The DTH has served the University community since 1893, first as the weekly Tar Heel, an arm of the Athletic Association, and then as a daily beginning in 1929 under a broader University publications board.

The weekly Tar Heel was born at a time that the university was growing at an unparalleled speed, quadrupling its enrollment from 1891 to 1893. The campus, then 376 students, had but one outlet for its news appetite, the University Magazine. The Athletic Association decided that something should be done more frequently to fill the need for campus news. (A weekly known during its one year of existence as The Chapel Hillian had failed at gaining a foothold as the campus newspaper). The association founded The Tar Heel on Feb. 23, 1893 as a four-page weekly tabloid, financed through advertising revenue and subscriptions -- students paid an annual subscription of $2.50, or $0.05 per issue.

The seven-member editorial team of the first Tar Heel staff pasted the newspaper together in a small upstairs storeroom in a house next to the Old Methodist Church at 201 E. Rosemary St. The paper grew in size to six pages printed on wider columns and increased in frequency of publication. Then-editor Thomas Wolfe wrote in the June 5, 1920 edition that the paper would soon begin publishing twice each week. The twice-weekly publication schedule started that September.

The Tar Heel slowly moved away from the control of the Athletic Association and completely changed its affiliation in 1923, officially transferring supervisory control to the Student Publications Union Board, which oversaw it and Carolina Magazine, the Carolina Buccaneer and the Yackety Yak. All students were automatically charged an annual $5.50 publications fee. Circulation quadrupled inside of a year and the newspaper started publishing three times a week in 1925. The Tar Heel began publishing a summer edition in 1927 (though the edition would not become commonplace until the 1940s).

The movement for a daily Tar Heel began in January 1929. A financing proposal was put to a campus-wide vote, which passed 666 to 128 on Feb. 7, 1929. The paper began publishing every day except Monday. The Daily Tar Heel moved from New West to the basement of the Alumni Building and then to Graham Memorial. The staff of the newspaper and its credibility among national dailies increased almost unchecked until World War II. The war proved unkind to the DTH, which scaled back publication to two times a week from March 1943 until the end of the war. After three years of editors being constantly uprooted by the call of military duty, the DTH returned to daily publication on Feb. 5, 1946 with the goal to become ?the greatest college newspaper in the world.? The university ceased door-to-door delivery of the paper in the 1960s in favor of generally accessible campus boxes. The paper soldiered through the turbulent era and increased page counts thanks to a $100,000 student activity fee allocation. Guaranteed financing would not be so easy for long. The paper was entrenched in a lengthy court battle in the 1970s against campus politicians who wanted to affect the editorial content of the paper by threatening its financial stability. At least some of the conflict was stymied in 1977 when the paper was constitutionally guaranteed at least 16 percent of student activity fees. The paper also was granted its own independent publication board that year, providing the seeds for the eventual movement toward complete autonomy.

The DTH incorporated its operation in 1989 as a separate educational 501(c)(3) non-profit entity from the University and stopped taking student fee money in 1993, making it completely financially independent for the first time. That also allowed it to change the way the editor was selected from a campus-wide vote to today?s selection process. The paper, an officially recognized student organization, has been housed in the Frank Porter Graham Student Union since 1969 and now pays a facility fee for that privilege.

The DTH employs six full-time professionals in non-editorial functions, and the student editor is vested with final authority over the content of the paper. The editor is selected each April by an independent selection board generated for just that purpose. The paper?s business operations are governed by its own board of directors. At the height of the school year, there are some 75 paid part-time student employees in news, advertising, customer service and production functions and another 100 or more student volunteers.

The paper circulates 20,000 free copies each publishing day during the regular academic year to 181 locations throughout campus, Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Durham, making it the largest community newspaper in the area with an estimated readership of 39,000. It publishes weekly during the summer. Its revenues are all self generated and mostly from retail and national display advertising.

In addition to being one of the largest college dailies in the country, the DTH is also one of the most decorated, winning numerous Associated Collegiate Press Pacemakers and SPJ Mark of Excellence awards in addition to being recognized recently for four straight years as having the outstanding business and advertising staff in the country. Its proud tradition includes many notable alumni of the paper including Charles Kuralt, Lou Harris, Jonathan Yardly, Peter Gammons, Cole Campbell, Peter Wallsten, Mary Junck, Thanasis Cambanis, Rolfe Neill, Hugh Stevens, Larry Keith, Thomas Wolfe, Walter Spearman, Susan Miller Fulton, Alan Murray, Edwin Yoder, Karen Jurgensen, Jonathan Daniels and many others.

The DTH was one of the first newspapers of any kind in the country to publish on the World Wide Web when it posted its first edition in November of 1994. Dailytarheel.com now regularly exceeds 750,000 page views a month.