Correction appended
Last spring, Megan Crepeau had the Daily Northwestern’s worst job: deciding which staffers would take the biggest pay cuts. She tried to ignore her personal ties to the people in the newsroom, but as the print managing editor, Crepeau had to choose how much, or how little, to pay her friends.
In the intimacy of the newsroom, reporters had no stigmas against talking about their salaries. They would bitch about their paychecks to their deputy desk editors, who would complain to their desk editors, until the tension climbed its way up to Crepeau. And although she divvied up the salary pool, she didn’t control how much cash went into it. Reporters’ pay has been steadily decreasing over the past few years. “It used to be almost a part-time job,” says Elise Foley, a senior who was the website’s managing editor that spring. “When we first started, pay used to be an incentive. By the time I left, we really stressed, ‘Don’t tell people about that, because we can’t promise anything.’” (Full disclosure: Foley has written for NU Intel.)
Once, Crepeau met with an editor to decide which of his writers were to receive more money, and which deserved less. He put his elbows on the table, and his head in his hands. “You have to pay these people more,” he cried. “They deserve so much more than you’re giving them,” he said, lamenting the labor his reporters were contributing in exchange for what amounted to practically pennies. The cuts have been relatively small for top-tier editors—perhaps $200 on paychecks that still top a grand every quarter. But they’ve been bigger for mid-level editors, and reporters who reach the two-articles-a-week threshold for pay receive less than 2/3 of what they did two years ago.
“It was the worst feeling to look at him and know that he and his staff had invested so much time, and I was only able to give them, like, ‘Hey, here’s $70 for half of the quarter. Good luck,’” Crepeau says. She couldn’t do much because there wasn’t much to work with—now, even the Daily’s adult employees are on a salary freeze. They too were once compensated competitively, but today pension payments have fallen to a fourth of what they were in 2003, and with few benefits left to cut, pay reductions and even layoffs could loom.
The Daily Northwestern became independent of the university in 1923, when Students Publishing Co. was incorporated. But the Daily’s relationship with the university long went beyond just constantly poking them with questions—Northwestern provided the paper with a subsidy. The Daily used to get a few dollars from each student through the student activity fee. In 1973, the university paid a flat sum of $27,000 per year in order to fund campus distribution. The plan was to phase this out, but when the money wasn’t in the school’s budget, the subsidy was abruptly cut altogether in 1983. Today, the Daily is run by Students Publishing Co., a nonprofit that oversees the Daily and Syllabus, the yearbook.
Currently, SPC runs a $63,000 deficit, and has been struggling for so long that the people paying the bills can’t pinpoint when they realized the company was in trouble. Readers who have picked up the paper in the past few years have felt it shrink, but few know it’s in danger of vanishing altogether.
“I think we can survive another year,” says Charles Whitaker, chairman of SPC’s board.
SPC’s most recent non-profit financial disclosure form listed a $151,000 loss for fiscal 2008. (For an archive of SPC’s forms, click here.) The company did cut costs by about $60,000 from the year prior, but even that couldn’t ameliorate plummeting revenue, which was down 22 percent from the year before. Although this latest form doesn’t contain a revenue breakdown, a tough advertising climate is probably the biggest factor. Advertising is the bedrock of the Daily, SPC’s largest business. Ads pay for publishing costs, editors’ salaries, the salaries for four full-time employees, and just about everything else. And with little hopes of fully recovering ad sales, no one knows how the company can stave off bankruptcy. If the company loses as much this year as it did last year, it will be bankrupt by this fall.
Charles Whitaker, a Medill professor and the chair of SPC’s Board of Directors, confesses he’s starting to lose sleep thinking about how to keep the Daily afloat. “At our last board meeting in March, it was pretty clear that the train was heading for the cliff, and that something’s going to have to be done,” he says. Whitaker is well-dressed and composed as he sits up straight in the high-backed chair in his Fisk Hall office. He is articulate, and well-respected by the Daily students. Sean Walsh, another former managing editor, describes Whitaker as one of the most brilliant people he has ever met. But for all his brilliance, Whitaker hasn’t begun to propose solutions to the $63,000 hole in the Daily’s balance sheet. He’s evasive on the subject of what he and the board have done about it. “The question is, ‘Why is the Daily losing money?’” he says.
Even before the recession, SPC was running small deficits, and the bottom line has been erratic. According to Whitaker, the investment portfolio has lost two-thirds of its value. In the ‘90s, the Daily was a golden goose; Whitaker describes the paper as being “really flush with cash,” while its investment portfolio was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Getting ads was a breeze. But now everything is deficit spending, and the company has begun dipping into its investment fund to pay for things like the yearbook.
College publications were able to escape the financial quicksand that mired most print media for a little longer, in part because of the niche demographic local papers attract. SPC employees believe that because the paper was affected later, the Daily will also feel the effects of an economic upturn later. But Whitaker is not sure how much longer the company can operate this way. “I think we can survive another year,” he says.
Small changes have been made, like cuts to the student salary pool and an improvement in communication between the business manager and the editor-in-chief. Whereas the newsroom and the ad shop used to be strictly delineated, now they work together. Business Manager Mitch Lee informs outgoing Editor-in-Chief Matt Forman when the paper might be tight, and Forman sometimes requests more space if they have a lot of stories. “It’s kind of like the family that eats at the dinner table now more often because they can’t afford to go out as much,” SPC General Manager Stacia Campbell says.
For the time being, the paper still publishes a print edition each weekday, still circulates 7,000 papers, still annoys the occasional administrator. But its survival is largely contingent on what-ifs and the expectation that yesterday’s business model is also tomorrow’s. The Daily is in need of a life preserver, and the stopgap measures aren’t true solutions, just piecemeal attempts to stanch the bleeding.
