The Lantern: End of an era — and a new home

Guest Author
Fri, 08 Aug 2025 18:20:12 +0000
Campus

By William Moody

The phone rang.

As Emma Wozniak, editor-in-chief of The Lantern, was leaving a Thursday morning class earlier this year, an Ohio State spokesperson called her with breaking news.

Wozniak spent the next 10 hours in the conference room of The Lantern, organizing journalists, transcribing interviews, securing photos, editing articles and posting on social media.

Like any other day, she was a student journalist, but today, she felt like a real journalist, too.

Wozniak is one of countless students who have learned the reporting trade working for? The Lantern.

Since 1924 — 101 years ago — the Lantern newsroom has been on the second floor of a building located at 242 W. 18th Avenue. Beginning in 1974, when the original building at that site was gutted, remodeled and enlarged with a third floor, the Lantern newsroom continued to operate on the second floor — from Room 271, versus Room 216 in the old building. But whether you view The Lantern’s current second floor home as literally 51 years old or figuratively 101, it’s now about to change.

One floor below, a new newsroom is opening today that will carry on the tradition of developing the next generation of young journalists. It leaves behind the rich history of? Room 271 in the Journalism Building and its predecessor.

As an independent news laboratory, The Lantern teaches students like Wozniak the theory of journalism and gives them the opportunity to practice their craft.?

“Hundreds or thousands of people read on our website in a week, and that is not something that should be taken for granted or a responsibility that should be taken lightly,” Wozniak said.

Over the course of 101 years, the Lantern newsroom has evolved to meet the needs of an ever-changing profession. In 1974, the reconstructed newsroom was enlarged and included technological innovations such as electric typewriters. There were separate rooms for wire service machines, a photo lab, and a room affectionately known as “the morgue.” It was a small room off to the side of the main newsroom where a library of past editions and articles from The Lantern were stored for future writers to review.

When John Oller, class of ’79, joined The Lantern, the newsroom reeked of cigarette smoke, which was only overpowered by a symphony of key clacks as students rapidly typed away.

The sound came from young journalists hunched over the two dozen thick black metal typewriters, sitting atop two large islands of desks in the center of the newsroom, only interrupted by the occasional need to remove the paper and make a correction.

The process didn’t start there, though, Oller said; it began in the morgue, where reporters researched prior stories on the same subject.

“You didn’t have the internet so that you could Google things. You had to look them up in the morgue or an encyclopedia or the World Almanac,” Oller said.?

Once the story was created, interviews completed and ink was on the page, students would take their draft over to a horseshoe-shaped desk, where they were distributed to the copy editors and revised for print.

Spending 40 to 50 hours a week in the newsroom, Oller said the room became a second home where late nights were fueled by bad coffee and missed meals made up by vending machine snacks.

“It was like a full-time job,” Oller said. “Sometimes that meant you had to miss classes, you worked very late, and everything was done in the newsroom. You didn’t work remotely from your dorm or anywhere, so you had to go into the newsroom physically.”

The newsroom has always been a second home for the journalists of The Lantern.

Former Lantern editor-in-chief Chris Davey, a class of ’94 graduate, said that he basically lived there, even spending his Sundays in Room 271 to get the Monday print ready.

“Sunday through Thursday, if you weren’t in class, you were in the Lantern newsroom until about midnight every day,” Davey said. “Saturday was the one day that we would typically stay away from the newsroom.”

When Davey was a part of The Lantern, typewriters had been replaced by somewhat crude word processors (by today’s standards) called video display terminals (“VDTs”)? Later they would be replaced by Macintosh computers sitting at every reporter’s desk.

The Lantern was just beginning to put its news content online during Davey’s era, carefully selecting the most important headlines and stories to share on a private Ohio State computer network with few visitors.

“It was just a novelty experiment, because the internet didn’t exist like it does today,” Davey said. “The thing I remember about that was that even then, you had a sense it was going to be a game-changer in the future.”

He was right. The innovation would go on to fundamentally change journalism. The biggest change was the migration to a primarily online news format, said Lantern Faculty Adviser and Student Media Director Spencer Hunt. “Now we’re a digital news organization that publishes a [print] newspaper once a week,” Hunt said.?

Shortly before Hunt became adviser in 2015, the newsroom actually shrunk when a wall was built to separate it from the Lantern TV studio, which took up the back half of Room 271 where the paste-up room used to be. (The newsroom portion was renumbered as Room 275.) As a result, traditional newsroom operations became rather cramped.

But the new newsroom opening today is bigger and better. It includes a larger main newsroom, a new, larger faculty adviser’s office, a teaching studio and editing lab, a new and bigger Lantern TV and media room and podcasting studio, a new green-screen room for video and film post-production, new offices, a meeting room, and a trophy case that will line the entrance to the space.?One of the two new state-of-the-art video production studios will be shared with the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts.

The entrance to the new space is in the main lobby of the building, giving The Lantern a more visible profile on campus. A glass wall on one side of the new Lantern TV studio allows people inside the building to see what the video producers are doing in the studio, and cameras facing the anchors can capture any activity in the newsroom behind them. Thus, visitors inside are able to view activity in much the same way that tourists in New York City can watch the Today Show’s hosts from the outside through a large glass window in Rockefeller Center.

A mural graces the far wall at the back of the newsroom. A large Lantern logo is along the wall. A separate logo at the end of the corridor running from the front entrance to the video studio — a circular symbol with the familiar Lantern image inside it — can be halo lit. It will be one of the first things people see from the lobby when they walk in the front door.?

Although she will not get to experience the new newsroom, Wozniak, who graduated in the spring, said what is most important is not the updated space or equipment, but rather the opportunity for the Lantern newsroom to be a visible part of the community.

“I love our [old] newsroom upstairs, but it is very tiny, and people don’t know where it is,” Wozniak said. “I think that’s important for our community — being in touch with our audience and making sure they know we exist.”

And so a new day dawns today — a new space to house The Lantern for the next 50 or 100 years. While the technology, physical space and names may change, the stories in the paper remain remarkably similar over time: Student fees. Traffic and parking. Crime and safety. Dorm conditions. Demonstrations and protests. The Greek system. Occasional scandals. Not to mention our sports teams’ thrills of victory and agonies of defeat. Since 1881 — even before the first Orton Hall bell chimes tolled — The Lantern has seen and reported it all.

We can never lose our precious sense of continuity with the past — or our fervent hopes for a bright future. Time and change will surely show . . .

Please join us in wishing The Lantern well.

Editor’s Note: William “Will” Moody graduated with a B.A. in Strategic Communication in May 2025. He is the owner of Wmoody Media, a freelance photography and media company.