For 100 years, The Kent Stater has been more than a student newspaper.
It has been a newsroom.
A training ground.
A place where young journalists learned to ask difficult questions, hold leaders accountable, tell stories that mattered and discover their voices.
The student-run newspaper has been published since 1926 under the titles of The Searchlight (2/25/1926-7/22/1926) and The Kent Stater (7/29/1926-present). Since publishing its first issue the paper has documented the history of Kent State University while preparing generations of journalists, photographers, editors, designers and media leaders for careers around the world.
From presidential elections to campus controversies, from moments of tragedy and triumph to the stories unfolding in the lives of students, Stater journalists have been there — reporting history while learning the craft of journalism.
Notable alumni mentioned below are those whose work after Kent State reflects the mission of student journalism.
Seek truth. Tell stories. Serve communities. Make an impact.
Frank Yonkof ’12, The Washington Post
When Frank Yonkof arrived at Kent State, he wasn’t sure where journalism would take him. But he knew where he wanted to start.
During his orientation weekend in 2008, Yonkof picked up The Kent Stater.
“I was just so impressed by the quality of the work,” he says. “I started reading The Stater every day after that.”
By his freshman year, Yonkof had worked up the nerve to apply for a position as a website editor. Over the next several years, he took on additional roles before becoming editor during his senior year.
Along the way, Yonkof found mentors who helped shape both his journalism and his ambitions. Susan Zake, then a lecturer and student media adviser, gave him room to experiment while providing guidance when he needed it.
“She would be there alongside of us experimenting on the website or brainstorming story angles, but at the same time would give us that space to be able to do it on our own,” he says.
Carl Schierhorn, then an associate professor, helped Yonkof see possibilities for his career that he hadn't considered. While helping Yonkof search for internships, Schierhorn crossed out several local publications on his list and wrote “The Washington Post.”
“It had never really occurred to me before that moment of being able to work here where I work now,” Yonkof says. “If it hadn't been for him doing that, I don't think I would've had the confidence to apply here. And so, I'm going to be forever grateful for his guidance there.”
For Yonkof, The Stater was more than an extracurricular activity. It was where he learned what journalism looked like in practice — under deadline, amid uncertainty and with real consequences for the people whose stories appeared in its pages.
“The Stater did such a good job of really preparing you for the actual work of a journalist,” Yonkof says. “It wasn't just a classroom that you were learning about journalism, you were actually doing it every day and you'd make some mistakes and you'd have some wins.”
Those lessons included the questions that define good journalism – Is a headline fair? Is a story angle accurate? Is it ethical to publish a particular photograph?
Yonkof discovered that those questions didn’t disappear when he left Kent.
“They were some of the exact same questions that I discovered years later that I'd be having the same discussions with my colleagues while editing the Washington Post homepage,” he says.
Yonkof’s time at The Stater also taught him the power of journalism to connect major events with the people living through them.
As editor in chief in 2011, he helped oversee a special issue marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The issue included photographs and a deeply personal essay from a Kent State student who had experienced the attacks in Manhattan, as well as an essay from another student about growing up Muslim in the aftermath of 9/11.
The experience changed how Yonkof viewed the role of a university newsroom.
“In our communities we had so many people that were personally impacted by these national events that you see in other places,” he says. “And it was just a really big pleasure at the time to be able to help to tell that story.”
It was a lesson in the importance of looking close to home — even when the story itself was national.
Yonkof interned at The Washington Post between his junior and senior years. The Post hired him after graduation and he began working overnight on the newspaper’s homepage, editing international stories, updating the site during breaking news and sending alerts. He eventually became a daytime homepage editor.
The newsroom experience was particularly meaningful during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the need for reliable information was immediate and profound.
“The whole world was shutting down,” Yonkof recalls. “You were really just giving people essential information that they needed.”
But as digital journalism evolved, so did Yonkof’s career. His work with the Post’s engineering team on an app redesign sparked an interest in product management, and in 2021 he moved from the newsroom to the engineering side of the organization.
