The Triangle is picking up steam as it chugs into its 100th year — a milestone that may never have arrived if not for the efforts of a string of strong editors and a group of alumni determined to keep their favorite college institution alive.
The Triangle has a long history, with Thomas T. Mather ’27 as its first editor in chief in 1926. It was a weekly newspaper covering events on campus and around the city, run editorially and financially independent of the University. Its plentiful alumni include former President and Myers Hall namesake Harold Myers ’38 and CEO of Boscov’s Department Stores Albert Boscov ’48, and it’s earned several awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and two National Pacemaker Awards. Its website, TheTriangle.org, has been online since the mid-90s, when Drexel became an early campus to go wireless and require personal computers.
The Triangle has always drawn passionate students who juggled co-op, classes and deadlines to keep their peers informed. In the late ’90s, the Triangle Monkey mascot appeared in the paper, peering from the pages to implore students to show up to general meetings. But over the years, the pressures facing college papers — rising paper costs, disappearing ad revenue and competition for eyeballs in the age of social media — eventually caught up.
Those challenges came to a head on Feb. 1, 2019, which happened to be the 93rd anniversary of the paper’s first issue. Then Editor in Chief Mike Avena ’19 informed staff that the newspaper was out of money and newsstands were bare. In a heroic effort, the staff launched a “Triangle Week of Begging” campaign to keep the paper publishing online. Aided by the Drexel Fund and Institutional Advancement, they rallied 330 donors — alumni, students, faculty and staff — to reach their $16,000 goal. Yet even with that infusion, the paper limped through the pandemic, losing many of its writers to graduation or waning interest.
By 2022 the newsroom had been silent for months. In April, Kiara Santos ’23 signed on to be Editor in Chief with a handful of friends. They lacked staff — without even enough people to qualify as a student organization — and access to their finances, equipment and server.
“We just had nothing,” Santos recalls. “You just had to be passionately driven for this. As hard as it was, those were some of my fondest memories, getting the band back together and figuring it out.”
Despite everything, the crew managed to put together a digital issue in summer 2022. That same summer, a colleague of Santos’ at the Philadelphia Inquirer, who is Dominican like Santos, profiled her as The Triangle’s first Afro-Latina editor in chief and leader of the paper’s return.
The story caught the attention of Triangle alumnus Larry Marion, BS humanities and social sciences ’72, a retired publishing executive who was moved to help. He began contacting fellow alumni, including Rich Lampert, BS chemical engineering ’69, plus Santos and Ivy Lane, who at the time worked with the Institutional Advancement team, who helped Marion set up an endowment. Marion’s support not only modernized the newsroom, but also laid the foundation for a more secure future for The Triangle by creating an alumni advisory board and an endowment.
“University endowments are considered permanent perpetual funds,” says Nik Kozel, assistant vice president of development within Institutional Advancement. “The longer it grows, the more support it provides. There still needs to be a constant stream of income to support The Triangle in addition to the endowment. Larry did not want the endowment to be enough that they didn’t need to be trying to bring in other sources of revenue, because raising money taught him a lot of skills that he transferred into his professional life.”
Marion’s support didn’t stop at funding. By 2023, Marion, Lampert, Santos and Avena — who had been mentoring staff — officially formed the Triangle Alumni Advisory Board.
“Larry had the idea that if we had a group of people who would be assisting from year to year, hopefully the continuity of The Triangle staff will pick up again,” Lampert explains. “Ever so slowly, among the Advisory Board and the staff, we’ve learned to understand what alumni and advertisers can and can’t do. It’s been a symbiotic relationship, and we’ve all grown from the experience.”
The paper is back on steadier ground now. It prints twice a term and publishes online biweekly. The staff has grown from Santos and her ragtag group to about 80 people. Despite differences in generation and experiences, the current staff and the alumni board are united by a belief in the mission, shared memories of late nights, camaraderie and pride in The Triangle.
Larry Marion ’72 donated the funds to launch the endowment.
