gjr vol 42 issue 326

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Spring 2012 • Volume 42 Number 326 • $7.00

S t . L o u i s J o u r n a l i s m R e v i e w P r e s e n t s :S t . L o u i s J o u r n a l i s m R e v i e w P r e s e n t s :

A copydesk future? by Eric Fidler • Page 7Copydesks shrinking by John Jar vis • 0

Campus newspapers: Hard times, hard choices by Eric Fidler • Page 12

Small school papers still sustainable by Paul Van S lambrouck • Page 13

Robbins says good-bye to Post-Dispatch by A rnie Robbins • Page 19

Notice how we’re avoiding the traditional terms for this position. We don’t really want ombudsmen because that doesn’t really define what we need. The same can be said of news councils. Truth vigilantes don’t fill our needs either.

Media critic works best. We need people to critically analyze how me-dia in their area do their jobs. We not only need to know what they’re writ-ing about, but what they aren’t writ-ing about and why. We’re interested in those who cover how the media in their area report on stories being covered by national media, or how media respond to the needs of their local audience. Too, we are interested in all the mass media: print, online and broadcast journalism; photojournalism; advertis-ing; public relations; integrated mar-keting communications and entertain-ment media.

The Gateway Journalism Review starts from the proposition that media in our basic 16-state coverage region may operate from a different viewpoint than many media outlets operating on both coasts. Considering that we live in a region described by those who live on the coasts as fly-over country, we would like to know how media work while the rest of the world flies over. That doesn’t mean we don’t cover issues outside our target area, both nationally and internationally, but it does mean our primary focus is on America’s midsection.

For example, while the national spotlight may focus on how pro-union and anti-union forces are

squaring off in the recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, we are interested in how these factors affect how Wisconsin media cover the story. We want to know if there is a difference in the coverage and if certain media entities in Wisconsin show a pronounced bias in how they cover the issues. We’re interested in which publications left-leaning Wisconsinites read. Same for those who lean right. We’re also interested in how coverage in Wisconsin is different from the coverage seen nationally. We at GJR think someone in Wisconsin could better answer that than we could.

Every state in our coverage area has its own issues. The entire expanded Midwest is not a conservative bastion, nor is it a leftist haven. Our goal is to find people who live and work in our region to report on the subtleties of their state’s media that would not be visible by just examining a few newspaper or website articles or television reports. We want critics who can point out differences in how local or state media cover a story and h o w

national media may portray the same story. We want to take some of the “accepted” stereotypes assigned to many who live in our region and pick at them. At the same time, we’re interested in how media cover the situations that arise that reinforce those stereotypes.

We think GJR is providing a service to an area that is underserviced, and we need your help.

If you are interested, please email us at [email protected].

Gateway Journalism Review is looking for people to analyze their local media.

Scott Lamber t, Managing Editor

We Need your help.We Need your help.

Spring 2012 • Vol. 42 No. 326 • $7.00

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Spring 2012 • Gateway Journal ism Review •

Copy desk Trends7 • A copy desk future?

Er ic Fidler

8 • Cutting copy desks: penny-wise or pound-foolish? John Jar vis

9 • C.S. Monitor – the way we were Gregor y M. Lamb

10 • Copy desks shrinking John Jar vis

11 • Central hub a possible solution S cott Lamber t

Campus Newspapers in Crisis12 • Campus newspapers: hard times, hard choices Er ic Fidler

13 • Small school papers still sustainable Paul Van S lambrouck

14 • College papers ’ financial health questionable Jerr y Bush

16 • Squeezing blood from a college newspaper Lola Burnham

17 • Long Beach State keeps college paper B arbara Kingsley-Wilson

18 • University News provides a student voice for St. Louis University

B en Conrady

Features5 • Joe Pollack ’s 60 – year c areer Roy Malone

19 • Robbins says good-bye to Post-Dispatch A rnie Robbins

20 • Underground press revisited Charles L . Klotzer

21 • Warren Buffett adds Lee Enterprises Inc. to publishing por tfolio

John Jar vis

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I’m unsure which national trend disturbs me more – the demise of newspaper copydesks or problems facing college newspapers.

As a former member of the Christian Science Monitor’s large, h o r s e s h o e - s h a p e d copydesk during a portion of the 1970s, I spent countless hours crafting the perfect headline. That was a

time when the paper’s best “head” would earn $10 for the “headline of the week award,” and our band of 11 desk editors constantly competed for that award. Catchy, pun-filled, alliterative heads were all a part of every copy editor’s arsenal.