Today, as a staff product manager at The Washington Post, Yonkof works with journalists and engineers to determine how news can best reach audiences across digital platforms. His work includes experimenting with new formats, mobile experiences, audio and artificial intelligence.
The tools may be radically different from those available when he was sitting in The Stater newsroom, but Yonkof says the fundamental lesson remains the same.
“Kent [State] did a really good job at teaching you the core of being a journalist of just being able to tell a good story,” he says. “And I think that's something that I use every day in my career now as well.”
That philosophy is especially important as journalism enters the AI era, Yonkof says. He sees enormous potential for technology to help journalists work faster and deliver information in new ways — but not to replace the human work at the heart of journalism.
“I think there's just tools already that people have been using for a while, whether it's transcription tools or translation tools, that sort of thing,” he says. “And I don't see it, at least from my view, ever replacing the human on the ground because no AI is going to go to a town council meeting, for instance, and ask the mayor a follow-up question.”
For Yonkof, that human element — curiosity, judgment and the ability to tell a story that matters to another person — is the part of journalism that technology cannot replace.
And it is the same foundation he began building as a student at The Kent Stater.
Connie Schultz ’79
When Connie Schultz arrived at Kent State from Ashtabula, she felt lost.
The university’s enrollment was roughly the size of her hometown’s entire population. She was the first person in her family to go to college, and the campus initially felt like a sea of strangers.
Then she found The Daily Kent Stater.
“Once I got to the Stater, everything clicked,” Schultz says. “It was my sorority, my fraternity, my every club. It's all I ever wanted to do.”
Schultz had worked on her high school newspaper and served as yearbook editor, but Kent State gave her something different: a newsroom where she could learn journalism by actually practicing it.
She started as a reporter, moved quickly to the copy desk and eventually became editor of The Stater during her senior year.
The newsroom also gave Schultz something she didn't fully understand she was gaining at the time: a voice.
One of her first major decisions as editor was prompted by a change in university policy. Kent State had stopped distributing information about birth control during freshman orientation.
Schultz and her staff responded with a Page One series about contraception.
The newspaper published four consecutive days of stories, accompanied by graphics, illustrations and photographs.
Her father, a working-class man who had sent the first person in his family to college, wasn't impressed.
“He said, ‘This is not why we sent you to Kent State,’” Schultz remembers.
Her answer was immediate.
“I said, ‘Well, this is why I went.’”
It was a revealing moment for the young editor — and an early indication of the kind of journalist she would become.
Schultz was one of only a few women in the newsroom, and she was coming of age as a young woman in the 1970s, when the boundaries around what women could and should do were changing rapidly.
The Stater gave her a place to test those boundaries.
It also gave her an education in Kent State's complicated history.
In 1979, Schultz had a photograph taken at an alumni event in which four members of her staff held targets. She hadn't realized they would be in the photograph until afterward. To Schultz, the targets represented the four students killed during the May 4, 1970, shootings.
The university's response was telling.
The photograph was thrown away, Schultz says, because a university director did not want alumni to see it. She retrieved it from the trash.
“I love having that picture,” she says. “Partly for the memory of how much it aggravated some people in charge.”
By then, the May 4 anniversary remained a major national media event, and Schultz had begun stringing for The New York Times while still a student.
The experience taught her another lesson: Think bigger.
As an undergraduate, she would tell herself that she was writing for The New York Times even when she was writing for the Stater. Later, she would write for the Plain Dealer and freelance for national publications. Eventually, she would actually write for The Times.
“I was always writing for the New York Times,” she says. “I wanted to think of it that way because I wanted to set my sights up here.”
Her time at the Stater also taught her something more basic — and more important.
She learned that people would talk to her.
One day, an editor asked Schultz to try to reach a county sheriff who wasn't returning calls about a controversial issue. Schultz eventually got through and came back with a lengthy interview.
