The signs are everywhere, but they are not new: The journalism industry is in free fall.
Facing double-digit percent declines in advertising income and a dwindling print audience, nearly every major news outlet has made drastic cuts in editorial staff.
What many people may not realize, however, is that college newspapers are facing a similar ““ perhaps even graver ““ situation.
Papers like UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian and our very own Daily Bruin are not, contrary to popular perception, funded by the school or state government in any way. They are independent papers ““ businesses that are now facing the same issues with which their professional counterparts are forced to contend.
In light of these events, the public ““ specifically readers of college papers ““ must rally in support of these institutions before they disappear.
The problem is not especially complex: When a business loses revenue, it must make cuts. This gets tricky when there are no places to make cuts.
Most Daily Bruin writers are not paid for their work, so there are no salaries to adjust and no bonuses to forgo.
Operationally, The Daily Bruin has an approximate budget of just over $2 million per fiscal year. Berkeley’s Daily Californian has a budget of nearly $1 million.
This past August, management at the Daily Californian made a decision no communications board wants to make: They cut publication to just four days a week.
Some readers will undoubtedly see this as unlikely to happen at UCLA, while others may not think it is a big deal at all. Both of these viewpoints are misguided.
No college paper ““ the Daily Bruin included ““ is immune from the ills facing the journalism industry. Leadership here at The Bruin is actively exploring options for financial betterment.
The problem with an apathetic view of the fall of college newspapers is that it embodies the cliche maxim “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.”
Without college newspapers, a breadth of issues would fail to be covered at all ““ in-depth sports reporting, attention to student issues, opinion pages that send a collective message of oversight to politicians and administrators on local and national levels, investigative oversight of the institutions at which they are based ““ the list goes on and on.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism best highlighted (albeit inadvertently) the importance of the college newspaper niche when it claimed that “journalism’s (problem is) oversupply, too many news organizations doing the same thing.”
The argument is that at some point, the news world becomes oversaturated with press, and readers are not going to go to multiple newspapers to read the same topic.
But the Daily Bruin is not a part of this hyper-obsessive national media. While it certainly engages national issues such as the election, it does so in a manner no other newspaper in the nation does: a Bruin manner.
In other words, while there may be thousands of journals covering the election, there is only one covering how UCLA students voted, offering UCLA students’ opinion, and reporting on a wide array of UCLA sports.
Thus the preservation of this specialized sort of media is vital to the flow of information to those who care the most.
It has been widely reported that the Internet is the main cause of the print industry’s problems. After all, if we can read countless articles for free, instantly, why would we waste time with finger-staining newspapers?
There is little ad revenue streaming from the Internet to newspapers. When people go online to buy something, they do not surf newspapers to click through their ads.
Contrast this with the climate of, say, television, and it becomes evident that people watch ads on the news because they effectively have to. Advertisers know this and budget their buys accordingly.
Anthony Pesce, editor-in-chief of the Daily Bruin, offered this insight: “It’s stressful because here and at professional newspapers, the majority of our revenue still is not coming from online.”
So what are producers and consumers of college newspapers to do in what appears to be a tsunami of lost profits and marketability?
The first step is awareness and evaluation. If papers rush to conclusions without proper investigation, we could very well accelerate to ““ not evade ““ our end.
The Project for Excellency in Journalism also claims that the “key question” is not so much what papers do, but “whether the investment community sees the news business as a declining industry or an emerging one in transition.”
Here at The Bruin, we are in the midst of an exciting transition. Join and support us.
E-mail Makarechi at kmakarechi@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.