College newspapers serve to inform campus communities, provide youthful perspectives on national and global news, and offer budding reporters and media executives the opportunity to hone their craft. But American print journalism is withering away, and college papers are no exception. They face the same challenges that plague professional organizations, and they, too, must find new ways to remain sustainable.
US daily newspaper circulation declined 8 percent in 2016, the 28th year in a row that daily papers across the country experienced some sort of decline in circulation. And as circulation has decreased, so has advertising revenue, falling an extraordinary 63 percent from 2005 to 2016. The share of revenue from digital ads is on the rise, but many giants of the industry still must rely on a subscription model. Avid readers, for example, must pay to read more than 10 articles per month in the New York Times, or more than seven in the Washington Post.
As The Times noted in “Project 2020,” a recent, forward-looking report on their strategy and aspirations: Despite a recent upturn in subscribers, even more subscriptions are necessary for the long-term sustainability of the institution.
The report also noted that to attract subscribers, the quality of the paper’s content matters: “The Times publishes about 200 pieces of journalism every day. This number typically includes some of the best work published anywhere. It also includes too many stories that lack significant impact or audience — that do not help make The Times a valuable destination.”
In experimenting with new ways of presenting stories and engaging readers, The Times hopes to “prove that there is a digital model for original, time-consuming, boots-on-the-ground, expert reporting that the world needs.”
But a student newspaper cannot resort to such a “subscription-first business.” With a small fraction of the number of readers national newspapers attract, college papers would not be wise to implement paywalls. There doesn’t seem to be much of a demand among college students for paid campus news. Not to mention, such a move would be antithetical to the mission of these organizations — presumably, to freely provide their respective campus communities with important news. So without the digital-subscription tool at their disposal, how are college papers to deal with the problems plaguing the journalism world? It’s a vexing question, and one that has surely long been on the minds of undergraduate editorial boards across the country.
The Stanford Daily is, of course, one of the many papers grappling with this exact question. For over 125 years, The Daily has been Stanford’s go-to news source, but it is not immune to the broader trend of revenue struggles. Is The Daily doing enough to innovate in the face of these challenges?
The Daily circulates 8,000 papers every day to over 500 locations on campus and across the greater Palo Alto area. Perhaps we should question the frequency of its printing.
The demands of daily printing should not be understated; it requires students — on top of their full-time academic responsibilities — to have the time to write, edit, and layout stories they believe the community needs on a daily basis. Cutting printing frequency at The Daily might allow those dedicated student journalists to refocus such valuable time and energy on other pursuits, ones that may increase the quality of the paper’s content, for the betterment of both campus and The Daily itself.
Ink to Inc.
In 1973, The Daily made the conscious decision to legally separate itself from the ASSU, and consequently, the university. Up until that point, the paper had operated as a sort of subsidiary of the ASSU (which was then still a group officially associated with the university). This relationship naturally led to concerns over the journalistic integrity of the paper, beginning with its coverage of student activism on campus throughout the 1960s and 70s. These stories often created tensions between university officials and the student editors, and as these tensions grew, many Daily writers worried the university’s affiliation with the ASSU could allow them to punish The Daily financially, or otherwise impede its ability to function. This formal relationship between the parties also meant the university could potentially be held liable for any of The Daily’s actions. Thus, on Feb. 1, 1973, The Daily established “The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation,” a fully incorporated California 501(c)(3) non-profit group meant to take over all responsibilities related to running the newspaper.
These responsibilities are, by no means, trivial. Separating themselves from the university editorially also meant separating themselves financially. Leaders of The Daily now had to figure out how to sustain their group as business, on top of writing and editing stories to be printed every day. To aid in these efforts, they have since established two full-time positions within The Publishing Corporation, a Chief Operating Officer (COO) and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).
The COO and CRO — usually recent graduates who were involved with the editorial side as students — handle everything from advertising to marketing to printing and much more. Accordingly, in addition to taking on the general operating expenses of the paper (including daily printing, typesetting, and the like), the Publishing Corporation pays these two (and the editors in chief) yearly salaries. Taken together, the compensation of employees/editors and the operating costs associated with running a newspaper make up the principal financial obligations of The Stanford Daily.
The Stanford Daily’s advertising revenue in recent years.
