The beginning of sifting and winnowing: 1892-1932

The Daily Cardinal was founded as a rival to the monthly student paper Aegis, by Monroe, Wisconsin native William Wesley Young, the brother of cartoonist Art Young and the University of Wisconsin–Madison's first journalism student, and William Saucerman. Four hundred free copies of the paper were made available to Wisconsin students on April 4, 1892. For the first month of production, Young rode his horse down State Street to the offices of the Madison Democrat, which printed the Cardinal. The newspaper's name was decided by a vote of university students, "Cardinal" representing one of the school colors.

During the early years of the paper, the founder of the university's journalism school, Willard G. Bleyer, was a reporter and editor as an undergraduate. The experience was formative in his views on the teaching of journalism.

While against World War I at its outset, the Cardinal developed favorable attitudes toward the war, especially following the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice. The Cardinal did not initially support the Second World War either, but later added special military sections to the paper to help coordinate the war effort.

Making an impression: 1932-1960

During the Great Depression the Cardinal first earned its reputation for radicalism. Disagreeing with a policy of mandatory military training for male undergraduates to prepare for the impending World War II and running a letter to the editor signed by Junior Women discussing free love led U.S. Senate nominee John B. Chapple to declare that the Cardinal was controlled by "Reds, Atheists and free love advocates". The UW Board of Regents revoked the Cardinal’s title as "official University newspaper" following this discourse and threatened to close the paper down until a compromise added a faculty member and a regent to the Cardinal board.

In 1940, the Cardinal moved out of its office east of Memorial Union to a building on University Avenue, on the land where Vilas Communication Hall sits today. In 1956, the Cardinal board donated the land to the university in an agreement stipulating that the Cardinal would enjoy rent-free tenancy in the new building. The Cardinal's offices remain in Vilas Hall today.

In 1942, Cardinal founder Young returned to edit the paper for a day. The New York Times wrote on the occasion, "Despite annual changes in student staffs, a few college newspapers in the country have acquired a definite character. One of these is the Daily Cardinal of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The Cardinal is proud of its liberal tradition. Because it fights cleanly and with a sense of responsibility, its youthful passion for righteousness does not burn less brightly."

A radical reputation: 1960-1988

During the 1960s, the Cardinal developed a national reputation for its vehement far-left politics. They were the first American newspaper to send reporters to Cuba, and after two of the Cardinal’s editors and two other campus radicals carried out the largest and most destructive car bomb attack until that point in United States history, the Sterling Hall bombing, the Cardinal ran editorials endorsing the bombing.^[9] They ran several editorials strongly protesting the Vietnam War and supporting causes of Civil Rights. In 1969, a group of conservative UW students, frustrated by the Cardinal’s unrelenting liberalism, founded The Badger Herald as a right-wing alternative. Until recently, UW-Madison was one of few American universities with competing daily news publications, though starting in 2014 that competition largely shifted online with the Cardinal cutting Friday editions and the Herald publishing print issues once a week.^[10][11]

The 1970s saw the Cardinal maintain its strong issue advocacy, but opinion began to shift to more campus, rather than national, angles. In the last half of the decade, the paper continually attacked the university for its holdings in corporations that participated in apartheid in South Africa.

In 1987 the Cardinal survived a hostile takeover attempt by the Herald when then-president of the Daily Cardinal Board of Directors David Atkins conspired with Herald Publisher Richard Ausman to hire Herald staffers for Cardinal leadership positions and eventually merge the papers.^[12] The same year, it became free, and has remained so until this day.^[13]

Strife and shutdown: 1988-1995

In the beginning of the difficult stretch for the Cardinal, in 1988 the university announced it would shut down the paper's presses, then located in Vilas Hall. Fortunately for the Cardinal, the university decided to sell the presses to UW–Extension, which remained the Cardinal’s printer for the next five years. Today, the Cardinal is printed at Capital Newspapers.

In 1995, the Cardinal was forced to stop printing due to financial issues, suffering a seven-month shutdown until the necessary funds were secured to return to publication.

The Cardinal reborn: 1995-

The Cardinal returned to campus later that year with a cover depicting a cardinal rising from ashes like a phoenix. The paper repaid its remaining debts two years to the day of the shutdown.

In 2000, the Cardinal broke the story that university officials had digitally inserted a black student's face into a photograph of white Badger football fans. The image had been used on the cover of Wisconsin's 2001-02 undergraduate application.^[14] The story received the 2001 Diversity Story of the Year award for student journalism,^[15] awarded by the Associated Collegiate Press and the Los Angeles Times.

In 2012, the Cardinal celebrated the 120th anniversary of its first publication with an alumni gathering featuring presentations by former Cardinal staffers who had gone on to win Pulitzer prizes and Emmy awards, a gala banquet at the nearby Orpheum Theater and a tribute to Anthony Shadid, who had died earlier in the year.^[16]

In November 2015, the Cardinal announced it would begin a new publication schedule by publishing two print issues per week while also moving to a new online platform, effective with the start of the spring semester.^[17] The new publishing schedule, following a similar cut in print publishing by the Herald the previous year, left the UW-Madison campus without a daily newspaper print edition for the first time in decades.^[18]

Official history

It Doesn't End With Us, the official history of The Daily Cardinal, was published in 2007.