"[2] The history of The State Press goes back to ASU's establishment as a "Normal School" during Arizona's territorial period.
The existence of The State Press as an independent entity began in 1906, when it became the Tempe Normal Student, a four-page tabloid distributed on campus each Friday for five cents per copy.
In the spring semester of 2013, The State Press went from being a five-day-a-week publication to a weekly, ending a 28-year run as a student daily.
In 2009, SPM became an online-only magazine, publishing daily stories and blogs that examined university issues such as current events, arts and entertainment.
In spring 2011, SPM began releasing a stand-alone print issue once per semester, in addition to its daily online publication.
Cartoonist Tony Carrillo began drawing his F Minus comic strip for The State Press while he was a student at ASU.
Carrillo also painted the city skyline mural in the underground window well in The State Press' Tempe newsroom.
On Tuesdays, a campus-specific front page had been produced and printed on the 500 copies of the newspaper delivered to ASU's West campus.
Both zoned editions were launched in the fall of 2008 but suspended in February 2009 due to both the cost of the endeavor and uncertainty about the future of both outlying campuses in light of state budget cuts.
In addition, a spoof edition of the daily paper, The Stale Mess, was published at the end of each semester by the State Press staff.
In 2003, a memorable Stale Mess spoof cover featured a simulated photo of ASU President Michael Crow passed out in a bathtub, with vomit on his shirt and a bottle of cheap vodka cradled on his arm.
State Press Magazine created a stir in fall 2004 by publishing a full-page cover photo of a woman's naked, pierced breast on its cover; the publication drew criticism from prominent conservatives and ASU boosters such as Ira Fulton, who felt the university's administration needed to have more oversight regarding editorial decisions.
On September 1, 2012, the paper's editorial board printed an apology to its readers after discovering that Raquel Velasco, who was writing on issues related to Tempe (home of the ASU Tempe Campus), plagiarized and/or used facts and quotes without proper attribution, from the Phoenix Business Journal, Arizona Republic, and KNXV-TV (locally known as ABC15), among other news organizations.
[10] In its apology, the editorial board mentioned the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication's efforts to teach students the virtues of ethics and aversion of plagiarism.
[13] On April 22, 2024, the paper's editorial board issued a statement confirming that they had retracted 24 stories from the publication's website after each had been found to be at least partially written by a form of generative artificial intelligence.