As The Daily Texan marks its 125th year of publication, work is underway on a documentary film to celebrate the student paper’s celebrated history.
The film will be produced by well-known Dallas film-maker Quin Mathews, a former Daily Texan staffer and member of The Daily Texan Hall of Fame.
Mathews is donating his time and expertise, and the Friends of The Daily Texan, Inc. will financially support production of the film.
The film will be released in 2025.
Mathews will tell the story through interviews with notable Texan staffers from different decades, and will mix in historical research, information from The Texan archives and photos along with the interviews.
Mathews is known for City of Hate: Dallas and the Assassination (2013), The Colors of the Sky: The Churches of Michoacan (2009) and Inauguration Day: The Documentary (2009).
From D Magazine: “In 2013, the filmmaker Quin Mathews examined the tumultuous political and social atmosphere in Dallas leading up to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in the documentary, City of Hate: Dallas and the Assassination. A decade later, he has returned to the subject.
“The film is composed almost entirely of new footage, including Mathews’ personal recollections of seeing JFK just before the assassination. One of the most compelling aspects of this new version is how Mathews shares his own experiences with the camera, having seen Kennedy at Dallas Love Field Airport the day of the assassination.
“Tragedies that occurred over the last decade pulled him back into the story. Mass shootings connected to North Texas—like in El Paso, a racist attack that was carried out by a shooter from Collin County, and the Allen outlet mall—pushed Mathews to reassess the history of violence and injustice in his hometown. A special cut of City of Hate: Dallas and the Assassination 60 Years Later will premiere at the Dallas International Film Festival.
“I always thought there was the extremism in Dallas in the 1960s and Dallas has improved so much that it [no longer has any] relation to the actual assassination. But I can’t dismiss it,” he says. “I can’t dismiss the connection, that when you have an atmosphere where there is a vocal element that seems to prompt other people to commit acts of violence, or to instigate a feeling of hate, that it does have consequences.”
He turned to film-making after a 22-year career in journalism, leaving WFAA-TV in the 1990s to pursue a career in documentary film-making.
The first edition of The Texan appeared on the campus of the 17-year-old University of Texas at Austin on Oct. 8, 1900.
There’s no mention of its founding in that first edition, although its origins date to two privately owned weekly newspapers: the Ranger, founded in 1897 and successor to the Alcalde, published 1895-97, and The Ranger and the Calendar (1889–1900).
Its front-page nameplate simply said The Texan, and the content was typical of the era: advertisements for shoes, clothing, travel (train tickets), laundry, drug store and other items on each page of the newspaper. Student life activities and information were inside the four-page Texan.