When editors gathered around the story, they couldn't figure out how she had gotten the sheriff to say so much.
“How did you get him to say all this?” one asked.
“I said, ‘I just asked him questions,’” Schultz remembers.
Another editor pointed at her and said, “Look at her. Wouldn't you trust her with everything?”
Schultz laughs about it now.
“I look harmless,” she says. “It’s been my secret power.”
But what looked like a natural ability was also becoming a professional skill.
Schultz credits two Kent State professors, Kathleen “Kitty” Endres and Fred Endres, with helping her understand that journalism wasn't simply something she could dabble in.
Kitty confronted her after Schultz received a poor grade on a story.
“You can continue to be entertaining in class and you can be popular,” Schultz remembers Kitty telling her, “or you can become one of the best journalists Kent State has ever produced. And it's up to you.”
It was exactly what Schultz needed to hear.
Later, after a difficult experience in newswriting, Schultz decided she would switch her major to public relations.
Fred Endres wasn't having it.
“He slammed the desk and he said, ‘The hell you did,’” Schultz recalls. “He walked me right back over to the dean's office and made me change it back to news.”
Then he told her something she had never heard before.
“Don't be a wimp,” Schultz remembers. “You're not weak. You just gotta learn how to do this. This is what you were born to do.”
The two professors, she says, “tag teamed” in raising her into the journalist she hoped to become.
Their lessons followed her into a career that unfolded, as Schultz puts it, “like popcorn in a hot skillet.”
After Kent State, she attended law school at Cleveland State, made law review and then quit when she realized she wanted to be a journalist. She freelanced for years, including work for Chicago Tribune Magazine, before joining The Plain Dealer in 1993. She spent nearly 20 years there, moving from general assignment reporting to feature writing and, eventually, the opinion page.
In 2005, Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her columns in The Plain Dealer, recognized for providing “a voice for the underdog and underprivileged.”
But the path to that Pulitzer can be traced back to the lessons she learned as a student.
At Kent State, she learned that journalists have an obligation to ask questions of people in power.
That lesson has only become more important to her with time.
“If you've got a presidential administration that's calling us the enemies of the people regularly and trying to demonize us, you got county commissioners who think they don't have to answer questions,” Schultz says. “It's never been more vital that we do our jobs, our First Amendment-protected jobs, of demanding answers for the American public.”
She learned that responsibility at Kent State in part because of the university's own complicated relationship with its history.
“We knew we had every right to be asking why are there no university-planned events, for example?” she says. “There was just so much that was buried.”
That instinct — to ask the question that someone in authority would rather not answer — became central to Schultz's career.
So did another lesson: Preparation matters.
Before the internet, Schultz would research prominent people in the library and dig through the newsroom's clip files before interviews. Kent State regularly brought prominent and sometimes controversial speakers to campus, giving students opportunities to practice.
“You do all the preparation, you learn as much as you can, and keep in mind,” she says. “I wanted to be ready with my questions. I wanted to know what I was doing as best I could before I got there.”
Decades later, she is still doing it.
Schultz now teaches journalism at Denison University, where she is a Professor of Practice. She sees student journalism not simply as professional preparation, but as a way for students to discover their place in the world.
She knows because she lived it.
“The Daily Kent Stater cemented my passion for journalism and my commitment to doing it as a career,” she says. “It taught me so much about how to be a journalist.”
But perhaps the most powerful lesson was not about journalism at all.
Schultz grew up working class and was the first in her family to attend college. At Kent State, she learned that those beginnings did not have to determine the boundaries of her life.
“Being a journalist was going to give me a passport to a world I'd otherwise never be invited in,” she says.
It did.
And it gave her something else: a reason to believe she belonged in that world.
“I really hope that this administration, this university, this journalism program cherishes student journalism, these tangible pieces of it, this Daily Kent Stater history, and is committed to continuing it because there is no substitute,” Schultz says.
“For doing the work and getting to do it at such a young age really can transform lives.”
Then she puts the lesson in even more personal terms.
