The East Texan will be celebrating its 100th anniversary this coming fall. Started in 1915, The East Texan is a resource students can look to both as a source of information and as a training ground for future work in mass media.

“It serves as a student media; it serves as a forum of expression,” Fred Stewart, faculty advisor for The East Texan since 1993, said. “It’s also the primary means of campus news for students on campus. I don’t think the majority of our students spend the time to read any of the other area newspapers, which don’t get the news events and photos and things like that of campus in those other publications.”

The East Texan has continued to expand despite dwindling resources, particularly with the recent new website. In the coming future, The East Texan is hoping to build a bigger presence and expand further online, especially as more and more individuals begin to get news in that fashion. However, even with the move to online, hard copies of the paper will continue to be produced. The East Texan also plans to begin video work that will accompany the paper each week.

“We just had a section of the newsroom repainted, and we’re going to be ordering a backdrop that has The East Texan on it, so we’re going to start doing some video interviews and so forth to be going online,” Stewart said. “And then we have the magazine, which is being produced predominately now by the reporting classes and then the magazine production class in the summer, so we can essentially have a magazine that is online on a monthly basis.”

With the 100th anniversary this year, Stewart and The East Texan staff are very excited to be honoring this historic commemoration. The East Texan hopes to celebrate this special time with featured stories, involvement with outside media, and an event in the fall. More details on the event will become available in the coming fall. In the meantime, make sure to check out The East Texan every week this semester for the Texan Timehop, a series highlighting special articles, features and pictures from archived editions of the paper.