During Chautauqua’s nine-week summer season, the Daily is a community newspaper distributed six days a week by carriers to subscribers at their homes within and immediately outside the Institution. It is also sold by hawkers on Bestor Plaza each summer morning as well as mailed to subscribers. The newspaper is written, designed and edited at Chautauqua and sent to an off-site printer who returns the finished publication to the Institution for delivery. The newspaper began as the Chautauqua Assembly Daily Herald in 1876, two years after the founding of the Chautauqua Institution. Since then, it has continuously served Chautauquans with information about current events and as the archival record. The newsroom has been a newswriting and reporting training camp for well-known journalists such as investigative reporter Ida Tarbell and current Time magazine executive editor Nancy Gibbs. Fraser Smith wrote, “In a media world virtually atomized by electronic devices, a world taken over by commentators and gossips of every stripe, the Daily gives you well-grounded, comprehensive coverage of ideas you care about at considerable length.”