We also memorized the paper’s stylebook and always had The Book of Associations and Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary close at hand as we boldly blue-penciled paper copy. We constantly conferred with each other and made frequent forays to writers and editors around the newsroom with “Are you sure this is what you want to say?” queries. And we were sure that Monitor sentences never, ever began with the word “and.”

It’s (whoops, make that “it is”) a rare journalist in the bygone days of large copy editing staffs who (oh no, did I really say “journalist … who”?) was not saved from a potential libel case by an eagle-eyed (yikes, I should not use a cliché) copy desk editor. When I later was a staff writer for the Monitor, copy desk editors regularly saved me from embarrassment by pointing out writing errors in my own pre-publication copy.

In the “good old days” copy editors still made – or did not catch – mistakes. But in the current era where copy editors have been eliminated or reassigned or downsized or outsourced, it’s hard to imagine that copy now is cleaner than it was in earlier times. Will iam A. Babcock, Editor

College newspapers, too, are in flux, as can be seen from a number of stories in this issue of GJR. When I was an undergraduate, I regularly pounded out stories for my college’s weekly newspaper on a manual typewriter. As an academic I’ve worked with student journalists at four different university daily papers.

In the latter years of the 20th century, many campus newspapers still were growing in circulation and in advertising revenue. Those days are gone, though, judging from what GJR has found, and today’s student newspapers tend to now mirror their professional counterparts’ downturns in revenue and reader interest. College daily papers are increasingly going on-line or ceasing publication or going weekly or morphing into magazines or choosing some combination of the above as revenue sources are drying up. College newspapers circulating online are discovering that finding ad revenue is just as difficult as it is for professional papers.

This news does not bode well for the professional mass media, which often have hired graduating college seniors with numerous news clips from semesters of working for their school newspaper. So at a time when professional papers are increasingly ill-equipped to apprentice young, untrained jounalists, fewer and fewer recent university grads any longer have had experience working on their school newspapers. While some newspapers offer internships, such positions usually are offered on a low- or no-pay basis, making such opportunities in effect available only to well-off students.

Try as I might, I can’t see a silver lining in these copy desk and college newspapers trends, as the end product is a newspaper industry destined to lose ever more credibility by publishing poorly edited copy produced by untrained young journalists. I certainly hope I’m mistaken in this gloomy prediction.

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• Gateway Journal ism Review • Spring 2012

Features

Joe Pollack, St. Louis’ best known and often-feared critic of theater, movies, restaurants, wine and journalism, was still pounding out columns and reviews up to the age of 81 when his heart couldn’t keep up with his workaholic lifestyle.

He died March 9, 2012, of an apparent heart attack at his home in Clayton. “My dear Joe has left us, far more quietly than was his usual style,” said his wife, Ann Lemons Pollack, to readers of their St. Louis Eats and Drinks website.

He was known mainly because of his 23-year career at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His obit in the paper stated a good word from him in a review could fill a restaurant or theater and a bad review was something to be feared. When he entered a restaurant, sometimes under an assumed name, word quickly spread: “Joe Pollack is here.”

He would not take a free meal and once refused to accept an envelope full of cash sent to his home by a restaurant owner who wanted a favorable review. Joe never again went to that restaurant, his wife said.

He retired from the Post in 1995 but continued doing reviews for a number of media outlets, including television, KWMU radio, St. Louis Magazine, and the St. Louis Journalism Review (now Gateway Journalism Review). He and his wife wrote books about food.

He made his living with words and loved writing. “Give me a deadline and I’ll get it done,’” he would say, even if the deadline was in 10 minutes. He liked to quote his mentor, media critic A. J. Leibling, as saying: “I can write faster than any man who can write better, and can write better than any man who can write faster.”

Pollack was known for his considerable ego and big waistline. He would quip: “I’m in shape for what I like to do best.”

He said he fell in love with the theater as a kid in Brooklyn, N.Y. He hoped to become a shortstop for the Dodgers but when he got to the journalism school at Missouri University, at age 16, he decided on becoming a sports writer. In a placement test speech at Mizzou he criticized the baseball Cardinals and their announcer, Harry Caray. The young critic was assigned to a remedial speech course.

