The Carroll News and discovered conflicting evidence.
“I found the 1925 editions online and wondered why they are listed as volume 7,” Brossmann explained. “Since the 1925 editions are volume 7, and the 1926 editions are volume 8, it suggests that there should be six years prior to the 1925 editions that are lost.”
Over the summer, Brossmann took this discovery to Margaret Finucane, head of the Communication department, and Carrie Buchanan, adviser for The Carroll News and an assistant professor in the Communication department. Neither Finucane nor Buchanan had an answer to this inquiry.
Without a clear answer, Brossmann gathered evidence from the first 1925 issue of The Carroll News and formulated his own theory. “I am thoroughly convinced that we claim 1925 as the start because we don’t have any newspapers older than that,” Brossmann stated at the time. “I am also thoroughly convinced that there should be six years of previous newspapers somewhere, although they are likely destroyed by now. If I am correct, the original Carroll News was published in 1919.”
first pages of the first 1925 issue and found no mention that the paper was new or that this was the very first edition. Additionally, he noted that the paper already had a very impressive amount of advertisements, something he observed to be uncommon in a brand new publication. Finally, he noted that there are other gaps of papers missing in the archives.
“We know there are a lot of missing papers,” Brossmann stated. “For example, our collection has a total of six papers from the years 2001 to 2006. So, the archives are clearly inadequate. It makes perfect sense that we simply don’t have the first six years of papers,” he opined.
This sparked a quest to solve the mystery among The Carroll News staff, to either confirm Brossmann’s theory or to find the first six volumes of the paper. Editor-in-Chief Olivia Shackleton, ’20, and Campus Editor Mackenzie Clinger, ’20, set out to find the answer by reading through the same first 1925 edition.
After a careful read of the six-columned, eight-page edition, Clinger and Shackleton discovered a crucial hint on page three.
In a very small article near the bottom of the page titled “Paper Features Six Column Size,” it is announced, “At a meeting of The Carroll News staff on Saturday, Sept. 26, it was decided to alter the size of the paper. The old Ignatian afforded small chance for much variety because of its extremely limited space accommodations.”
This line led Shackleton and Clinger to believe that The Carroll News might be connected to another publication called the Ignatian.
On page four, at the very bottom, in the same issue, the editor listed a suggestion that “the students at Carroll save their new copies of The Carroll News and place them with their copies of the old Ignatian and have them bound for future enjoyment.”
To Shackleton and Clinger, this was solid proof that The Carroll News was likely once called the Ignatian. To confirm their theory, Shackleton contacted Mina Chercourt, interim head of collections and digital narratives at JCU. Chercourt confirmed that such a publication existed and forwarded the Ignatian archives to Shackleton.
Clinger noted that the volume numbers of the two publications matched up perfectly. Although all the 1919 volume one editions were missing, volumes two through six ran from 1920 through 1924. The Carroll News picked up with volume seven in 1925.
This was enough evidence for Shackleton and Clinger to conclude that they had solved the mystery. The Carroll News was a continuation of the Ignatian, with the change in name possibly accounting for the University’s name change from St. Ignatius College to John Carroll University in 1923. Therefore, it is true that The Carroll News officially started in 1925, but it can trace its roots back to the 1919 Ignatian.
Brossmann reviewed the evidence and agreed wholeheartedly with the conclusion. When asked what this new discovery meant for the Carroll community, Brossman stated, “That depends entirely on what you want to celebrate. If the goal is to celebrate the birth of The Carroll News, then folks have been right all these years and in fact, The Carroll News was born in 1925. But I do think it’s important to note that the journalism folks here at John Carroll have been producing a newspaper since 1919. So if you want to celebrate the history of student journalism at John Carroll, then you would start in 1919. If you just want to celebrate the naming of The Carroll News, then you would start in 1925.”