In SPC’s Ad Office at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, Mitch Lee sits alone, hunched over a spiral-bound book. The editorial side of the Daily doesn’t wander in until about 5 p.m., and none of the five ad salespeople is here. It’s quiet, a remnant of what was once a divide between the right and left brain of the paper. The business manager is left to pore over the paper’s advertising accounts and crunch numbers on an Australian calculator, in peace.
Just a year ago, when Lee was still an ad rep, the shop was a hangout for the business-minded staff members, many of whom were friends and fraternity brothers. “We were all making quite a bit of money, and it was right before the bad part hit,” Lee says. People cracked dead baby jokes, and inflammatory name-calling was part of getting the job done. “It’s pretty easy to have fun when you’re making a lot of money,” he says.
Lee came into his quarter-long tenure as business manager this spring with the intention, and the expectation, of operating a more serious office. These days, ad reps are required to come in for an hour each day. They cold call advertisers. They deal with clients. They work the full hour. Lee gives them homework assignments, like delivering newspapers to local clients. He gives them quizzes to make sure they are reading the paper and know who the editor-in-chief is. Not all of the fun is gone, but paychecks reflect sales performance, and morale goes hand in hand with moneymaking.
To motivate ad reps, Lee is pressured to come up with new ideas, which is why he keeps what he refers to as his “brainstorm box” in the office. A cardboard box bulges with pamphlets, handouts, clippings from other college newspapers and even games: little inspirations about things like why coupons work so well and the secrets of closing ad sales.
The homework assignments, the brainstorm box, the feel of a thin paper: these are signs of the times. Still, Lee says selling ads is hard enough as it is, and the company’s financial trouble isn’t a focus in his office. “I don’t want to scare them into being like, ‘Sinking ship. I’m out,’” he says. He’s upfront with his ad reps, but he’s not yet going out of his way to share the depth of the situation, and they don’t know the specific numbers.
Apparently, no one else is going out of his way to tell Lee, either. “Wow,” he says, when I give him an estimate of the deficit.
A few days later, I walk past the ad office and into the Daily’s newsroom to speak with Forman, who was then in the middle of his second quarter as the paper’s editor. I’m greeted with a tag-team interview and well-crafted yet plodding answers that revolve around marketing principles and the newsroom’s high morale. Forman brings an audio recorder, too, and places it on the seat next him. His current managing editor, Andrew Kaspar, sits in the corner at Forman’s insistence, nursing a Starbucks cup.
“Until I was in this position, I didn’t know the numbers, and even now, I don’t study the numbers,” Forman says. “If you talk to 90 percent of the people out there,”—he gestures toward the newsroom—“they’re not worried either.” But Forman admits the subject isn’t openly discussed.
Although Forman attends board meetings, Whitaker and the full-time staffers aren’t sure what students think about the situation, or if they think about it at all. Campbell agrees that the pressure is not on the students, because they don’t pay the bills. “They’re inscrutable,” Whitaker says. “I actually don’t get a good reading. Matt is a blank slate most of the time. He’s not someone that I can read.”
Sean Walsh, Forman’s first managing editor, recalls skipping the last part of his final board meeting last winter to get back to the newsroom. He and Forman left after listening to general updates about things like the status of the yearbook and the Daily’s website. “After that they talk about the finances and stuff, which I let the old people handle,” he says.
For each student, the Daily only has to hold on for four years. Every year, a fresh crop of reporters graduates with an arsenal of skills they can tout in job interviews. They keep the memories of meeting the football coach and sleeping on the couch in the newsroom. Although they know they’ll be facing the same worn-out budgets in newsrooms across the country—if they can even get a job in journalism—they can leave the Daily‘s financial afflictions behind. Instead of becoming a testbed for innovative approaches to the news business, Medill’s future journalists treat the Daily as a bulwark against the realities they’ll confront when they graduate.
Whitaker thinks the knowledge would create newsroom panic. “The students will start to worry about, you know, whether or not the publication is going to fold, whether or not we’ll continue to have a daily newspaper,” he says.
“Until I was in this position, I didn’t know the numbers, and even now, I don’t study the numbers,” Forman, the outgoing editor-in-chief, says. “If you talk to 90 percent of the people out there”—he gestures toward the newsroom—“they’re not worried either.”
None of the student stakeholders I spoke with had ever been brought up to speed on the financial crunch. Part of that is willful ignorance—Walsh told me he’d spent hours poring through university’s 990 forms, but he’d never thought to look at SPC’s. But it’s also partly by design. As Whitaker rarely visits the newsroom, the role of gatekeeper falls to Campbell, who controls everything about the Daily but its content from her corner office on Norris’ third floor. She’s instinctively protective of the Daily’s reputation. When I begin to explain I’m writing about the paper’s finances because they don’t look so good, and she forcefully interrupts. “Which is, of course, your interpretation,” she snaps, before I finish the statement.
Campbell’s occasional aggression hints at a deep-rooted protectiveness. When pressed, she’s matter-of-fact about the current difficulties, and she stresses that the Daily’s financial situation is not unique. “I don’t think we’re any more special,” she says.
Campbell says she’s done her part to trim unnecessary expenses. She’s picking paper clips off the floor. She doesn’t set out Halloween candy each October. Former Editor-in-Chief Emily Glazer worked with Campbell to cut costs here and there around the newsroom. They removed a few unused phones and saved several hundred dollars—”things that were just literally eating up money that didn’t need to be,” Glazer says. Today, Glazer holds an unofficial position at the Daily: fundraiser. She has been compiling a database of Daily alums in hopes of securing donations and looking for grants the paper could qualify for.
During Glazer’s reign as editor-in-chief, her main goal was to push the Daily into the present. She split the managing editor position in two to separate the print and online sides of the Daily, and she pushed through a redesigned website in the fall of 2009.