“It gave me a reason to believe that I could matter in the world.”
Her final thought sounds almost like a mission statement for The Stater itself.
“Our roots are our beginnings. They're not our excuses.”
And for Schultz, those roots began in a newsroom at Kent State.
“The Kent State journalism program, particularly working for the Daily Kent Stater, helped me see a path for myself that I've never veered from.”
Ben Wolford ’11
Ben Wolford did not leave Kent State with the career he had imagined.
He left with something more useful – the confidence to build one.
Wolford arrived at Kent State in 2007 already knowing he wanted to be a journalist. Before he even started classes, he was working for the Summer Kent Stater as a features reporter. Over the next four years, he would cover university administration, become a news editor and, in the fall of his senior year, serve as editor of the Daily Kent Stater.
The newsroom quickly became his community.
“Between every class, you're in the newsroom,” Wolford says. “After class, you're in the newsroom, sometimes till two, three, four in the morning.”
Wolford remembers the College Fest riot as one of the most memorable late nights of his time at Kent State. He and other Stater staffers were in Franklin Hall celebrating the end-of-year issue of Fusion magazine when word came that there was a fire on College Avenue.
“We just got our notebooks and ran out there,” Wolford says.
What they encountered was chaos – students running through the streets, two large fires burning in the roadway and police moving in wearing SWAT gear. Pepper spray filled the air as police fired pepper balls and students fled the scene.
The Stater team covered the confrontation as it unfolded, filing updates that night and another the next day before working through Sunday on a large front-page package.
“We covered that whole standoff and we were able to put together a story for the next day,” Wolford says.
It was a vivid example of what student journalism could demand. No classroom exercise could fully replicate the experience of being sent into a chaotic situation and being expected to make sense of it for your community.
As editor of the Stater, Wolford would go on to work on an even more consequential story. In 2010, the paper investigated new information surrounding the 1970 Kent State shootings. Reporters tracked down leads and pursued information about Terry Norman, whose presence on campus that day had long been part of the historical record but had not been deeply examined by the Stater.
Wolford remembers the teamwork that went into the story — and the reaction when the finished paper hit the newsroom.
“Jeff Fruit, I remember, came rushing down from the other end of the hall, slapping the paper like, ‘Who did this? This is great,’” Wolford says.
The experience reinforced what he was learning every day – journalism was not something to study from a distance. It was something to do.
“The Daily Kent Stater at that time was one of the top student newspapers in the country,” Wolford says.
The professors and advisers around him reinforced that real-world approach. Wolford remembers Barb Hipsman, Bob Springer and Jan Leach as mentors who connected students with the professional journalism world. He credits Hipsman with helping him land his first major internship at The Columbus Dispatch.
And an international reporting class taught by Mitch McKinney and Gary Hanson opened another door. Wolford had dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. A trip to China — his first trip with the class — convinced him that international reporting was the path he wanted to pursue.
“I was in the first trip that they took and that absolutely solidified my goal,” he says. “That confirmed that international reporting was what I wanted to do.”
It turned out to be a different kind of journalism that eventually brought him home.
In 2020, as the pandemic exposed the growing weaknesses of traditional local news, Wolford saw an opportunity in the community where he had grown up. He launched The Portager, initially as a newsletter providing Portage County residents with the local information they urgently needed.
What began with fewer than 300 subscribers grew into a news organization serving thousands of readers. Today, The Portager publishes local journalism across Portage County and beyond. Wolford is its publisher and editor while also working in technology marketing.
And when he looks back at the decision to build a newspaper of his own, he traces it directly to the newsroom where he learned how.
“I don't know that I would've believed that making a newspaper on my own was possible if I hadn't literally done it five days a week at the Daily Kent Stater,” he says.
He knew how to design a front page. He knew how to use a content management system. He knew how to publish breaking news and build a newsletter.
“I had the tools,” he says. “I had the confidence to know that this is a thing that can be done.”
