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About the Orient
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General Information
The Bowdoin Orient is a student
newspaper serving the entire Bowdoin community. The paper has
an on-campus distribution of over 2000, and is mailed off-campus to
several hundred subscribers. The paper is distributed free-of-charge at
various locations on campus, including the student union, several classroom
buildings, the admissions office, the dining halls, and the libraries. Published
on Fridays, 24 times a year, the Orient is read by students and their families,
faculty, staff, alumni, off-campus subscribers, prospective students, and campus visitors.
History of the Orient
The Bowdoin Orient was established in 1871 as Bowdoin
College's newspaper and literary magazine. Originally issued bi-weekly, it has been
a weekly since April, 1899. It is considered to be the oldest continuously-published
college weekly in the U.S., which means that it has been in publication every academic
year that Bowdoin has been in session since it began publishing weekly (other college
weeklies stopped printing during certain war years).
In the beginning, the Orient was laid out in a smaller
magazine format, and included literary material such as poems and
fiction alongside its news. In 1897, the literary society formed its own publication,
The Quill, and the Orient has since primarily focused on reporting news. In 1921, the Orient
moved from the magazine format to a larger broadsheet layout and has changed between
broadsheet and tabloid sizes frequently.
In 1912, The Bowdoin Publishing Company was established
as the formal publisher of the Orient, and remained independent of the College
for many years while using college facilities and working with faculty-member advisers.
The Bowdoin Publishing Company was a legal, non-profit corporation in the State of Maine
for many years (at least from 1968 to 1989), though it was most likely an independent
corporation since its inception. In recent years, the Orient printed with the presses of
the Brunswick Times Record, though switched to using Central Maine Papers (publisher of The
Kennebec Journal) in 2005 and increased the number of full-color pages per issue from two to four.
The Orient building has its own archives,
with issues dating back to 1873, but it is missing several periods of time.
The Hawthorne-Longfellow Library has a nearly complete archive of past Orient
issues, both in print and on microform. Virtually all print issues are available
from 1871 to the present in Special Collections and Archives. Bound copies from
1871 to 1921 can be found in the periodicals section of the library. Microform
is available for issues 1921 to the present, and can be accessed at any time.
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