In the newsroom, the impetus for overhauling the website was a clunky, ugly, search-unfriendly design so awful it had spawned online-only competitors like NorthbyNorthwestern. For the redesign, aesthetics were paramount, and expediency was prized: the paper’s new online home had to be ready for fall of 2009, and it had to hook visitors.
But finances also played a role. The first decision for Glazer and Elise Foley, her online managing editor, was to choose to stick with the current clunky host, College Publisher, or venture into uncoded territory and run it independently. College Publisher represented a bargain the paper had struck almost ten years earlier. In exchange for the lion’s share of online revenue, the MTV Networks-owned service hosted the paper’s website for free. But it was also slow to implement changes Daily staffers wanted to the website and as the years wore on it looked increasingly like a unfair deal.
One of the few bright spots for newspapers nationally has been their websites. Nearly 9 percent of advertising revenue now comes from online sales, according to data from the Newspapers Association of America. Industry analysts expect that portion to grow dramatically in the coming years. Online ads haven’t saved entire newspapers, but they have saved jobs and, at papers with the best-performing sites, they’ve staved off the prospect of massive layoffs and bankruptcy in the near term.
Rick Edmonds, the leader of news transformation at the Poynter Institute, estimates readers and advertisements will all be digital within the next five to ten years. Although it’s currently more difficult for smaller publications to generate online revenue, that’s the way business is going. “The consensus strategy is for medium-sized publications to have the presence online and try to build traffic.”
As Foley and Glazer began researching options, Campbell aggregated information and fired off e-mails—Foley recalls sometimes receiving upwards of ten per day—detailing both the technical horrors of College Publisher and the difficulties of going it alone. The Daily would not have total control with College Publisher, especially over the prime advertising spots. On the other hand, an independent site would offer more control, but it would cost, both in terms of hosting, support and initial design and infrastructure.
Campbell’s emails presented a complete picture of the possibilities. Ultimately they opted to continue with College Publisher because the transition would be smoother, but also because it would be cheaper. “Stacia raised a lot of concerns about going off on our own, in terms of the cost,” Foley says. Although she says they discussed the possibility of higher ad revenue through an independent method, they decided it wasn’t worth the gamble if they had to balance the cost of a server and they couldn’t sell their ad space.
“We didn’t want to take money away from paying our staffers or to improving the Daily by going away from College Publisher,” Glazer says. Although the Daily is not able to maximize its advertising potential through College Publisher, it is able to place a few ads. Foley says if they had left College Publisher and there weren’t any advertisements coming in, the paper would have been left with the costs of the server and paying someone to create the website. To sell ads online, the ad office would have needed to learn an entirely new set of sales skills, and would probably need more staffers. The paper’s detailed ad kit says nothing about online ad rates, and refers would-be web advertisers to a full-time employee in SPC’s composition shop, not Lee’s office. An independent website would have necessitated an investment of time, money, and energy the paper didn’t have.
The Daily Pennsylvanian at the University of Pennsylvania is similar to the Daily Northwestern. It’s independent of the university, runs a deficit, works with a general manager who has been there for longer than students have been alive. But in the fall of 2009, the Pennsylvanian left College Publisher. Although College Publisher provides a tremendous amount of free tools, the service also retains total control over the largest advertising spots on the website. Penn students were not being given the flexibility they wanted. For these two reasons, the paper’s board decided to make the switch, according to General Manager Eric Jacobs. Now they pay to host the website, but they control the ad space. The year’s numbers aren’t in, but Jacobs estimates that the revenue from the website covered the cost of hosting it and they probably came out a little bit ahead, he says.
With its own web ad team, the paper is now positioned to grow its online sales quickly as the industry recovers from the recession. “We’re always looking at what areas of our business are doing well, and which areas are not performing well, and trying to make changes, and innovate and fix things,” Jacobs says. “Certainly over the past year we’ve spent a lot of time examining all the things in our business operations to see which things we can do to try to generate more revenue in the coming year. Pretty much everything from the students we recruit on the business side of the paper, and our approach to selling advertising, our rate structure, our training, you name it.”
Both Glazer and Foley agree that websites have profit-making potential, but insist College Publisher remained the better choice to transition quickly. “Emily really wanted to have a new site during her time as editor-in-chief, and I wanted to have that done as well,” Foley says. “Given the time constraints, staying on College Publisher was a good decision in the short term.”
But the dailynorthwestern.com redesign hasn’t resulted in a traffic windfall. According to statistics from web-traffic tracker Alexa.com, visitors to the site retain the erratic use patterns they exhibited before the redesign. The website doesn’t appear to be any more of a portal, or even a regular destination, than it was before the 2009 overhaul. And with the College Publisher deal still firmly in place, significant online ad revenues wouldn’t materialize even with a sudden and sustained spike in readership.
Instead, Daily leaders are hoping salvation comes not from an advertising rebound. They’re looking for a bailout.
As welcome as it would be to the paper’s bottom line, university support would greatly undermine its prized independence. For example, in February, Virginia Tech threatened to pull $70,000 of annual funding in order to punish its student newspaper, the result of a dispute over the paper’s refusal to change its online commenting policy. Ultimately the funding wasn’t cut, but these types of spats could be a reality if the university were to step in.
An alternative to a direct bailout from NU would be to siphon ASG-allocated money from the student activities fee to the Daily. Then the Daily would need to become an ASG-recognized organization, which would complicate the way the paper covers the student body, as it would be among the groups vying for a portion of ASG’s $1.2 million annual outlays. But in the event of this kind of agreement, Walsh says, “as young journalists, we’re all aspiring to ‘bring down the man’ or something like that, so it’s more likely that we would piss off ASG in this situation than we would censor ourselves.”
Whitaker, however, is leery of an arrangement like this and would prefer something more conducive to “separation of church and state,” he says. “If there’s another way to craft a fee specifically for the newspaper that doesn’t get funneled through student activities, that’s what we would like to do.”