That may be the lasting lesson of The Stater for Wolford – not simply how to write a story, but how to believe you are capable of making something that matters.
“I'm aware of journalism programs where it's classroom work or it's academic,” he says. “The Kent State journalism program is valuable because of how serious it treats student media.”
For Wolford, the gains came from doing the work – constantly, under deadline, with editors and classmates pushing each other to get better.
“After four years of doing that, you are so much more qualified to work a news job than people who haven't spent every waking hour of their last four years doing that,” he says.
And perhaps that's why, 15 years after graduation, the Stater still feels less like a college experience to Wolford than the beginning of everything that came after.
“Student media tees you up to just start working right away,” he says. “Your first day in a professional newsroom, you know you can do it because you've done it.”
Brian Windhorst ’00
Brian Windhorst's path to becoming one of the country's most recognizable NBA journalists did not begin with a sports editor's position at The Kent Stater.
In fact, he didn't get the job.
As a freshman, Windhorst applied to work on the sports staff but was turned away. It was not a promising start for someone who had already been writing sports for the Akron Beacon Journal since he was 16.
Instead, he spent a semester as a general assignment reporter, covering campus speeches and visitors. He was assigned to cover a play he didn't have time to see because of a paper deadline. Another assignment took him to a nearby buffalo farm that supplied meat to a local restaurant.
Then, as a junior, Windhorst took Beat Reporting with professor Fred Endres. His assignment – the Buildings and Grounds beat.
There was just one problem.
“Everyone was banned from talking to the media on the record,” Windhorst says.
The assignment became a lesson in persistence. Sources were difficult to reach, stories were hard to produce and his grade depended on the number of column inches he wrote. He wrote about the daffodils surrounding Kent State's May 4 memorial and how an early spring threatened to leave them out of bloom for the remembrance ceremony. He wrote about the speakers that played the chimes atop the library.
He barely met the minimum requirements.
And he got a C.
“That's right, someone who became a professional beat reporter at a relatively high level got a C in beat reporting,” Windhorst says.
The irony is fitting. Windhorst went on to cover the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Akron Beacon Journal and The Plain Dealer, becoming one of the youngest traveling NBA beat writers in the league before joining ESPN in 2010. Today, he is a senior NBA writer for ESPN, appearing across the network's platforms and hosting The Hoop Collective podcast.
But if his time at The Stater didn't always make journalism easy, perhaps that was part of its value.
“Managing being told no,” Windhorst says when asked what lesson from his student journalism career helped launch his professional one. “That's a lot of reporting, dealing with no or dealing with a roadblock. Sometimes you have to take an L in this business. There's a lot of Ls.”
There were lessons, too, in the people around him. Windhorst remembers Al Fitzpatrick, a visiting professor and 30-year newspaper veteran who taught him newswriting.
“I loved every class with him,” Windhorst says. “I believe he is in his late 90s and still with us and is a treasure.”
He also remembers Barb Hipsman and the late Tim Smith, professors whose classes left an impression during his time at Kent State.
And he remembers the newsroom itself.
“Working late nights in the office at Taylor Hall,” he says. “The architect students on the top floor worked late and we worked late, that building had people in it 24/7.”
There was no working remotely, no filing from a laptop at home. “You wrote your story in the newsroom,” Windhorst says.
More than two decades later, Windhorst sees student journalism as just as important, perhaps more important, than it was when he was a student.
“The lifeblood of a university is the new blood,” he says. “That's really the dynamic at a college, the old and the new. The new blood that cycles through and learns to hold all to account. It also refreshes everything.”
For Windhorst, that is the enduring value of a student newsroom. It gives young journalists a place to learn the craft, challenge institutions and discover what happens when someone says no.
“Probably now more than ever when old institutions are doing more and more things to bend the rules to hang on to power and the art of journalism is changing, the learning and proving ground is all the more relevant,” he says.
For the freshman who couldn't get a spot on the sports staff, it turned out to be a pretty good proving ground.
