[1] The paper dates back to 1942 and co-exists on the bilingual campus with La Rotonde, the University of Ottawa's French newspaper.

[2] The newspaper covers news, arts and culture, and sports information relevant to University of Ottawa students and nearby community, and contains a feature article each week.

Due to its conservative Catholic editorial policies, The Fulcrum was fairly non-controversial compared to its more outspoken counterpart, La Rotonde.

The inclusion of advertising starting in its second year allowed the paper some slight financial freedom and The Fulcrum continued in this manner until 1946, when it came under the supervision of the English Students' Association and the SFUO.

[4] In 1951, the SFUO (suffering from serious financial problems) proposed that The Fulcrum and La Rotonde be combined into one publication and renamed The Ottawa.

The ill-will between the two groups reached a climax in 1958, when three editors from La Rotonde were expelled for an article criticizing Queen Elizabeth II.

However, this began to change in 1964, when the University of Ottawa administration censored an article in La Rotonde espousing the opinion that Queen Elizabeth II was not welcome in Quebec.

The Fulcrum spoke out on the issue and in an editorial at the time stated that: "We feel that the administration should have given the publishers of La Rotonde a chance to act.

Fueled by their lack of control over their publication and an increasing move towards autonomy in student newspapers across the country, editors at The Fulcrum began formulating plans to go "autonomous" as early as 1998, but many stalled attempts meant that they were not successful until many years later.

It was during this time that The Fulcrum moved to offices located between University of Ottawa's Thompson Residence and Morriset Library (later occupied by CHUO-FM, and now known as the Déjà Vu lounge).

In the summer of 2004, recently elected editor-in-chief Mary Cummins and managing editor Marcus McCann once again looked into plans to become an autonomously incorporated organization.

The main reason being that the editorial board felt it was an inherent conflict of interest to be owned by the student government while attempting to write fair, unbiased, and often critical stories about them.

To avoid a similar conflict of interest, provisions were put into the corporate bylaws prohibiting the board from interfering in editorial content unless faced with possible legal action.