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The South End is the official student newspaper of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, published in print and online. It was founded in 1967, and its publication is funded partly from university funds and partly from advertising revenues, and is distributed free of charge.
Circulation of the paper hit an all-time high when guest columnist Joe Fisher wrote a controversial column entitled "Islam sucks" in the February 26, 2002 issue. The column was even mentioned by noted journalist Jack Lessenberry in his Metro Times column, saying that it should've been titled "Fundamentalist Islam sucks." The South End received so much mail about Fisher's column that they were printing letters for days, including letters from anti-defamation leagues. But after that, circulation went downhill tremendously and has never recovered since.
The paper is not consistently antagonistic to Muslims, however. When a student group consisting mostly of Arabic women got together on campus to protest the 2003 occupation of Iraq on April 13, 2004, the paper reported on the protest the next day with a headline reading "Students rally for justice." However, the article itself appeared to make an effort to be neutral.
The circulation is hurt by highly unreliable distribution; although there are stands for the paper at many points throughout the campus, they are almost always either full of old issues or completely empty. The website had problems putting issues online on a timely manner, but has improved significantly over the summer 2004 semester. Since the September 13 issue, the front and back pages of the paper are in color.
In April 2004, the Conservative Union, a student group at Wayne State University started a biweekly newspaper, the Wayne Review, without university funding, to counter what was seen as the South Ends liberal bias with an conservative viewpoint that some called racist. Wonetha Jackson, then editor in chief of the South End, wrote a column extending good wishes to the Wayne Review. The Wayne Review closed down for the summer after two issues, while The South End continued to publish even in the summer semester. On September 2004, the first Fall issue of the Wayne Review came out, now calling itself a monthly newspaper and expressing in its page 3 editorial percieved victimization by the South End.
Before The South End, the official student newspaper was The Collegian, sometimes called The Daily Collegian.