In his words: I felt that we needed to fix this. A number of other Triangle alumni had also contacted Kiara when they saw the Inquirer story, but there was no outlet for our support before the Alumni Advisory Board. To bolster the alumni effort and create a database of Triangle alumni, Rich Lampert and I went to the Drexel library’s archives and found the old bound volumes of The Triangle. We started writing down editors and writers and spent hours finding their emails. Then we handed that to Drexel’s Office of Institutional Advancement. I think the current database has over 1,100 Triangle alumni.
The camaraderie of working at The Triangle together, with a group focused on producing something, having a shared vision and shared values… that stayed with me my whole life. I named my company, Triangle Publishing Services, after the paper. The Triangle not only gave me a career but also helped me meet the woman who became my wife. My managing editor Walt Hallinan, who was my best friend, was on the music scene and knew just about every musician in Philadelphia. He knew a local musician who was dating a journalist and said I should meet her. He fixed me up with the woman I ended up marrying, and we’ve been married 49 years in September.
I’ve been very public about my health issues. I was diagnosed with a form of leukemia in 2005 and since then have had repeated treatments which eventually fail. Early last year, I had a meeting with my chief oncologist and asked him the “God question” — how long do I have to live? I figured I’ve got another five good years. I looked around and saw what was going on with The Triangle and thought, “OK, I can keep helping The Triangle for the next five years. But what happens afterward?”
At the same time, my financial adviser and I discovered some assets that were not part of my estate plan. I sat down with my wife and daughter and explained that diverting these funds to The Triangle and creating and funding an endowment wouldn’t deprive them of support. My daughter had two preconditions — she wanted the money going to computers, software, supplies, etc., and she said I deserved recognition for my efforts. That’s when they offered to name the newsroom after me.
Another important issue for me was supporting the editor in chief financially. When I was a student on the paper, I was dedicated to The Triangle and also had a work-study job, so my academics suffered. I swore if I were ever in the position to make sure that didn’t happen to future editors in chief, I would do something. So I decided to fund a work-study endowment for the editor in chief.
Rich Lampert ’68 was The Triangle’s editor several years before Marion and is now a key member of the Triangle Alumni Advisory Board (TAAB).
In his words: When we go into a meeting with The Triangle, we go in equipped to offer advice. We’re not managing The Triangle. Instead we just keep coming back and saying, ‘You said this three months ago, how’s that going now?’ Although the world has changed enormously since I was a student, Journalism 101 is still Journalism 101.
However, a lot of what Larry and I thought going in were no-brainer ways to increase advertising turned out not to work. The goalposts have been moved a long way. Students also have so many more sources of information than just their campus newspaper. The administration and their departments communicate with them all the time, and with social media, there’s a lot more peer-to-peer communication. Larry and I competed with bulletin boards, and now The Triangle is competing with everything.
I attended Drexel when it was the Drexel Institute of Technology and I was a chemical engineering major. I can say with certainty that I spent more time in The Triangle office than in class or studying. The office functioned as a de facto lounge, so we were all there in our off hours. Sometimes we were talking The Triangle and sometimes we were socializing.
The Triangle office in my day was on the lower level of what became the Creese Student Center, but at the time, McAllister didn’t wrap around it, so we actually had this enormous window overlooking a courtyard. We also were 20 yards away from vending machines so we could get junk food at all hours, and we were around the corner from some pinball machines and a four-lane bowling alley. I’d play pinball or bowl a couple frames when I needed a break, then get some peanut butter crackers and bad coffee to sustain me.
It was absolutely the center of my life at Drexel, and it did influence my career path. The faculty adviser of The Triangle when I was a freshman called out of the clear blue sky during my junior year and suggested that I ought to be an intern to him in a book publishing company for that summer. Otherwise I would have had to go back out into the chemical engineering industry, which by then I realized I did not want to work in. I got into that publishing industry, and I didn’t leave for 48 years.
Sophia Mattia, English ’25, got involved with The Triangle as an arts and entertainment writer in 2020 and became editor in chief in April 2024.
In her words: The Triangle really only started to come back around March or April 2022. We had meetings in the office that summer, and I was like, ‘I don’t know any of these people,’ because we had been online and hearing minimal things for the past year. As we realized how much work there was to do, people slowly dwindled off.