He was a sports writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat from 1955-61 and was public relations director for the football Cardinals from 1961-72. When the team left St. Louis he came to the Post-Dispatch. He worked his way into eating out and going to movies, the theater and musical events — all for the newspaper.

A memorial service for Pollack was held at the Repertory Theatre at which speakers from various venues of his work life praised him with anecdotes. Charles Taylor, an attorney and friend of the Pollacks, said Joe charted the course for getting the word to the public about quality offerings at the area’s theaters, restaurants and movies. “The region owes him gratitude for his enrichment if it,” Taylor said.

He was a stickler for the truth and didn’t hedge when his opinions might hurt. Steven Woolf, artistic director of the Repertory Theatre, said, “He loved the theater and everybody in it. He was a curmudgeon from time to time... when he retired from the Post we all gave him a send off. Joe loved the theater as much as anyone I know. He just wanted us to get it right.”

Pollack would say: “A splendid performance sends me floating... an awful one causes me to walk slowly, stooped over, encased in a cobweb of gloom.” As for wine, he said, “Drinking wine is a great adventure.”

Pollack was president of the St. Louis Newspaper Guild for six years. “Some younger reporters thought he was a little gruff,” said Jeff Gordon, now the Guild president. “But he would be out there fighting for us [on contracts and other union matters].”

In January, at a Guild dinner, Pollack was given an award for his career achievements. Post columnist Bill McClellan announced the award with his recollection of when he came to the paper and couldn’t believe a critic could be one of its star writers. But Joe Pollack was.

R o y M a l o n e

Joe Pollack’s 60 -year career


Copy desk Editors Search For Oasis

Today’s copy editors face the prospect of being tomorrow’s unemployed as the copy desk goes the way of the pica pole and proportion wheel. Just as technology made those ancient tools of the trade obsolete, it has contributed to the decline of the position itself. As more of the job has been mechanized, copy desks have begun to resemble assembly lines. With the growth of centralized editing hubs, where copy for multiple newspapers in a chain is edited and pages are designed, copy desks might better be called copy finishing plants.

These changes have implications for the future of journalism on paper and online, and for how we teach future journalists.

“The role of the copy editor today is to move copy as they get it,” David Arkin, vice president of content and audience for GateHouse Media, said when he announced the company’s plan to centralize design and copy editing.

Arkin may epitomize the modern news executive: concern with efficiency, speed and the balance sheet merged with the inability to see journalism as anything but a product. But even those with deep backgrounds in journalism have financial pressures to adopt an assembly line approach to editing.

Design and copy editing for Tribune Co. properties, the Hartford Courant and the Daily Press of Newport, Va., are handled in Chicago. Others in the chain are expected to follow. Editors in Chicago also assemble national, international, features and non-local sports news into “modules” that can be dropped into other papers in the chain. GateHouse’s larger papers will be designed and copy edited in Rockford, Ill.; smaller papers will be handled in Massachusetts. Other chains, including Gannett and Media General, have gone to similar models. Even The Associated Press now has regional editing hubs, taking some of the control over content out of the hands of journalists in its bureaus, who presumably know their areas better than editors from other cities.

“For a central desk to work, you basically have to standardize everything,” said Doug Fisher, a senior instructor at the University of South Carolina, who spent many years as a reporter and editor.

And that’s one of the problems with centralized editing. Not only do newspapers lose their individual flavors when they become as standardized as a Happy Meal, they risk losing their connection with readers as editors in other cities make decisions that are not based on knowledge of the newspaper’s locality and audience. Fisher says leaving some people on local desks, as Gannett has done, can help editing hubs avoid such problems while meeting the goal of cost efficiency.

“I think it can save some money. But it has to be done judiciously and with a bit of art rather than a hammer,” he said.

Centralization has led to more job losses for copy editors, who were already among the hardest hit by the incessant buyouts and layoffs that have reduced the size of newspaper staffs dramatically in recent years.

“Papers have just decided that given the fantastical drop in advertising revenue over the past five or six years, this is something they don’t need,” said David Sullivan, a copy editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which had 60 copy editors in 2005 and now has 23.

“It’s difficult to monetize exactly what copy editors do. Even the weakest story can be measured in clicks,” he says.

Sullivan said Arkin’s view of copy editors is becoming standard. The mechanics of online publishing are easier than print, and reader expectations for quality are at least thought to be lower, he says.