Meeting these obligations obviously requires money. Before establishing The Publishing Corporation, the paper’s official status as an ASSU/university affiliate meant it could utilize ASSU/university funds and employees to run its business. Though a large chunk of money always came from advertising revenue generated from the physical papers (and more recently, from the website, the email newsletter, and the magazine), this source has never been enough to fully sustain the paper. The ASSU/university would always make up the difference with their respective contributions, but separation meant The Daily would ostensibly no longer have easy access to these funds. Nevertheless, The Publishing Company still receives money from both groups. As students, we vote every year to give The Daily (via The Publishing Corporation) $100,000 in “subscription fees.” Current COO of The Daily Do-Hyoung Park additionally told Stanford Politics that The Corporation collects an additional $60,000-80,000 in subscription fees from the university, a stipend meant to cover the “subscription” of faculty and staff. However, advertising remains the major revenue source for The Daily.
As a 501(c)(3), all of The Stanford Daily Publishing Company’s IRS filings from fiscal years 2002-2016 are available online through ProPublica’s nonprofit explorer. According to this data, The Daily’s advertising revenue has been declining just as national newspaper revenue advertising has. From 2011-2016 alone, advertising revenue fell a drastic 45.5 percent, with subscription revenues remaining relatively constant during the same period at around $163,000. The Daily has tried to make up for these lost revenues in new and creative ways. Park told Stanford Politics that this year the organization took over the handling of the yearbook (after the dissolution of The Quad) and launched a Snapchat Discover story in attempts to make more money.
Despite these efforts, The Publishing Company’s expenses have exceeded their revenue every year since FY2012. Practically this trend is not as concerning as it would be for non-campus newspapers — The Daily does not necessarily need to financially compensate its writers. But, it does reveal that The Daily is subject to the same forces afflicting newspapers across the country. And where better than in college newsrooms should innovative ways to reduce costs in journalism be tested? One of the ways some campus papers are tackling this is by reducing their printing.
How would cutting printing frequency affect the Stanford Daily’s numbers? We can’t be sure. It would certainly aid their expense burden, but it would also hurt their income, for less printing means less advertising revenue. Still, it may be an option worth considering. Aside from the potential financial benefits that could be gained from cutting print, it’s also worth looking at how cutting print may impact the quality of stories The Daily publishes.
Stories, Everyday
Printing everyday is understandably difficult. Printing everyday on a college campus is even more difficult. On top of having to write, edit, typeset, print, and deliver papers every night and morning, student journalists have the added difficulty of actually finding newsworthy stories to fill their pages. The nature of the campus setting is such that the demands of daily printing exceed the news value of stories that occur. In an interview with Stanford Politics, The Daily’s current editor in chief, Hannah Knowles, noted that, “There are definitely days where we need to fill a hole in the paper,” and that consequently, “last-minute articles that aren’t the level of research we would typically want for a lot of our content” find their way into the paper’s pages.
(Pexels stock photo)
It’s more than just these “last-minute articles” that one finds in a copy of The Daily. Pick up any copy and you’ll likely notice lightly paraphrased Stanford News press releases and ‘The Grind’ (The Daily’s campus lifestyle column established back in 2015) combine to make up a considerable portion of each day’s paper. In relative terms, actual original news stories don’t take up as much space as one would think or hope. But again this may be no fault of The Daily’s reporters; there likely aren’t as many immediately obvious stories worth printing everyday. Once more, none of this is to say that The Daily does not produce content worth reading. They provide unrivaled coverage of campus events and some of the most detailed stories on virtually every sports team. Nonetheless, journalism isn’t just about covering events, sports, and the day-to-day going-ons of a country, city, or campus.
Journalism’s real bread and butter lies in unearthing those stories that no one knows about, that nobody has fully put together yet. At the end of the day, newspapers make their names by breaking stories that matter, that make waves. On this front, The Daily regrettably struggles. Indeed, if you ask a Stanford student where they usually read these kinds of stories, The Daily probably and unfortunately wouldn’t be the first publication to come mind. Instead, students are likely to think of The Fountain Hopper. The FoHo (as it is commonly referred to) made its name early on in its existence by discovering in 2015 (and reporting on) a legal loophole that allowed Stanford students to gain access to their admissions files. It has since garnered a reputation for being a place students and administrators alike can go to with tips on big stories. FoHo writers broke a recent story about a Dartmouth Rower suspected of drugging people at a Sigma Chi party, and they were first to report that Stanford suggested writing, “I’m okay, everything’s okay,” on the plaque at the site of the Brock Turner assault instead of the phrases desired by the victim. Most importantly, The FoHo was the first publication to break the Brock Turner assault, a staggering nine days after the crime.
