What is Stanford Politics?

Stanford Politics was a non-profit, non-partisan student newsmagazine at Stanford University. Originally founded in 2014 as the Stanford Political Journal to be a forum for debate and discussion about a wide variety of issues from international affairs to campus politics, the publication rebranded in 2017 as SP, with a print magazine, podcast and email newsletter, in addition to web-only news and opinion articles. While politics is in the name, we exclusively covered “politics” in the broadest sense of the term — really, anything that matters to people, at a university, local, national or international level.

In 2015, Stanford Politics (then SPJ) received the Campus Impact Award. And in 2017, a Stanford Politics Magazine cover story was named by Longreads as one of the best pieces of local reporting of the year. Our former writers and editors have gone on to work at publications such as New York Magazine, POLITICO Magazine, TIME, Texas Monthly, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

After 7 years of ambitious and experimental student journalism, SP stopped publication at the end of the 2020-2021 academic year due to difficulties imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. If you’re a current Stanford student interested in relaunching SP, please reach out to editor@stanfordpolitics.org.


Stanford Politics

Why Substack?

We were actually early adopters of Substack when we started publishing our Monday Memo newsletter on the platform in 2018 (previously published on MailChimp). Since then, Substack has made a lot of technological improvements to be a great platform not only for newsletters but also for bigger publications like digital magazines.

We’re thinking about longevity, too. Our WordPress recently went down temporarily due to a lapse in payments to our domain and webhosting provider. We don’t want our content to disappear in the future, and by using a Substack subdomain (stanfordpolitics.substack.com) rather than our own website address, we can ensure that what is posted on SP will remain for as long as Substack remains.

We’ve made a lot of changes over the years. SPJ started on a humble WordPress website, then we migrated to Medium where we became SP before relaunching back on WordPress again. As we are currently in the process of migrating our archival content to Substack, our WordPress website continues to exist with our complete archives: stanfordpolitics.org.


Former editors in chief:

Jason Willick (’15)
Truman Chen (’17)
Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna (’18)
Daniela Gonzalez (’19)
Roxy Bonafont (’21)
Nathalie Kiersznowski (’21)

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Stanford Politics is a non-profit, non-partisan student newsmagazine at Stanford University.