“The role of a copy editor is to run spellcheck and put it online,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan, of course, knows that the role is much more than that. Often regarded in newsrooms as glorified proofreaders, copy editors bring much more to the job. They read stories from a different perspective, questioning facts, seeking holes, guarding against libel. And, yes, they look for problems with grammar and usage.

“We’re representing the reader. That’s what we’re losing,” Sullivan said.

e R i c F i d l e R

“ “By some measures, qual it y has suffered with fewer copy

editors, but most chains f ind it an acceptable tradeoff so far.

“ “newspapers lose their individual f lavors when they become as standardized as a Happy Meal

Continued on Page 22


A copy desk future?Copy desk Trends

Copy desk Trends

It’s no secret that newspaper copy editors work in obscurity. They toil at night, on weekends and over the holidays, without even a byline to note their role in delivering the news to the publication’s readers. But as the industry moves toward consolidating copy desks across the country, these unseen journalists are becoming an endangered species.

Consolidating copy desks is part of a nationwide trend by newspaper management. It’s an attempt to enhance newspapers’ bottom lines by assigning a set of copy editors in one location the task that previously was performed on-site at each newspaper.

Erica Smith, the social media director at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, maintains an online blog called “Paper Cuts” (newspaperlayoffs.com) that tracks newspaper layoffs and buyouts. In 2008, according to Smith’s research, the layoffs and buyouts at U.S. newspapers shrunk staff levels by 15,993 jobs. In 2009, 14,825 jobs were lost. In 2010, Smith reported that 2,920 newspaper jobs were cut. (That number included 31 newspapers in Illinois that reported layoffs that year – the most papers reporting layoffs of any state.) In 2011, Smith found that 4,111 newspaper jobs were eliminated, and the 2012 layoffs stood at 858 as of early March.

On her blog, Smith said her figures “include all newspaper jobs, from editor to ad rep, reporter to marketing, copy editor to pressman, design to carrier, and anyone else who works for a newspaper.” But those figures may be understating the total, she said, because many newspapers

don’t announce layoffs – and the numbers she’s collected don’t include jobs lost through attrition.

The trend to consolidate copy desks as part of this downsizing in the industry isn’t new; in fact, the “virtual copy desk” been part of some newspaper journalism discussions since at least 2008, if not earlier.

The trade magazine Presstime identified the consolidation of the copy desk as one of eight newspaper trends for 2008. A story in that year’s January edition reported that “as newspapers seek to become more efficient in tough economic times, using technology more and combining job functions are two approaches, says Steve

Buttry, director of tailored programs at the American Press Institute in Reston, Va. ‘In a perfect world,’ he says, ‘local copy editors could review non-local stores and offer insight the paper might otherwise miss, such as the need to add a paragraph on a local person who is a central player in a national story. But if anybody believes newspapers are operating in a perfect world, they haven’t been paying attention.’ ”

According to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the peak number of journalism jobs at U.S. newspapers occurred in the late 1980s, when almost 57,000 journalists worked in the newspaper business. That number had fallen down to around 41,000 by the end of 2011. The ASNE number is smaller than Smith’s because it is limited to journalists and does not include other newspaper related jobs.

The ASNE figures showed that almost 27 percent of newspaper journalism jobs have been eliminated since the number of workers in the industry peaked at 56,900 in 1989, according to its annual survey. At the end of 2010, just 41,600 journalists were still collecting a newsroom paycheck.

The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists that “exists to ensure that our communities have access to excellent journalism,” addressed the trend of copy desk consolidation in a story written by Bill Mitchell on its website, www.poynter.org.

J o h n J a R v i s

Cutting copy desks: penny-wise or pound-foolish?



G R e G o R y M. l a M b

C.S. Monitor – the way we wereWe sat around a horseshoe-shaped desk, nearly a dozen of us, slot man Dewey Ray in the center, flipping copy to be edited right and left like a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas.

In the mid-1970s the newsroom of the Christian Science Monitor in Boston was a place of paper, pencils, glue pots, the incessant clatter of typewriters and the ringing of phones. Peering at computer terminals was still years away.