Where was The Daily on each of these? How did Stanford’s preeminent student publication, with all its resources, miss these massive stories? Yes, students probably think to go to The FoHo with tips before they think of The Daily, but that doesn’t preclude The Daily from actively seeking these stories out with the kind of “time-consuming, boots-on-the-ground” reporting that The New York Times strives for. Yet, it’s the “time-consuming” nature of this reporting that’s prohibitive.
The time and effort needed to print a paper every day detracts from The Daily’s ability to pursue this sort of impact journalism. Daily editor in chief Hannah Knowles summed it up well, telling Stanford Politics how, “Being a daily print paper means that you can’t just invest all your resources in the really big stories…We don’t operate like the FoHo where they work intensively on their things for months.” Knowles did note that “a big priority of mine and our priority last volume as well was how to shift some more of our resources into longer-term things where we’re really getting stories of impact.” Cutting print, as some other college papers around the country have already done, would most certainly allow The Daily to commit more resources to this priority.
A Twitter exchange between The Stanford Daily and The Daily Cal.
Printing in Perspective
In the midst of “Big Game Week” in Nov. 2017, The Stanford Daily gently teased UC Berkeley’s The Daily Cal in an exchange on Twitter. “Oh right – your ‘daily’ paper is only four times a week,” The Stanford Daily’s account posted.
Although the tweets were all in good fun, they illuminate a salient reality: Cutting print is often perceived as a sign of weakness. Newspapers cut back on print because they are struggling financially or cannot produce enough content. The Stanford Daily does not fall into either of these categories, nor does it want to.
The Daily’s printing practices are perhaps best examined in the context of student publications at other universities. In fact, many of The Daily’s peers have recently opted to change the number of copies and frequency with which they print for a variety of different reasons.
One of the most drastic print reductions in recent years took place at Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper at Columbia University, home to one of the top graduate journalism programs in the country. About three and half years ago, Spectator moved from printing every day to just once a week in an effort to boost news quality and better serve the organization’s mission. The decision made Columbia the only Ivy League school without a daily student-run print newspaper, eliciting mixed responses from alumni. But according to then-editor in chief Abby Abrams, the move had little to do with the paper’s finances; rather, they aimed to allow all “writers and editors to produce the best content possible.” Abrams also told Politico that she hoped to “make the decision while Spectator [was]still in a strong place.”
In 2016, Spectator updated its alumni on the results of this reduction — an apparent success. In the note, editor in chief Caroline Chiu said that “since the transition in the fall of 2014, we have higher engagement with both our print and digital editions… The increased impact isn’t the result of magic; it’s because the staff is now more productive and doing higher quality work… Our stories are better, and the University community has noticed.”
Chiu also said the change allowed Spectator staff to be more thoughtful and intentional about the stories they published.
“The freedom to not force a story into publication because we had to fill pages in a daily print edition allowed us to take a step back and redefine for ourselves what Spectator’s mission is and what we aspire to in successful storytelling,” she said. “We have (re)learned how to push ourselves to do real journalism, a shift that should be credited to a renewed focus on staff development and training.”
Regardless of their financial state, many college papers are limited by the unyielding requirement to print newspapers on a daily basis. Although long hours and late nights are the norm for student journalists no matter their publication’s printing practices, shifting to a weekly model gave those at Spectator a newfound, “freedom,” as described by Chiu. Primarily, it eliminated the constant physical necessity to fill space on a page. Web journalism is much more flexible because article length and available space are rarely a concern online. Once “daily” publications can still publish at a similar — if not higher — frequency after choosing to cut back on print, but such a shift will remove the need to hastily add otherwise dispensable fluff pieces to the paper. The Stanford Daily is no stranger to these stresses.
