Photo by Trinity Johnson, Photographer
We’ve made a big fuss this year about our anniversary. We stand proud on the 100th anniversary of The Panther, a century of student journalism at Chapman University.
But, as much as we hate to say it, we have a confession to make.
Initially, we believed that The Panther dated back to 1926, and we planned to celebrate last spring. This did not quite pan out, and our celebration was a quiet, personal one. We concluded that, given the information and documentation we had available, The Panther’s Meow was founded during the 1926-27 academic year. Thus, now would finally be the time to celebrate with pride. The 2026-27 academic year would be irrefutably ours.
Finally, it came time to write our big, celebratory article looking back at the last century of our organization’s reporting.
As we sat down to finish writing it, we received potentially devastating news: according to a newly uncovered tidbit in a 1929 edition of Chapman’s old Ceer Yearbook (that the university permanently stopped publishing in 2019), The Panther’s Meow was, in fact, started in the spring of 1927.
After poring over decades' worth of carefully recovered and delicately preserved back issues of The Panther in Chapman University’s Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections and Archives, this came as a bit of a shock. We decided to bring back the original title of the newspaper, planned a series of centennial stories to run in each section of the paper and were still rocking our (now erroneously printed) 100-year celebratory hoodies.
So, we wondered, are we going to let this new piece of information change our plans?
In a word: no.
Does that make our hullabaloo about turning 100 years old inaccurate? As journalists, we have an honor-bound obligation to bring you factual reporting to the best of our ability. And yet, as our big centennial issue went to press, we decided not to share this information with you all.
Was this a mistake? We have to wonder, because after choosing to go to press anyway, we found our anniversary issue full of issues of its own. A few unfortunate typos, since corrected and properly noted on our website, as well as an unfortunate misprint or two that we’ll leave for you to find yourself, found their way into our celebration. Oversight? Sure, one we take full accountability for. But perhaps something deeper and more arcane as well; a curse, a reckoning for wilfully spreading misinformation to the public. The Elder Gods of Student Journalism, perhaps, have decided to smite us for our misgivings.
But then again, we’ve already had a semester of postponed celebration, and this time we at least hit the right academic year for a centennial. And who knows, maybe Ceer got it wrong back in 1929. The Panther has flubbed its archival system more times than we can count (we dropped volume and issue numbers some time ago for that reason), so this time around, we heartily say “close enough!”