100 years of The Manitoban

On November 5, 2014 The Manitoban newspaper joins a prestigious and exclusive club. The official student newspaper of the University of Manitoba published its first paper on November 5, 1914, making it one of Canada’s centennial newspapers.

A student works on laying out The Manitoban / Photo: UM Archives & Special Collections

In November 1914, the Great War was less than five months old, Sir Robert Borden was the prime minister of Canada, and a group of University of Manitoba students decided to create a forum of expression for their classmates.

That first issue explored a range of topics from the fighting in Europe to how many people may safely pile on a freshman during a rugby match.

During the following 100 years many notable Manitobans edited and contributed to the University of Manitoba’s official student newspaper, including: Marshall McLuhan, Israel Asper, Graham Spry (founder of the CBC), Monty Hall, Heather Robertson, Andrew Coyne and Nahlah Ayed.

In 2009, the University of Manitoba’s Archives & Special Collections partnered with The Manitoban to digitally preserve the paper copies of the Manitoban, and began an ambitious project to digitize the entire 90+ year run of the paper, making it a publicly available and completely searchable record of 100 years of student life in Manitoba.

With generous donations from the Asper Foundation, The Winnipeg Foundation, The University of Manitoba Libraries and Archives & Special Collections, the University of Manitoba and countless Manitoba alumni, the paper was made available in November 2013 and the project was fully completed in March 2014. It was soft-launched to the public in summer 2014.

Today, The Manitoban is a completely independent publication, run by the Manitoban Newspaper Publications Corporation. It employs dozens of student journalists and countless more volunteers, and gives many Manitobans their first taste of journalism, leading many to careers in the field.