If the Daily were to fall under ASG, there’s still no way the student government could quickly plug the paper’s deficit. ASG puts student groups on training wheels before they can receive the kind of money the Daily needs to survive. A-status students groups are the ones that receive big money, and only time and performance can make a group eligible for that type of status. “The Daily would be treated like any other group on campus,” ASG President Claire Lew says, meaning at least two years of climbing the status ladder.
When I begin to explain I’m writing about the paper’s finances because they don’t look so good, she forcefully interrupts. “Which is, of course, your interpretation,” she snaps, before I finish the statement.
Whitaker has tried to reach out to President Morton Schapiro, but the president’s office pushed him towards outgoing Student Affairs VP Bill Banis, with whom he has resisted, even refused, meeting. ”It’s an important enough conversation to begin in the president’s office,” Whitaker argues, and he is continuing his efforts to get on the president’s calendar first. The president’s office declined to comment, saying the president’s correspondence and calendar are confidential. Shortly after, Whitaker finally received a phone call from the office—not to grant his request, but to demand why he had discussed confidential affairs with a student journalist.
The office’s rebuff of Whitaker strikes at a fundamental question: Is the Daily just another student media outlet, or something more important? The prevailing view in Rebecca Crown Center, the administrative seat, appears to be the former. As NU disseminates more and more “news” on its own website and through its official magazine, it has less need for a nettlesome, adversarial publication outside its direct control. “We just don’t have any insight into their finances,” says Al Cubbage, vice president for university relations. “It’s not something that the university administration has ever had a discussion about.”
While NU probably won’t allow the paper to go under entirely, funneling $60,000 each year to support a printed paper seems unlikely. But the alternative—doing just what’s needed to support the paper’s website, and that alone—wouldn’t foot the bill for the paper’s full-time staffers, Campbell and her three colleagues. Student editors could lose their remaining salaries, too.
But that’s a future the paper’s staff hasn’t begun to contemplate. “I think everything will rebound and there will still be a Daily as we know it,” Forman says. “I don’t know if the New York Times as we know it will exist in five or ten years. However, people have said that local journalism might be the way to go in the future because it’s specialized and has a niche audience, and that’s exactly what we have.”
The original version of this story incorrectly stated that administrators at public universities can legally control the content of a student publication. The phrase has been removed. Thanks to commenters for pointing out the error.
Ms. Karas,
This article might have been more compelling were it not for the fact that NUIntel makes a frequent habit of rehashing Daily coverage. Personally, cuts to my paycheck (which went from next to nothing to nothing) are not enough of a deterrent to jump ship from this Titanic of a student publication and perhaps swim over to the kind of investigative work with punch, which you have so artfully produced here. It’s lovely to read yet another bleak outlook on the future of journalism, I doubt anyone at The Daily is as deluded as you imagine in this piece, however. Perhaps part masochism, perhaps part idealism, but I would guess, its many of the same reasons you yourself chose to attend Medill that we toil away night after night on something so widely disparaged yet so wholly useful.
Cheers,
Lauren Kelleher
Daily Staffer
nuintel should change it’s name to Northwestern at Night.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Alyssa Karas and Newspaper News, NU Intel. NU Intel said: The untold story of why @thedailynu needs a bailout | http://bit.ly/9xPyzU [...]
Did you guys consider that the first chart in this story is extremely misleading? I know you would like to elicit a reaction with your coverage, but your choice of making the Y-axis of the graph not go to zero (unlike all other graphs in this story) to have jaw-dropping effect is dubious at best and unethical at worst.
While The Daily’s financial difficulties — and the possible consequences — are certainly worth discussing, it’s ridiculous for you to cite pay cuts as a serious problem. The pay has always been like a bonus — you work there for the invaluable experience of working for a well-respected daily newspaper. When I was editor in chief, I made about $5 an hour, and I was the mostly highly paid person on the editorial side! You could get a job working at Panera and make more than that.
Wenzel is right, first off. No one should be joining student groups for the money. Second, what’s with the needless dig at Charles Whitaker?
–
“But for all his brilliance, Whitaker hasn’t begun to propose solutions to the $63,000 hole in the Daily’s balance sheet. He’s evasive on the subject of what he and the board have done about it. “The question is, ‘Why is the Daily losing money?’” he says.”
–
Every brilliant mind in our industry is trying to solve (and losing sleep over) the same problem. It’s pretty tough for one man to save journalism.
Chris
Former Forum Editor
>>>its many of the same reasons you yourself chose to attend Medill that we toil away night after night on something so widely disparaged yet so wholly useful.
That sums it up for me. In my dim and fading memory – MSJ ’93 – Charles Whitaker is more brilliant than he is evasive or ‘articulate.’ I’m good for $200 if you make sure my earliest attempts at journalism never make their way to the Web.
fight fight fight!
yeah, this is the same problem every paper in the country is facing. I doubt the $70 (or whatever) check most Daily staffers get each quarter is a factor at all in their involvement.
the way this story is presented is way too sexed up … which is what this site does, fine, whatever, but come on … “The Death of the Daily”? Seriously?
Also: the subhead seems kind of misleading. “As the paper bleeds cash and exhausts its rainy-day reserves, its leaders pray for a bailout from Northwestern.” Nowhere in the article did I get the sense that anyone was “praying” for an NU bailout. That’s a bit sensationalistic, in my mind.
This rambling story misses a couple of points. Expenses are $700,000, but what are they? I assume (but don’t know) that the largest expense is printing the paper. There are other omissions. What is the salary of the editor in chief and the general manager. I am still trying to figure out what the salary paid to the reporters is, and gather the ad reps are paid on commission.
