Rough Draught of History

By ANNA WEGGEL

It is familiar advice to scribes everywhere: "Write what you know."

In the winter of 2004, two seniors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign took those words to heart when they founded Booze News, a newspaper by and for college students who like to drink.

"It was like, hey, what if we just created our own paper and...