School this year began on September 10, 2014, and for the first month, I was covered in an odd and distinctive odor, which evoked a grandfather’s study or an antique bookstore. Despite my friends’ wrinkled noses, I fully immersed myself in the scent that came from flipping through one hundred years’ worth of issues of the Kent News. To go over every single printed issue from the past century required strenuous and delicate work (and a lot of patience from Ms. Armstrong, the School’s archivist). With the help of many willing staffers and editors, however, sorting out the articles that best exemplified the papers 100-year history came to seem a lot less like work and more like a thrilling journey.

Examining the older issues, I was immediately bewildered – the News of old looks very little like the News today. The first issue, published on October 14, 1914, and reprinted on this page, was a weekly publication of four pages, three columns, and no pictures. Limited events, such as football games and Father Sill’s chapel talks, were covered. The Cauldron, now a separate annual magazine, was often included in the early issues as a pictorial and literary supplement. And, since it was printed on 8” x 12” newsprint, the first issue was no bigger than the New Yorker magazine. Many other changes, from the evolution of the masthead to the evolution of the dress styles, were a lot of fun to see.

Despite these changes, the spirit of the News has remained consistent. For every issue, the staff chronicled the changes, improvements, and evolution of life at Kent. Whenever events – both big and small, both on-campus and off- – occurred, the News was there. Student writers and edited reacted to agendas specific to Kent, such as dress code and seniority, while others responded to international and national news, such as President Carter’s election and Winston Churchill’s policies. Such efforts are, according to Father Schell, “a record of how Kent has evolved as a community.” The Kent News has been serving as “a link and vehicle” between the students, alumni, parents, and grandparents, says Father Schell, “chronicling not only the daily life, but also the accomplishments within the Kent community.”

Doing justice to that history in this centennial issue was a daunting task, since, for each of the paper’s 100 years, there are hundreds of articles and photographs to consider. In the end, we decided to offer as diverse, fun, and accurate an account of the paper’s history as possible, even though there were articles we discovered which were very hard to let go of. For those interested in a more complete picture of the paper’s history, we encourage you to visit the John Gray Park Library, where every issue of the paper is meticulously archived.

As the Kent News take steps towards the next century, the fundamental values of the News will remain the same, even as we prepare for a major shift in the way we reach our readers: we are thrilled to announce that this year we celebrate not just the past of the News but also the future, as we move to being a primarily on-line publication. The News will now have “timeliness, freshness, flexibility, and responsiveness that the paper format did not provide,” says Ms. Catherine O’Dwyer, who has served as faculty advisor to the News for 8 years. Ms. O’Dwyer expects that “being online will make it possible to immediately and accurately report on what happens at Kent School.” New doors will also open in terms of use of color and different media, as well as virtually unlimited space for longer and more diverse articles. Ms. O’Dwyer says that, “The News’s transition to an online format represents a tremendous opportunity for reinvigorating the paper; it will allow us to honor the strong journalistic tradition of the past while taking advantage of all that technology can now offer us.”

For the past century, the Kent News has upheld a fundamental value of reporting what is true to the community. The shift to an online format is not a shift in such thinking, but rather a step forward in our ability to tell the stories that the Kent Community has come to enjoy.

On behalf of all of this year’s staff, I thank you for your continued support of our efforts, and I hope you will enjoy – as much as we did – this journalistic history of both Kent and its paper.