Kill The College Newspaper
My only experience on a college newspaper was a mandatory one-semester period, the highlight of which was the adviser rejecting most of my stories for not being "serious" enough, and telling me menacingly, "People who work with me tend to do better professionally." (Confidential to that lady: Suck on the splendor of my cramped studio apartment, yea!). Some people parlay the editorship of their school papers into a nice journalism job—for example, every last employee of the New York Times was once editor-in-chief of the Harvard Crimson. Which is fine! Although it does increase your risk of being kind of a twit. Now college papers, like real papers, are having serious financial troubles. How to save them? Don't save them! The University of California- Berkeley and Syracuse University both had to cut their print papers back to four days a week recently, since they were losing money. Howard University had to stop printing its daily paper completely for several months earlier this year, until it was bailed out to the tune of $48,000. Of course, all these papers continued to publish online. The editor of the Syracuse paper said that "online readership was as high as it usually is" even when print publishing got cut. So tell us again: Why the fuck is it necessary for a college paper to publish a print edition at all? They're serving an audience where every last person has access to the internet. If a print edition isn't profitable, cut it. It's that simple. College papers are there for training purposes, primarily. There's no reason at all a college paper can't sell ads online, put all its content online, and be just as widely read as it was before. Print editions of college papers are either fully subsidized by advertising (which is getting harder, obviously), or they have some kind of endowment, or the university kicks in money to help them pay their expenses. Why not take that money and hire some laid-off journalists to teach these kids journalism? This way another former journalist would find a job, and janitors would have fewer things to pick up after entitled college kids, thereby cooling the simmering class war on campuses, leading to fewer administration buildings takeovers by young leftists channeling their rage into fair wage campaigns for university employees. College papers almost all suck, anyhow. [Inside Higher Ed]