He was a man who knew how to run newspapers.  

In his lifetime Frank Gannett, class of 1898, amassed a publishing group of 22 newspapers in 18 cities. He owned four radio stations and three television stations.  He founded Gannet Co., Inc., today America’s largest newspaper group with 95 daily newspapers and a combined circulation of 7.7 million.

The man who carved out an empire in America’s newspaper world began with the Cornell Daily Sun.  After serving for a year on the Editorial Board, however, he lost an election for Business Manager and quit The Sun, taking a position with Alumni News after graduation.

Author of the popular and award-winning children’s books Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White ’21 was the editor-in-chief of The Sun during his senior year at Cornell. Nicknamed Andy by his fellow staffers at The Sun for having the same last name as Cornell’s co-founder Andrew Dickson White, Elwyn Brooks White went on after his graduation to write for the The Seattle Times and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer for several years.

Richard “Dick” Schaap ’55 is well remembered as one of America’s best loved sports journalists. "He has walked with kings, ridden shotgun with legends, dined with the power elite and gotten drunk with some of the biggest sports stars of our time,” wrote fellow sportwriter Mitch Albom. “And what he comes away with is not a swelled head, an inflated sense of his own importance, or a need to lecture the world with an opinion much richer than ours. What he comes away with are stories." Those stories were not just about sports figures, however: in the 1960s, he covered civil rights murders, the Los Angeles riots and the funeral of Malcolm X. He interview subjects ranged from Muhammad Ali and Tom Wolfe to Bobby Fischer, who described him as a “father figure.” Schaap loved people, and loved telling their stories: of his 33 books, many were co-written biographies of some of the most influential sports figures of the day.

American anti-war novelist and satirist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ’44 was born in Indianapolis on  Armistice Day, November 11, 1922, almost prophetic for the anti-war author. Even in high school, Vonnegut was an adept writer, earning an editorship that helped land him at Cornell University. As a student at Cornell, he served as The Sun’s associate editor in his second year before nearly being asked by Cornell to leave because of his lackluster academic performance.