The Muse

The Muse, successor to the Memorial Times, began publishing in 1950 in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, as an unnamed paper. That paper held a contest to choose a new name, the winner being a professor who named the paper after all of the following: a bastardization of the Greek letters Μ and υ, for Memorial University; a reference to the Greek goddesses of the arts; a joke, saying this was MU's (Memorial University's) paper; and the role of a paper as a place where students could muse. Beginning with a small editorial staff controlled by the student union, The Muse grew into an autonomous student-run paper. In the early years of publication, it was a campus gossip tabloid; in the late 1960s it developed an activist flair which attracted the attention of the provincial government and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), with the latter including The Muse in their investigations of supposedly Marxist organizations. In the late eighties, the paper was enlivened by the women's movement, and followed a more activist agenda, including special coverage of gay, lesbian and bisexual issues not discussed in the mainstream media, and a boycotted list of advertisers. The Muse incorporated in 2002 as The Muse Publications Inc, and became fully autonomous from the Memorial University students' union in January 2003. The Muse focuses on campus life, Newfoundland and Labrador, university research, campus, municipal, provincial and federal politics, local music and sports, and periodically reports on world politics and social justice.