About Us

When The Circle Voice, founded by a young Walter Russell Mead, first arrived on the Groton School literary scene in 1969, it was a clear underdog to Groton’s more established sources of news at the time, The Grotonian and the Third Form Weekly. The two newspapers, despite their at-times unimpressive coverage of pertinent news and limited editorial clout, had long dominated the School’s market for strong writing. Thus, to survive, The Circle Voice (CV) had to be something different, and from its inception, it was. Led by Mead, who believed that the ultimate purpose of his paper was “to work for change,” the CV developed an anti-administration agenda, questioning the assertion—often made by the Weekly and The Grotonian—that everything was always well on the Circle.

In 1969, the Third Form Weekly ran its final issue, and a few years later, The Grotonian began a gradual but definitive movement away from reporting the news. Nowadays, the Weekly is a piece of Groton history long since passed, while The Grotonian has moved on to feature student works of fiction and poetry—a distinct sphere of the literary market that rarely, if ever, intersects with the CV.

Today, the CV is one of the largest student-run organizations on campus. It prints six to seven issues per year, with each issue ranging from eight to twelve pages.