The Classic

The Classic is the student-run high school newspaper of Townsend Harris High School in Queens, New York. Frequently named the best high school newspaper in New York City by Baruch College's NYC public school journalism awards, the paper has run free of censorship and administrative review since its founding in the fall of 1984. In recent years, reporting by The Classic has been cited by publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. Classic journalists have also been featured in various publications, including Teen Vogue, The Village Voice, and The New York Times. The paper publishes new content online on weeknights throughout the school year and publishes a print edition of collected pieces on a quarterly basis. History The original Townsend Harris Hall Prep School, founded in 1849 and located in Manhattan, was closed by New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1942. After the reopening of Townsend Harris in Queens in the fall of 1984, the first edition of The Classic was published that December. The Classic ran exclusively as a print newspaper, published around ten times a year, until the fall of 2012 when it began to publish both in print and online. The first Editor-in-Chief of The Classic, Heather Nash, credits her father with coming up with the name for the paper after seeing bumper stickers that read, “Townsend Harris: A Touch of the Classic.” Free press charter Malcolm Largmann, the first principal of the re-founded Townsend Harris, retired in the spring of 2001. During his tenure, student editors printed the newspaper without administrative review of content despite the 1988 Hazelwood Supreme Court decision that granted principals broad powers to oversee the content of school newspapers. Before Largmann's retirement, then Classic advisor Ilsa Cowen worked with student editors to draft a charter that would ensure Largmann's decision to refrain from administrative censorship of the paper became a matter of school policy.