Editor’s note: The Daily’s editorial department acknowledges that this article is premised on a conflict of interest. This article is a special feature for Commencement 2025 that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.
Since its founding in 1980, the Daily has traditionally produced short-form news and culture stories. But graduating senior Henry Chandonnet pioneered a new format for the Daily, making way for long-form reporting and striking visuals with The Tufts Daily Magazine.
Chandonnet joined the Daily’s Arts and Pop Culture section during his first semester on campus. As an active consumer of print media, from The New York Times to Vanity Fair, he thought it would be a fun thing to do on the side. But he said the bonds he made with the members of the “Dailmunity” encouraged him to stay on and continue reporting.
“By the end of my [first] year, I was thinking that I wanted to pursue media professionally,” Chandonnet said. “That turned me from like, ‘Oh, I can just write for fun,’ to, ‘I should take this seriously.’”
Chandonnet climbed the Daily’s ranks, serving as both executive arts editor and managing editor before going abroad in his junior spring. Between his Daily work and professional reporting experience, including an internship with People and ongoing employment with Fast Company, Chandonnet is fully immersed in the world of media.
But while serving on the managing board in the fall of his junior year, Chandonnet began to feel like there was something missing — the Daily lacked a space for writers to take what he called “big swings,” or deep cultural dives spanning a larger research sphere than the Daily’s average feature.
Inspired by other college papers’ magazines, namely The Harvard Crimson and University of Southern California’s Daily Trojan, and his own love for magazine-style reporting in publications like New York Magazine, Chandonnet pitched the idea of The Tufts Daily Magazine: a platform to make space for the “big questions” of collegiate reporting.
“I talked about it kind of jokingly for my first few semesters on [executive] board and then for the final semester on [managing board], and I was like, ‘No, wait, I might do this,’” Chandonnet said. “People were generally pretty supportive. … I was lucky that, except for the financial side, I didn’t really face any pushback.”
Given that the Daily is a financially independent paper, the funding needed to prop up the magazine was certainly an initial obstacle. But once the funding was approved, Chandonnet and the magazine’s first set of authors had all they needed to start work on its maiden issue.
Chandonnet said the magazine’s operations flew largely under the radar in its first semester. “I was telling people over and over again, ‘I want to make a magazine,’” Chandonnet said. “I don’t think that anybody actually believed me until, like, a couple weeks before production.”
But, lo and behold, the inaugural issue of The Tufts Daily Magazine was published on Dec. 5, 2024, with seven long-form features and a letter from Chandonnet himself.
In his “Letter from the Tufts Daily Magazine Editor,” Chandonnet spoke on a primary catalyst for its formation: the need to uphold long-form journalism in response to the rise of social media ‘reporting,’ especially in light of President Donald Trump's new administration.
“There are a lot of very shallow political takes out there right now that I think are formed by, chiefly, poor media consumption,” Chandonnet said. “Don’t read the first three [paragraphs] of a New York Times story. Don’t get your news from TikTok. … Read a full story. Read from the lede to the kicker. Understand what’s happening here, and understand it from all the sides that this reporter took their time to try to find.”
He explained that, although the Daily’s five-days-a-week publishing schedule lends itself well to a rapid news cycle, there is benefit to also incorporating the more intensive format of the magazine.
“Putting out something that has 3,000 word stories across four pages, that is really deep and intensive,” Chandonnet said. “Spend like 30 minutes sitting there reading that — I do think that there’s a moral benefit there. … I just think that the exercise itself is really valuable,” Chandonnet said.
Although he admitted that he doesn’t consider his arts and technology reporting to be necessarily “hard news,” Chandonnet has still felt the impact of the political climate on media and his own stake in reporting.
“Writing has been very empowering for me … especially in the second Trump term, like being able to write about Elon Musk, to be able to write about Silicon Valley hedging to Trump,” Chandonnet said. “It’s very easy to feel powerless. That is one way that I do feel like I have some kind of agency.”
Shortly after the publishing of the magazine’s second issue this April, Chandonnet highlighted some of its recent pieces, namely “We Are What We Eat” by graduating senior Aaron Gruen and “Athlete Alienation” by graduating senior Kaitlyn Wells from the fall 2024 issue, as well as “Architects of Academia” by rising senior Matthew Sage and “Money Matters” by rising senior Dylan Fee from the spring 2025 issue.
When asked about his goals for the magazine following his departure from Tufts, Chandonnet said his primary hope is that it simply continues to operate as a branch of the Daily.
“I was a little afraid that everybody’s looking at the magazine going, ‘Oh, that’s just Henry’s thing, and then when he leaves, it’s gonna die off or whatever.’ So I’m very happy that it’s being taken over,” Chandonnet said. “I am hopeful that they will continue to take big swings.”