Despite Spectator’s success, most other campus publications have opted for a more mild approach. In 2016, the Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, cut their Tuesday edition, moving from five print days a week to four. “We’ve cut a day out of print, but that doesn’t affect the work we’re doing,” former editor in chief Jane Wester wrote in a column announcing the change. “We are interested in pushing boundaries — making our work more interactive and more social online.”
The University of Pennsylvania’s the Daily Pennsylvanian dropped their Friday paper in 2014. Syracuse’s the Daily Orange made an even more moderate change in 2008, choosing to cut the Friday paper while still occasionally publishing special sports editions on Fridays. That same year, UC Berkeley’s The Daily Californian announced it would no longer be printing on Wednesdays. These aren’t the only examples — other universities at which student newspapers have chosen to roll back print editions include the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, the University of Maryland, the University of Georgia, the University of Oregon, Duke University, and the University of Texas-Austin, among many others — but they are particularly notable because the Daily Pennsylvanian and the Daily Californian are arguably among the nation’s best student newspapers, remaining so despite of (and possibly because of) their reduced print frequency.
The Case for Cutting Print
Even when compared to publications that have continued to print on a daily basis, The Stanford Daily’s current practice of printing 8,000 copies a day still appears excessive. Consider, for instance, UCLA’s daily student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, one of the most highly-acclaimed campus newspapers in the country. Despite serving nearly three times as many students as The Stanford Daily — UCLA’s 2016 total enrollment was 44,947 compared to Stanford’s 16,914 in 2017 — The Bruin prints 9,000 copies a day, only 1,000 more than The Daily. These numbers don’t take into account the faculty, staff, and off-campus readers the publications also serve (though those are also likely greater for UCLA), but they give a good rough approximation of a college paper’s distribution-to-readership ratio.
Copies printed per day at other college newspapers compared to total enrollment.
Still, UCLA is but one example, and a very different one at that, so it is important to also examine The Daily in relation to more similar publications. The Daily Orange prints 6,000 copies a day with approximately 22,500 students enrolled at Syracuse; the Yale Daily News prints 5,000 copies a day for a little over 12,300 students; and the Tufts Daily prints 1,500 copies a day for about 11,500 students. Although print-to-enrollment ratios vary among top college dailies, Stanford’s remains one of the highest. Think back to all the times you’ve seen a thick stack of untouched Stanford Daily newspapers at the entrance of your dorm or dining hall, or in newsstands at the student unions or along the Main Quad.
Of course, cutting back on the number of copies printed a day doesn’t do much in terms of giving newspaper staff more time or flexibility. However, it could potentially free up monetary resources for better use. According to Hannah Knowles and Do-Hyoung Park, The Daily currently uses all the money it receives from the ASSU and the university to cover its printing costs. But what if these costs could be reduced? On one hand, this could simply lead to a small decrease in student fees and wasted paper. But $100,000 — as substantial as it sounds — is not an unusual amount of special fees for a student group as large and established as The Daily. A wiser approach could be to use the same amount of funding for more innovative initiatives. What if, for instance, The Daily put some portion of the student fees it receives towards further developing their online presence and determining how to better engage the undergraduate population through digital journalism? Or what if it invested in the tools necessary for deep, prolonged investigative work? In either case, a reallocation of resources — time and money — could be valuable for the paper’s future.
Park additionally provided some insight into how the 8,000 copies a day were decided upon, noting that cuts have taken place in the past.
“It used to be the case that The Stanford Daily was a major newspaper serving the greater San Francisco Peninsula,” Park said. “And then, as it became more localized to the Stanford area, corresponding cuts were made. I can’t exactly give a specific timeline, but it settled on 8,000 as kind of a solid equilibrium where we felt like the 8,000 papers are still being read.”
The all-too-pervasive stacks of unread, still-rubber-banded Stanford Daily newspapers strewn across campus beg to differ. As any Stanford student can safely say, 8,000 copies of The Daily are certainly not being read every day. There are many reasons for this decrease in engagement, but one of the foremost is that undergraduates generally seem to prefer consuming Daily content in digital form.
“I’m definitely as sad as the next person when I see like a stack of print Dailies sitting around,” Knowles said. “Interestingly, undergrads aren’t our best readers of the print edition… Actually, we have a lot higher print readership among the grad student community.”
Park told Stanford Politics about a readership survey conducted last year which supposedly revealed that Stanford faculty, along with some graduate students, found the print editions to be “critical,” whereas interest among undergraduates lagged.
