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The Light Saint Ursula Academy · Cincinnati

About

About this archive

The Light was the student newspaper of Saint Ursula Academy in Cincinnati, published online by the school's journalism students. This site keeps 479 of its stories from the 2012-13 to 2022-23 school years.

The school

Saint Ursula Academy is a Catholic college-preparatory high school for young women in the East Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. The Ursuline sisters founded it in 1910; that first year sixty-three pupils met in a rented house at Ingleside and McMillan, and the school moved the next year to 1339 East McMillan Street, where it still stands. Its teams are the Bulldogs, and its oldest rivalry is with Ursuline Academy, which shows up in these pages more than once.

The paper

The Light began in print and had moved online by the time these stories ran. Students reported and edited it, sorted stories into six sections, and filed each piece under a school year. Some years it published in bursts tied to issues; in others it trickled out a story a week. The voice changes as staffs graduate, which is part of the charm: a 2015 reporter worrying about a gap year, a 2020 reporter planning Halloween around a pandemic, a 2023 reporter recapping March Madness.

Coverage in this archive, by section:

How it was rebuilt

The original site stopped working after 2023. Its pages were recovered from public web archive captures, cleaned of platform code, and put back at their original addresses, so that links from Wikipedia and elsewhere still land on the right story. Old addresses from earlier versions of the site, including the pre-2019 /single-post/ links, forward to the same articles. Photos were not carried over: most showed students, and the rest could not be recovered at a usable size.

What was left out, and why

A school paper is written by teenagers about teenagers. Much of that is fine to keep: reviews, explainers, sports reports, editorials, school news. Some of it is not fine to republish years later without the people in it agreeing. So this archive does not include profiles of individual students, senior wills and shout-out lists, college signing announcements, class-of rosters, or stories that turn on a named student's health or family. Bylines are shown without class years. Profiles of adults, such as teachers and staff, are kept, minus details about their children and private lives.

One exception is deliberate. The 2014 sports feature on M.A. Vignola is cited by Wikipedia and is about her soccer career; she has since played in college, abroad and in the National Women's Soccer League, so the article stays where readers expect to find it.

The Reading Lamp

The Reading Lamp is the one part of the site written now rather than then: four notes on the craft of student journalism and research writing that use old Light stories as worked examples.

Questions about the archive

Is this the official website of Saint Ursula Academy?

No. This is an independent archive of the student newspaper that used to live at this address. The school publishes its own news at saintursula.org, and current SUA students and families should go there for schedules, admissions and contacts.

Why are some old stories missing?

Pages that profiled individual students, senior wills, shout-out lists, and stories built around a named student's health or family were not restored. The authors were minors when they wrote, and many subjects were too. Those old addresses forward to the matching section instead of breaking.

Were the articles edited?

Only lightly. Text appears as published, with obvious typos fixed, dead links removed and the occasional duplicate paragraph merged. Where a later fact changes how a story reads, a short note under the article says so and gives the date.

Why are there no photos with the stories?

Most of the original images were photos of students, which this archive does not republish. Many others survived only as small thumbnails or not at all. The section colors and typography stand in for them.

Why do bylines have no class year?

The original site printed each writer's full name with a graduation year. A full name plus a class year pins a teenager to a school and an age, so the year was dropped. The name stays because the work is theirs.