Why is the paper losing money? It’s because there is no compelling reason to read it. You have lost your audience. Too much testbed for innovative approaches to the news business, not enough news. My solution: figure out which days are profitable, and which not, then stop publishing on days that are unprofitable. The Daily can continue as a daily Web publication (perhaps a place to position those stories that are a testbed for innovative approaches to the news business). But the print product would only be two or three days a week. More drastic would be to move to Web publication only and kill the print edition. There seems to be enough money for that approach.
Finally, you have to solve the news issue. Maybe a management change with someone driven with a back-to-basics approach is needed.
@ Ed.
That would be the worst possible mistake. With online CPM running about 1/10 that of print, going digital would almost certainly reduce revenue more than it would cut costs. The only big papers that are successful and the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, because they don’t listen to advice from Internet companies.
In all seriousness, Daily staff, I’m good for $500 if, and only if, you keep the print edition. (I’d also ask you not to describe college professors as ‘articulate,’ since it’s pretty obvious, but I won’t insist on that.) Seriously. Roblevine rcn with an ‘at’ between the name and the ‘rcn’ and a ‘dot-com’ after the ‘rcn.’ (Don’t want the bots to get my email.) I know it’s not much, but it’s something. Keep fighting the good fight. -rob
I’m sorry, but I will never have any pity for the Daily staffers getting pay cuts. No other on-campus publication pays their contributors. None. And I guarantee you they work just as hard. Kelleher, independent on-campus publications in the past have been just as competitive and committed to news-gathering as the Daily, without faculty sponsors or any form of a payroll. Criticizing NU Intel for running news the Daily has broken is like criticizing any publication that uses information the NYTimes has collected, or cites the AP in a story–if you think that’s something to complain about, I’ll be very impressed when you make a newspaper career of entirely directly-sourced information.
When I first heard about this story, my reaction was that NU Intel is doing PR work for itself with a journalistic facade. For those of you who aren’t embarrassingly Medilldo-ish, this Web site was founded by three former Daily staffers; almost every top editor at NU Intel worked at The Daily (aside from the one who wrote this story i.e. the highest ranking NU Intel staffer who wouldn’t have an explicit conflict of interest on the subject … like everyone who edited this story did). Putting The Daily down for clutching to its print product is essentially justifying NU Intel’s existence. This is the story they’ve been dying to write. It’s far and away the most thoroughly reported article NU Intel has ever published, I’m pretty sure it’s the longest, and one editor told me it’s their “go out with a bang” story (NU Intel is not publishing in the summer or fall).
And I’m glad they did it. Alyssa worked really hard on this story, and it brings up an important issue for the campus community. I hope this starts a productive conversation about the future of campus media.
I do, however, have a few problems with the story that I think readers should consider (I know this is obnoxious, and I’m sorry – this is what happens when reporters report on reporters):
- The first quote in the story is from Elise Foley. She works for NU Intel, and that’s not mentioned in the story. News publications normally make a note of that to be transparent about sources having potential conflicts of interest.
- This is simply false: “paychecks that still top a grand every quarter.” I managed the newsroom and editorial board payroll Winter Quarter. Not a single staffer, including the editor in chief, made four digits.
- Please, please, please change the subhed on this story. We are not seeking a bail out right now, and you know it. I’ve talked to Alyssa about it! The sad thing is it’s actually making an impact because it seems like very few people who don’t work for The Daily are reading past the headline. A lot of people are asking me if we’re really seeking a bail out. You’re polluting the conversation with such an enormous unwarranted leap.
- “NU probably won’t allow the paper to go under entirely.” First of all, read that statement and then read the headline. Something doesn’t seem to line up. Second, there is no attribution of any kind, meaning this statement is either a completely unwarranted assertion or an unbelievably important piece of reporting that goes undeveloped in the story. Did someone tell you that? If so, that should be an enormous part of the story. That’s huge. Or did you make that up?
- My name appears four times, and all four mentions are passing remarks. I was interviewed for 45 minutes, and Alyssa asked me about nearly every major issue that her story touches on. I would not be bothered by this if the points I raised in our interview were somewhere else in the story, quoted by another Daily staffer. But they’re not, and that’s really disappointing. I recorded the conversation and listened to it again before posting this comment to make sure I’m not simply blinded by frustration right now and exaggerating how selective the quoting is. Other Daily staffers recorded their interviews as well, and I’ve even heard those, too. They brought up many of the same points, several of which were EXTREMELY relevant to the issues in the story, and they are not included in this article. NU Intel heard what it wanted to hear.
In one sense, NU Intel was the best publication to run this story. Aside from the fact that it’s the only group of people in the world that care this much about The Daily aside from The Daily itself, it’s also the most knowledgeable on the subject. In another sense, it’s the worst because it has such a vested interest in fate of The Daily.
You’re right, Sean, that was obnoxious.
I have never been a Daily staffer. I’ve written something like three articles for the paper in the past four years, in each case because I was asked by a friend who worked there. I can assure you no one on staff was “dying” to publish this piece, though perhaps if someone had been, it would’ve been published on time.
What exactly are the points that Alyssa failed to include? You say that you hope this “starts a productive conversation about the future of campus media,” but instead of addressing the real concerns of the piece, you’ve resorted to petty personal sniping: We’re obsessed with you, we feel the need to legitimize ourselves, i.e. we can’t objectively report the facts. You’ve made every effort to negate the very “hard work” by Alyssa that you ostensibly praise. Really, dude, what gives?
I can’t address all your concerns, mostly because I just don’t know enough, but I’ll answer these:
- Elise has written for NU Intel. We should’ve included a full disclosure. Sorry about that. I’ll fix it now.
- Having spoken to Whitaker and others, I think we have every confidence in saying that the Daily is, indeed, looking for an administrative bailout.