“It’s just very tough to engage the undergraduate population at a forward-facing university like Stanford, especially with a print product,” Park said. “So that’s kind of the ongoing question that we’re looking to answer. Is our undergraduate population going to engage with the print product? … What are better ways to engage with them?”
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Park’s question brings us back to The Fountain Hopper, a publication that describes itself as an “email newsletter that’s offbeat, skeptical, and prizes brevity,” captivating students across campus without fail. Of course, some of The FoHo’s success can be ascribed to reasons beyond the capacities of The Daily, such as its debatably unethical anonymity, irregular email-blast-style of distribution, and penchant for mixing its editorial voice with its reporting. The FoHo receives no money from the university and is protected by its anonymity. Thus it is perceived by many as a sort of publication-gone-rogue that regularly critiques the university and challenges the status quo of student journalism. Its effective branding as a muckraker, however, may do more to influence its belovedness than its actual muckraking.
Some of The FoHo’s strongest selling points are well within The Daily’s reach. As much as its unusual image and personality are enticing, The FoHo would be nothing if it weren’t for its ability to break pivotal news and publish thoroughly-researched, in-depth investigative pieces.
In order to better engage its undergraduate readers, The Stanford Daily must prioritize these areas. If breaking old habits such as printing every day could lead to more in-depth work, more Daily exclusives, and a more developed digital presence (as it has done for other campus publications, including our own Stanford Politics), then perhaps such a move is worthwhile. The Daily continues to print because it always has and because graduate students, faculty, and people off-campus say they continue to value the print edition. But the driving vision of a college newspaper founded, written, and run primarily by undergraduates should be grounded in the preferences and perspectives of undergraduate students.
In light of this, it may be time for The Daily to make a change. As Park stated, the number of copies printed per day has decreased over the years, and while continuing to chip away at the distribution could free up some resources, ultimately a bigger, more comprehensive change is necessary. The Daily should strongly consider cutting a day — or more — of print in order to re-prioritize and make space for investigative journalism, breaking news, and digital innovation.
According to Park, reducing print has been a topic of conversation in recent years. “Talks of cutting print — whether it’s cutting days of print every week or cutting issues from our daily print run — have been in the air for as long as I’ve been here,” he said. However, Park noted that those in charge at The Daily are hesitant to implement actual changes.
“Nobody wants to be the one to pull the trigger. This paper has been around for 125 years, and it’s not to say we’re sticking to the past just for the sake of sticking to the past. We have not cut print because we still get good recycle rates off campus, according to our distribution manager, and because we feel like there is engagement with it on campus,” Park said.
Knowles similarly referred to decreasing print as an “ongoing discussion.” “I think we’re always considering cutting print, and I know we’ve had some semi-serious discussions about that,” Knowles said. “In the end, it’s not a decision you can make very quickly, so there’s a lot of research that needs to be done before we could figure that out.”
The impact of such changes can be seen at Columbia Daily Spectator. The Eye, a weekly features magazine launched by Spectator staff in 2006 has grown significantly since the newspaper cut back on print in 2014. The Eye regularly publishes longform, investigative pieces such as this one, providing a glimpse into what the future of The Daily could look like. (The Stanford Daily did launch a magazine last year, and though the intention was admirable, its execution has been lackluster, failing to provide much of the valuable investigative journalism that the format would ideally allow for.) Cutting print is understandably daunting, but the benefits it can afford have proven to be worth the risk for many campus publications.
The Daily has experienced a decrease in ad revenue in recent years, and the argument for cutting print is one of finances, but more so, it is also one of quality. Most importantly, it is one of relevance, adaptability, and foresight. Stanford — a leading institution both for its academic excellence and its contributions to technological and social modernization — should be at the cutting edge of journalism’s digital innovation. Rather than being stuck in its superfluous habits of the past, The Daily — Stanford’s oldest and most established student publication — must rethink existing norms and strive to become, as it should be, one of the leading campus newspapers in the country.
Daniela Gonzalez, a junior studying computer science and English, is the magazine director of Stanford Politics. Lucas Rodriguez, a junior studying political science and economics, is a senior staff writer for Stanford Politics. This article appears in the April 2018 issue of Stanford Politics Magazine.