Patrick Siddons

Pat Siddons’ first and last newspaper jobs were on the Indiana Daily Student. They ranged from cub reporter to publisher.

Siddons enlisted in the Army after graduation from Bloomington’s University High School in 1942. He was a veteran of South Pacific duty in World War II when he entered IU to study journalism.

“I learned about newspapers through my work on the Indiana Daily Student,” he recalled later, “and I still remember the heady feeling I got from putting words on paper, the thrill of watching the linotype operator create words in metal, and of watching that old flatbed press crank out copies of a paper that actually contained stories I had written. I thought it was a miracle.”

When he graduated, he worked for several Indiana newspapers, including those in Crawfordsville and Bloomington, as well as both Louisville newspapers, the Times and the Courier-Journal. He covered Indiana University as his beat throughout the 1970s, as well as government and business. He received the Chris Savage Award as Indiana Professional Journalist of the Year in 1970.

In 1978, he left the Louisville papers to become publisher of the Indiana Daily Student. Under his leadership, the IDS received numerous awards for excellence, and in 1983, his advisor peers named him Distinguished Newspaper Adviser. He was cited for his “outstanding service to student publications, to Indiana University and to the nation’s student press.”

As publisher, his auto license plate read “IDS,” and when he retired in 1989, he changed that to “X-IDS.”

Siddons was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 2001. He died in 2004.