The copy desk was in the center of it all. A copy editor then had to know his proofreading marks, from “carets” (to insert material in text) to symbols for “transpose these words” and “delete this.” A hash mark (#) meant “add space here” long before it meant “I tagged this on Twitter.” While the composing room had abandoned hot type a few years earlier, edited copy still zipped from the copy desk to the typesetters through an ancient pneumatic tube system, stuffed in cylinders with leather covers.

Back then, “the desk,” as it was casually known, was a highly visible perch (being in the center of the newsroom) for many kinds of journalists. A few were veterans who needed a roost on the way to retirement. Most were professional copy editors, who took great pride in the value they added to any story. But younger journalists also could be parked there for a year or two to get experience or until another assignment opened up. I was told early on that once upon a time a prominent Monitor columnist in the Washington bureau had been on the desk.

As a 20-something who lacked a journalism degree, I viewed being a “rim man” on the desk as a great step up in the newspaper world. Only recently I had been a lowly copy boy (though already so many of the “copy boys” were young women that the term had officially been changed to “junior staffer”). The desk felt like a “real” newsroom job.

It turned out to be that – and more. I continued my education there. I learned the importance of spelling, punctuation, style and grammar. (An editor who looked at a book review I’d submitted shortly after arriving remarked: “I

can’t tell if it’s good or bad. All I can see are all the spelling and grammatical mistakes.”) I had a chance to broaden my world by reading copy from throughout the paper, from crossword puzzles and recipes (I learned the crucial distinction between a “teaspoon” and a “tablespoon”) to travel pieces that carried me to far-off places to thoughtful analyses of national and international events.

As a new man on the desk (we did have one woman, as I recall) I was assigned to be mentored by Peter Nordahl, a kind soul. Everything I edited passed back through him for review. Mistakes were gently pointed out and corrected. My “graduation day” couldn’t have been more low key: After a while Ray started tossing copy directly to me. “Just hand that back to me when you’re done,” he said. No more needed to be said.

Being in the middle of the newsroom did have advantages: One rarely missed spotting anyone important passing through, from presidential candidates to celebrities. One day an editor brought Ginger Rogers to the newsroom. He stopped near my seat to explain what the copy desk does. I instinctively stood up – and received a smile and a kiss on the cheek from the movie star.

Today the Monitor employs just two copy editors. They carefully pore over stories headed for the Monitor’s weekly print edition. (The paper stopped publishing daily in print in 2009.) The desk (both women) gets two shots at each story: once early in the editing process and again just before the story is released to the printing plant. They have time to be thorough and exacting in their work, and they are.

But the desk rarely gets to read the majority of copy. It flies directly from editors in news and features departments onto the Web at csmonitor.com, a torrent of stories, updates, quizzes, lists and blogs.

The Monitor’s copy editors today do have advantages over 30 or 40 years ago. They have the entire Web as a reference tool for checking names, places, dates and other facts with a speed and at a depth unmatched back then.



Copy desk Trends

Ask any journalists who’ve spent time working for a daily newspaper, and they’ll probably regale you with stories from the “old days,” when full crews could be found across the entire newsroom, including the fun-loving (if slightly eccentric) souls who manned copy desks into the wee hours of the night.

For more and more of these wordsmiths, that’s not the case anymore.

The newspaper business reached its zenith in the late 1980s, when employment figures peaked at nearly 57,000 in 1989, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. That number had fallen to around 41,000 workers by the end of 2011.

Despite the downward trend, however, there are newspapers in the Midwest that still employ the “traditional” version of a copy desk to edit stories – even if the paper itself doesn’t fit the traditional mold completely.

One such paper is the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune, where wire/slot editor Greg Cupp has plied his trade for nearly 16 years.

“We are a family-owned afternoon paper, so we are something of an odd duck from most of the newspaper world,” said Cupp, who started in the newspaper business in college back in the spring of 1984.

Cupp added that the paper is published in the mornings on two days, Saturday and Sunday, and that the Tribune’s busiest morning is Wednesday.

“We usually have five editors working those days,” he said. “We have our earliest deadline, 11:30 a.m., and our largest paper. Our slowest morning is Monday. We will have four editors on the job those mornings. Monday afternoon is our smallest paper of the week, on average. Of course, with an afternoon deadline, we try to work ahead on other sections, such as food, entertainment, lifestyles, etc.

“Our smallest copy desk staff crew is, oddly enough, on Friday and Saturday nights. There will be one copy editor and one person working slot. Sunday is typically the largest paper, but we have twice the time to put it out.”

