The press as institution: the Press Club, the halls, and the archives

1907–2024

The craft's own house: The documentary trace of the press as an institution in South Bend is thin, and this entry prints it at its true size. Howard's 1907 chapter on the city's fraternal and social organizations lists "the Press Club" among the clubs of the city — one documented mention, at survey size, of the journalists' own organization in the two-paper era. The honors of the craft that touch the city stand in the records of the halls: Schuyler Colfax, the Register's editor, stands in the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame; Joe Boland stands in the Indiana Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame and, from 2024, the Indiana Football Hall of Fame; and F.A. Miller's charter membership in the Associated Press of 1900 ties the Tribune to the founding of the national news cooperative itself.

What the city's press finally became, institutionally, is an archive. When the Tribune was sold in 2019 it gave its photograph archive — as many as a million photographs, the finding aid measuring twenty-one cabinets and ninety-four boxes dated 1937 to 1999 — to the St. Joseph County Public Library's Local & Family History department, where more than ten thousand negatives have been digitized and the collection opened to the public on Michiana Memory on 2 September 2021; the Libraries chapter carries that gift whole. In April 2024 the Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame announced the acquisition of the complete digital archive of the Tribune from NewsBank — full-page scans of every available issue from 1873 to 2018 — closing the gap in a run that had been reachable only on scattered microfilm and recent text; the university's announcement names the paper, plainly, as "the city's newspaper of record since its early days," and the University Archives holds the firm's printed centennial material, the front pages of its first hundred years, 1872–1972. The press that began with a hand press in an oxcart's freight ends its institutional record as the most completely preserved account of the city that the city possesses.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), fraternal-organizations chapter — the Press Club among the city's clubs.
2. The Libraries chapter of this record — the Tribune photograph archive gift of 2019, its measure and dates, the digitization, and the Michiana Memory opening of 2 September 2021.
3. Hesburgh Libraries, announcement of 2 April 2024 — the NewsBank archive, 1873–2018, and the "newspaper of record" statement; University of Notre Dame Archives, ArchivesSpace — the South Bend Tribune (Firm) printed material: front pages 1872–1972 and the centennial edition.