We were a very small staff trying to produce a paper, and we didn’t have any money. We got back to printing twice a term and publishing online every two weeks, but we were still struggling. I had become A&E editor with my friend Atticus [Deeny] and we didn’t get any training from any previous editors, but Kiara got us out of the trenches.
Kejsi [Ruka] became editor in chief and we were publishing good stories and honing our writing. We had a production manager and layout editors. We were recruiting a lot more people and at that point, we had established the alumni board. They gave advice on how to approach a difficult story, how to manage a staff and what would be good to cover. Larry has helped us so much; we wouldn’t be where we are if he and the rest of the alumni board hadn’t come in and helped us.
I shadowed Kejsi when she was editor in chief and she had every editor make a transition document to establish that institutional memory again. I was editor in chief for a year, and it was a really great experience. I feel like I have more confidence in myself, and I’ve seen the impact of articles going in print and people reading them and talking about them. I took on this leadership role where I was leading meetings every week, talking to everyone, saying what we need to cover. It helped me grow a lot as a person and a leader.
I’ve made some of my closest friends at The Triangle, and I think I’m going to be friends with these people for the rest of my life. There’s a very specific bond from spending hours with people trying to produce something that you all care about. I think that’s kind of always been what it’s like. I remember talking to Larry about his Triangle memories, and he said the same thing. He cares so much about The Triangle, and now it’s protected. That’s so relieving to know, especially as a graduating senior.
Scott Warnock, professor of English and associate dean of undergraduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been The Triangle’s adviser for six years.
In his words: For a lot of reasons, one main one being the pandemic, The Triangle was in a lot of trouble. I had a number of sit-downs with the very small leadership group at the time, but the students have to figure it out. Then here comes Kiara and The Inquirer story, and the rest is history. It’s really thriving now.
What Larry has done with the alumni group has been invaluable. I think having this formalized Alumni Advisory Board that has a good relationship with the University is going to help The Triangle perpetuate itself, and now they have a direct connection to some revenue to help them build and do the things they want to do.
Larry and Rich’s involvement inspired me to reconfigure our Faculty Advisory Board, too. You tend to get writing or journalism people as members, but the newspaper is like a business, so now we have some faculty from LeBow and Westphal in addition to those with journalism backgrounds, and we’re going to work with the alumni board to see how we can all work together for the students.
What Kiara, Kejsi and Sophia have done is so above and beyond what was expected of them when they signed onto this role; they have all been involved writing grants and interacting with the administration to get funding. I remember the general business meetings on Wednesday nights, and when you’re getting five people, you can’t run a newspaper like that. Then all of a sudden, they were getting dozens of people.
To have a university of this size and stature without a newspaper would be unthinkable. I’m glad I’m a part of it, and I try to recruit a lot of people for the paper. The job of adviser has been a lot more hands-on over the past few years, but it’s been a lot more rewarding. Sometimes the editors would call me at 10 at night, for instance during stories about the Gaza demonstrations to check in, but it’s important to note that I don’t have editorial control: I’m only there to give them advice. When I worked for my undergraduate newspaper, I learned invaluable things. I’ve been on two school boards, I’ve done a ton of volunteer coaching and writing in my community, and I learned a lot of those skills from working on the school newspaper. Obviously, there’s the journalism side, but there’s a lot more learning that goes on, too.
Kiara Santos ’23 was thrust into the editor in chief position when the paper was at its lowest.
“By the time I left the staff was about 50 people, and they have about 80 now. I feel so proud. It’s like when you throw a pebble into water and you see the ripples. I was the pebble and of course, I can’t take credit for all the work, but if I didn’t hire this person who hired this person, those ripples wouldn’t have happened. I’m glad that it’s in a great place. Now, the idea that we’re even approaching 100 years, it felt so unrealistic. I just hope it can get bigger and better. I just love what The Triangle gave me.”
Celebrate 100 years of The Triangle by securing its future. Your gift strengthens the organization’s financial foundation so Drexel students can continue to learn, lead and adapt for generations to come. Give to the Triangle Endowment.