- To say that NU probably won’t let the Daily die, at least entirely, is intelligent conjecture. The Daily is part of what sells this school to prospective students. (The headline, alas, is allusive and, yes, sensationalistic. “What Will Remain of the Daily?” is probably more accurate, but nuance doesn’t always make for good copy. Sorry, we’re not very apologetic about these things.)
As a former Daily editor (’81), I would sincerely hate to see the paper go under. That said, can the salaries. No one got paid in the past, except those who could qualify for work-study. Second, the paper exists not soley to provide information for the university community, but also as a critical training ground for future journalists — Medill should step up. Third, doesn’t NU have a pretty decent Business School? Sounds like a great class project — sort of a Celebrity/Student Apprentice, eh?
Hey, I’m an editor for a daily newspaper at another top school for journalism (the College of Communication at Boston University). I’m there until four in the morning working for no money at a paper that is millions of dollars in debt. We win.
Wait — I thought NU people were supposed to be so much smarter. After all, they go to NU, and that’s in Chicago, where there are all sorts of things to do!
And I thought the young journos had all the answers and were going to — all together now — SAVE JOURNALISM! So how can this be happening?
Perhaps during the 1990s, when the paper was profitable, the NU people should have spent more time planning for the future and less time being arrogant.
The real story, though, is that all universities need to give serious thought to closing their journalism programs. The jobs are going away quickly, and even if they weren’t, it’s apparent journalism schools have not been teaching the right things. There is too much bad, lazy writing in today’s newspapers, and there is far too much obsession on things other than content (which probably helps to explain why the writing is so bad).
I am 100% in agreement with Ryan Wenzel when he writes: “it’s ridiculous for you to cite pay cuts as a serious problem. The pay has always been like a bonus — you work there for the invaluable experience of working for a well-respected daily newspaper.”
When I began shooting for the Daily last year I was promised a paycheck as long as I covered a given number stories per week for a month — a paycheck, by the way, that I never received. But I didn’t complain because I loved the work and would have done it for free anyway. Which is exactly what I did this year, when the Daily doubled the number of stories per week a photographer had to cover in order to be paid.
Hell, I’d be willing to forfeit my pay check even if I were in an editorial position. I didn’t get a cent when I was doing this shit in high school, and I didn’t care because I loved it. Why should any of that change now?
“Hell, I’d be willing to forfeit my pay check even if I were in an editorial position. I didn’t get a cent when I was doing this shit in high school, and I didn’t care because I loved it. Why should any of that change now?”
Newspaper publishers are going to love you. “I’ll do it all — and for LOW PAY!!!!!” Great bargaining chip, dude.
P.S.: On further review, I see that person in Boston trumps you. No wonder journalists will never earn a living wage.
Yeah, well, BU may trump me in quantity of time put in, but maybe I’d trump him in quality of work churned out. No way to know
Also, is BU really a top school for journalism? This is the first time I have ever heard that claim. Or is it like Ohio U., where all the OU grads talk about how great they are, but no one ever sees the proof?
Evanston is at least cleaner than Athens, Ohio, even if the Evanston crackhouses are included. But a junk yard would be cleaner than Campustown in Athens. If there’s one thing people in southeast Ohio excel at, it’s filth.
TL; DNR
Meh = moron. Moron = Meh. The symmetric property applies.
Alyssa, I think the topic you tackled is an interesting and worthwhile one. A college newspaper is a unique lens through which to look at the current changes in journalism. I think, though, that your article ignores some of the questions it raises.
I’m surprised you didn’t look into the situations on other campuses, where daily publications have had to scale back to four production days a week. You discuss how SPC full-time staffers don’t know how students are feeling about our sorry financial situation, but you didn’t talk to any reporters, photographers, copy editors or designers who could have given you the answers you were looking for about newsroom morale and their knowledge of the situation. I interact with a lot of staffers on a nightly basis. From what I have seen, people at The Daily are not ignorant to what is happening to newspapers across the country and are not blind to what is happening to us. That said, they also love what they do and will keep doing it for little or no pay for as long as possible. I see no newsroom panic on the horizon. If, in the future, my paycheck can no longer cover the two pairs of shoes it covers now, I think I’ll be ok.
There is a reason for the wall between The Daily’s ad shop and the newsroom. The business and editorial sides of the publication are largely meant to be kept separate. The students I work with on the editorial side know what’s going on, but it’s not their job to worry about finances. Their job is to fairly and accurately report and to put together a high quality product.
“That said, they also love what they do and will keep doing it for little or no pay for as long as possible.”
Again, we see what is wrong with the journalism business model. As long as people keep saying they will do journalism for little to no pay, then that’s exactly what they will get — little to no pay.
The trust-fund elitists and other idiot rich kids who go to NU might be able to afford that for a while, but many people cannot.
On another note, I looked up several lists of “elite” journalism schools, and Boston U. was on none of them.
From NU Intel Editorial Director Paul Schrodt’s comment:
“The headline, alas, is allusive and, yes, sensationalistic. “What Will Remain of the Daily?” is probably more accurate, but nuance doesn’t always make for good copy.”
Thank you for helping me with word economy, Paul; the editorial attitude you display above is pretty much everything I wanted to say about what’s in this story.
So here’s what’s not in the story, like you asked. The following quotes are transcribed verbatim from my interview with the writer. Again, my problem is not that my quotes weren’t selected, it’s that the concepts I brought up were not addressed in the story whatsoever. The writer didn’t even bring them up and shoot them down with opposing information. And this wasn’t a rogue source situation, either; I’ve talked to the other editors who were interviewed and listened to their interviews, and they brought up many of the same points. Alyssa interviewed us to get anecdotes, not to learn about the issue she was reporting.
“The salaries change in every payroll based on how editors do and stuff, but as far as the total amount, the newsroom budget, that stayed the same from Fall Quarter to Winter Quarter.”
