The South End is the official student newspaper of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, published in print and online.
The paper is published in print once a month during the fall and winter terms but produces an e-edition weekly and posts new online content daily.
During the summer, The South End publishes content exclusively online, with the exception of its special editions: the Freshman Survival Guide, an informative publication for new students, and the Back to School issue, which is printed the first week of the fall semester.
On its website, The South End offers up-to-date stories, photo galleries, videos, online polls and links to its weekly PDF issues.
In recent years, The South End has covered a number of major events, including the 2011 protests outside Catherine Ferguson Academy after it was slated to close, the 2011 shooting death of WSU football player Cortez Smith and the beginnings of the Occupy Detroit movement.
The A&E section of The South End covers Detroit and WSU theaters, galleries, music/dance performances, concerts and fashion events.
The South End's sports section predominantly focuses on WSU teams, including men's baseball, basketball, cross country, fencing, football, golf, swimming/diving and tennis.
Women's sports include basketball, cross country, fencing, softball, swimming/diving, tennis, track & field and volleyball.
Copies of The South End and its predecessors (from 1917 to present) are housed in the Wayne State University Archives at the Walter P. Reuther Library, 5401 Cass Avenue.
Much of the 1990s was spent upgrading the paper's notoriously lax standards with in-house style and grammar guides; adding strict editorial policies banning opinions from articles and a coherent editorial page featuring opinions from both sides of the political spectrum; and introducing the Associated Press wire to allow editors the use of AP stories in what was a steadily growing newspaper.
Many of these standards fell by the wayside in subsequent years due to the high turnover in staff common at university newspapers.
Circulation of The South End spiked when guest columnist Joe Fisher wrote a controversial column entitled "Islam Sucks" in the February 26, 2002 issue.
It was during that school year that a gray line drawing of a tower of Old Main (a campus building) was added to the paper's name atop the front page.
For the April 1, 2005 issue, the paper ran a satire issue called The Rear End, which printed the date as "March 32, 2005" and ran fake news stories such as "WSU partiers conquer, reign," "Raisin mistaken for roach, student still catches buzz" and "Warriors Basketball awarded National Championship."
In summer 2005, the Fusion (science and technology) and Campus Life sections were cancelled to make more room for prepared full pages from the KRT wire service.
Justified paragraphs, a constant source of layout problems in the past, were discarded completely in favor of ragged right margins like the Detroit News uses in many of its sections.
The editor-in-chief is a student, usually an upperclassman, who is selected annually and traditionally enjoys some autonomy in staffing and editorial decision-making.
According to the SNPB charter, the administration's appointees include one working journalist, preferably an alumnus/a of the WSU journalism program, a faculty member from the Department of Communication, and a financial professional from the university's operations division.