Students from UF and Santa Fe College, also located in the city of Gainesville, Florida, are allowed to work at the paper.

The editor was roughly on the same level of prestige as the student body president, and various fraternities controlled the newspaper at one time or other.

Around this time, The Alligator was one of the first college newspapers in the nation to switch from hot type printing to the more modern offset standard.

The university's crowded public hearing on Jones was denounced in Florida newspapers as reminiscent of the McCarthyist Red Scare of the 1950s.

The newspaper continued to do investigative reporting including stories about low wages paid to maintenance employees.

Among the key writers of the Alligator at the time were James Cook, later an attorney, who wrote the "Uncle Javerneck" column, and Joe Torchia, later a novelist, who intercepted humorous letters from "God" to various people, sparking an uproar among some religious readers.

Controversy ensued with a new set of editors being selected by the board, and an off-campus newspaper, University Report, published by Hull, Abrams, and Scott DeGarmo, a master's student in history.

The paper exposed spying on students by government officials and law enforcement agents and was an outspoken critic of the administration of Stephen C. O'Connell, the former Florida Supreme Court justice and University President.

One of its stories told of a government agent "Palmer Wee" who was apparently hired to watch radical students.

In late 1971, editor Ron Sachs approved an insert to be published in The Alligator that printed the addresses of known abortion clinics.

When O'Connell discovered that Sachs was protected by federal First Amendment case law, he started working to disavow any connection between the university and The Alligator.

To defuse the hostile situation, Florida Attorney General Robert Shevin ruled that to protect students' First Amendment rights, the university and The Alligator should split.

The Alligator also was one of the first college papers on the Internet, hosting a bulletin board system as early as 1985 and a website beginning in 1994.

[8][9] Alligator photographer and editor Robert Ellison (1944–1968) died in Vietnam while covering the Battle of Khe Sanh for the newspaper.

[12] Jan Godown Annino National Geographic Children's Books author[13][14] Since Stephen C. O'Connell stepped down as UF president in 1973, several rivals to The Alligator have set up shop.

[42][43] Losing his sponsorship, Oxendine changed the magazine's focus, limiting it to students and education and renaming it Florida Leader.

Florida Leader was distributed at nearly every college and university in the state and also published a separate high school edition.

In 2000, confusion with a university publication also called The Orange and Blue led the newspaper to change its name to The Gator Times.