-
“With the same amount of money, me and Matt Spector (managing editor in Fall Quarter, 2009) allocated it radically differently. He put a lot more money into the edit board than I did, and he put a lot more money into the newsroom in general, like the reporters and copy editors than he did. But we had the same total, so I think if you were look at one position and how it changes over time, that might have more to do with the newsroom payroll manager, the managing editor, than it does with the actual total.”
-
“It’s a lot more complicated economically to take just the numbers from the last years and make predictions, given the current economic status and The Daily’s business model.”
-
“The fear in the newspaper industry is that [advertising {replaced “that”}]’s just going to keep going down until it’s nothing, and obviously subscriptions have fallen. But The Daily is lucky because it is a free publication with an extremely niche market.”
-
“Because The Daily is free, there’s no reason that readership is going to go down, there’s no reason that our ad rate, once the businesses can afford to buy ads again, which is up to the national recession, not us, there’s no reason that those businesses aren’t going to buy ads again because we’re going to have the same amount of readers. We’re not going to lose readers because people aren’t cutting their subscriptions because they were never subscribers. Students are still going to be bored in lecture halls. They’re going to go on Facebook, and they’re going to read The Daily, and that’s not going to change, and that’s how we made money before.”
-
“I heard ad sales were down, and they were down during the recession. I heard they’re better now than they were last quarter.”
It’s mind-boggling to me that this last point didn’t make it into the story. Especially considering that the latest 990s available right now are from the middle of the recession, how could you not mention what’s been going on since the economy started rebounding? And there’s no way to claim ignorance here; I told you in an interview. To reiterate, I’m not saying I’m the end-all source for this story, and I’m not saying it’s ridiculous the writer failed to pull anything with my name on it from our 45-minute interview aside from four anecdotes. What I am saying is that these points were brought up by multiple sources Alyssa interviewed, and they were intentionally ignored to make the story better. After all, “nuance doesn’t always make for good copy.” Selective reporting and sensationalistic headlines do.
I find it completely ridiculous that NU Intel should publish this story about the supposed lack of morale for the Daily, when they can’t even conjure up enough morale to keep publishing next fall.
NU Intel, in case anyone hadn’t noticed, can only scrounge up a handful of posts a week (most of which are sensationalistic if not outright tasteless) while, had Karas actually asked any of the hard-working Daily staffers who are visible but silent in her story, the Daily puts out more content in Day than Intel did in the past few months. Perhaps college journalism has more to do with ethos and passion than it does with making a “bang”: the death of NU Intel should serve as reminder that students are staying on board with the former.
Also, the fact that one of their top editors feel the need to act out like a 14-year-old girl on this thread, rather than stick by the story, speaks volumes.
What’s amazing about this story is that goes on for 4,000 words discussing the woes of the paper without ever addressing what is the main problem with the Daily Northwestern – it’s not a very good paper. Considering the fact that it is published by a university that has one of the top journalism programs in the country, it’s almost an embarrassment. It does an amazingly poor job of covering what goes on at the school. For example, NU puts on dozens of top-notch plays and musical events every quarter, but one would never know that by reading the daily. For some reason the editors think that they need to spend as much effort covering Evanston as they do covering NU. That may satisfy their ambitions of being a ‘real’ newspaper, but it wont’ get many students to read the paper. The first principle of any publication is that it has to serve its target readers. The main problem with the daily is that it doesn’t do that. Until the editors address that issue they can’t begin to solve its financial problems.
This is a joke that everyone’s getting so worked up about this. Get a grip neither the Daily or NUIntel comes close to a legitimate public newspaper. All these publication do is provide a vehicle for snobby journalism students to put something on their resume.
Very few writers actually do a good job with their stories. I have flipped through the Daily probably every other day over the past two year and often the most riveting section is the sudoku.
Everyone needs to get a grip, chill out, and enjoy their summers.
One question I was left with after reading this story…are online student publications like NorthbyNorthwestern or NU Intel profitable? Obviously their costs are going to be much lower than the Daily’s, but there still has to be some expenses for server space, etc. From what I understand, NBN is primarily funded by donations and fundraiser parties, not sure about NU Intel. I’m not trying to say this is a bad thing, but it seems like online student publications aren’t really a successful business model either.
Also, I agree with “Red” that the Daily could be a better paper, but I definitely don’t think covering every single freaking music or theatre event on campus is the way to go about doing that…honestly there have to be at least 5-10 going on every weekend on this campus. I’m sure they’re great and all, but unless you’re involved with these performances, I doubt you have a burning desire to read about them. So yeah, I would probably rather read about crime in Evanston or whatever rather than the fact that some theater kids are excited about doing the 374382th production of a famous musical.
Hi commenters–
I thought I’d address a few logistical points about NU Intel.
Medill student: You’re absolutely right that NU Intel will not be publishing in the fall, but it’s not for lack of morale. It just so happens that the bulk of our editorial board will be either abroad or on JR in the fall, so we made the decision to take a quarter off and relaunch in the winter. We’re all incredibly excited about continuing NU Intel next year. Remember, we’re still a relatively new publication, so we are indeed working out kinks that may have contributed a less-than-stellar amount of content. But the general consensus among our writers and our editors is that we’re very proud of what we’ve produced this year and that we’re ready to take on future challenges.
questions…: Yes, websites have inherent costs, and yes, they are much, much lower than the cost to print content, such as with the Daily or NBN’s magazine incarnation. (I don’t want to speak for NBN, but I believe events like their fundraiser parties are aimed predominantly at funding the print product.) Websites are lucky because money doesn’t have to be much of an issue, so we don’t really have to concern ourselves as much with having a successful business model. Donations, grant money, and just a little fundraising can help fend off basic costs.
Hope that helps!
Serena Dai
NU Intel editor
srna16@gmail.com
From this article, I sense that the paper hasn’t had a total budget overhaul. Lots of publications are cutting people and frequency, not just picking up paper clips and cutting phone service and staff salaries — although every dollar saved does help. What about cutting back the print special additions? When I last worked at the Daily in 2006, the Daily also produced [in print] then-Play/now-The Weekly, Gameday, a holiday gift guide, a graduation guide, a freshman guide, and the Summer NU.
Are these editions still produced in print? Do each of these special editions sell out of their ad space? Wouldn’t it have been more cost-efficient to move these online, thereby saving printing [and mailing, in the case of the Freshman issue] costs and also providing an incentive for people to visit the Daily website? Also, hows the yearbook doing? Is it helping or hindering SPC finances?
Commenter questions…. had a good question too — are NBN, NUIntel, maybe even the Chron keeping afloat? NBN is a nonprofit too, is it operating at a deficit? I think this article would be better having NBN on record for however they decided to respond to that question, be it no comment or whatever info they’d like to extend to NUIntel.
And what about NUIntel? NUIntel has no information for potential advertiser on its advertise page down below, so how did it operate? Grant? Staff-subsidized? Was this publication operating as a nonprofit? It wouldn’t have hurt to have some clarity on how this publication worked, to contrast it to how the Daily and NBN works.
I’m glad this article was published, and its been on the Daily Northwestern alum group on Facebook for a couple of days now. I would have liked to see some more reporting on the Daily’s competitors so that the reader has a better picture what media publications are on campus now (where did NUComment or NUde go?), and what are they struggling with.
Tina
Former Daily staffer, ’05, ’06
North by Northwestern is indeed a non-for-profit corporation. We are primarily funded by advertising in both the print magazine and on northbynorthwestern.com, as well as by grants and donations.
Our print magazine is by far our most expensive venture, but we are able to cover our costs each quarter. That being said, we operate at a significantly lower cost than the Daily Northwestern.
As a new publication, we do not have the capacity to operate at a deficit. When faced with financial difficulty we have responded by using competitively priced printers and adjusting circulation when necessary.
North by Northwestern would welcome any additional questions from NUIntel concerning our business model.
Sincerely,
Nick Castele
President and Editor-in-Chief
Aubrey Blanche
Director and Managing Editor
How many ads did NBN have in its last issue? (You can count them yourself by looking at the issue online.)
Let’s be clear: The magazine probably wouldn’t have made it to press without a grant from Campus Progress, an arm of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. That’s money The Daily, which is non-partisan, can’t take.
The Daily has serious financial woes, many of which are of its own making. It hasn’t tried enough real innovation on either the editorial or financial sides. I’m glad the new business manager makes his charges do cold calls, because that was long overdue. I have several disagreements with this article — for one, I was a leader of The Daily not long ago and still am a religious person, and I’ve never prayed for a dime from Morty Schapiro — but those disagreements don’t change the underlying theme: The Daily will only survive if it overhauls the way it produces itself and markets itself to residents and advertisers. Looking for handouts from benefactors won’t solve a damn thing in the long term.
Nomaan
Former reporter, city editor and managing editor
They should combine the crime reports and the theater stories. This would take some ingenuity, but as NU students are self-proclaimed super-smart people, they can pull it off.
Perhaps they could start like this:
“Angelo Abercrombie’s performance as Iago in ‘Othello’ may have led us to wish we were elsewhere — just as long as we weren’t at the corner of Main and Sixth, where an armed gunman was stealing wallets and cell phones from passersby.”
Or maybe combine the theater stories with athletics:
“‘Terminator 2 On Broadway’ opened for its 65th consecutive night, just as the Northwestern men’s basketball team was falling short of the NCAA tournament for the 122nd consecutive season.”
Again, NU students are ultra-smart (just ask them), so I’m sure they can improve upon these examples.
I hope you’ll correct a serious misstatement of fact in your story. Your assertion that “Legally, administrators at public universities have total control over any student publications they subsidize” is categorically wrong. No court has said that providing some funding to a publication gives school officials content control, and all but one court ruling on the issue of college press freedom over the course of the last 40 years has said the First Amendment provides almost complete protection to the editorial independence of public college student newspapers. The one court decision to the contrary (Hosty v. Carter, decided by the federal 7th Cir. Court of Appeals in 2005) was effectively negated by the Illinois legislature when it enacted the College Campus Press Act in 2007. (See http://www.splc.org/newsflash.asp?id=1601&year=2007 for details.)
College press freedom is protected, even for subsidized publications. For a brief explanation of this, check out the Student Press Law Center’s resources on the subject: http://www.splc.org/legalresearch.asp?subcat=4
And PLEASE correct this statement in your story.
“Legally, administrators at public universities have total control over any student publications they subsidize, and the same would certainly hold true here, at least informally.”
What legal expert told you this? It’s not true.
Hi Neil,
Based on the decision in Hosty v. Carter, U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit, college administrator’s do have control, should they wish to use it, over the student publications they support. Since Illinois is included in the 7th Circuit, this holds legally true here.
NU Intel Editors
Your response to Neil is wrong for two reasons: 1) the Hosty decision did NOT say that administrators have “total” control. The holding was much more limited, and did not apply to all public college student publications. 2) The Hosty decision was effectively overruled by the state legislature in enacting statutory protections for college journalists.
The assertion in the story is flat out wrong. Anyone who knows anything about college media law will tell you that. It’s disappointing that NU Intel editors are not willing to consult any expert on this (especially given the fact that as Northwestern is a private university, none of this matters to this Daily anyway).
_Based on the decision in Hosty v. Carter, U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit, college administrator’s do have control_
Nice grammar, dudes.
[...] for its editorial success. Is it now one of the reasons for a dramatic level of financial duress? A new investigative report argues the Daily Northwestern‘s entirely advertising-reliant business model- free from school [...]