The Tribune was founded Sept. 12, 1901, by former University of Missouri student Charles Monro Strong with help from Barratt O’Hara, according to the paper’s website, and it was the first daily newspaper in Columbia and claims to be the most widely circulated newspaper in mid-Missouri.” Circulation is 20,000+.

In late 2010, the family that owns the Tribune announced a major reorganization in the paper’s ownership structure. In a Tribune story written Dec. 21, 2010, Kris Hilgedick reported that “publisher Hank Waters’ two youngest children are buying out four other family members to take full ownership of the company. Starting Jan. 1, Andy Waters will take over as president and general manager, giving up his current title as vice president for interactive media. Andy Waters and his sister, Elizabeth, who lives in Atlanta, will own the company. Their father — 80-year-old publisher Henry J. ‘Hank’ Waters III — will take the title publisher emeritus and continue writing editorials. Hank Waters’ wife, associate publisher Vicki Russell, 60, will become publisher. Russell will be only the fourth family member — and the first woman — to serve as publisher since Hank Waters’ great-uncle Edwin Watson listed himself as ‘editor and proprietor’ in 1905.”

Being a family-owned business has helped shield the Tribune from an industry trend where newspaper chains are downsizing their copy desks to a centralized “hub” that serves several papers, instead of having copy editors at each publication. The push to consolidate newspaper copy desks carries the risk of eliminating the local expertise and knowledge for the majority of the newspapers involved.

When asked if he had seen any downsizing efforts where he works, Cupp replied, “In my time at the Columbia Daily Tribune, we have had periods where there have had hiring freezes and left copy desk positions vacant for a time. However, the desk has maintained a pretty constant staffing. Where downsizing has affected the desk more severely is in the picking up of tasks from other, downsized areas of the newsroom and the production departments.

“With the advent of pagination, most of the backshop productions went away. Copy editors generally did not do much page design and production before pagination. It has become a significant part of the job description now.”

So does Cupp ever foresee a time when the Tribune might go for a “hub” type of copy desk?

“Not really,” he said. “As a family-owned, non-chain paper, there isn’t the option for a consolidated off-site desk. They only way I see that happening is if the paper were sold to a chain at some future time.”

John Jarvis is nearing the quarter-century mark as a professional journalist. He has worked as a writer, copy editor and editor for newspapers in Texas, Indiana and Arizona. Jarvis was the editor and publisher of ASU Insight, a weekly newspaper for the faculty and staff of Arizona State University.

J o h n J a R v i s

Copy desks shrinking


Copy desk Trends

The old way no longer works. Gone are the days of the old-school copy desk, with news copy shifting from one desk to another as the piece was edited and massaged to hit the print edition the next morning in pristine shape.

Instead, news happens every moment and the only way for print media to survive is to be as immediate as television, to get the news online the minute it happens and to provide clean content without the hour-long delay it takes to go from one copy editor to the next.

It’s a new model, one that shifts the focus of reporting from getting one story right for the morning — or afternoon — edition to getting numerous stories right throughout the course of the day. This role of the copy editor has changed.

MLive Media Group has taken this new philosophy to heart. MLive.com used to be the website representing eight newspapers in Michigan. Today, it’s a media group providing news to the state and content for eight daily newspapers.

“When I say we put digital first, we mean it,” said John Hiner, Vice President of Content for MLive Media Group. “One of the problems online sites have is that they work on the print story, reporting incrementally all day long. We’ve changed the emphasis. We have to put the reporting first, not the deadline. We allow people the freedom to report all day long. It’s about constant, interactive reporting.”

Reporting has traditionally been part of the news story process before it reaches the public. The other part is editing.

“We have a central copy desk,” Hiner said. “Prior to the change, we had three copy desks. The general premise that

we say is that local teams focus on content. Our copy desk focuses on editing, design and preparation.

“We have a lead editor in every office, called a community producer and beneath him is the managing producer,” Hiner said. “They’re assigning, editing, directing coverage. That kind of editing is still happening in real time. We’re just not waiting for the next day to run the story. Everything that appears in the paper is edited several times.”

There appears to be a contradiction in this approach. How does a web site stay current if several eyeballs see a story before it hits the site? Hiner says it depends on the story.

“A preponderance of our stuff is edited before we put it on the web,” Hiner said.

Still, with the emphasis on “right now,” and without the traditional safety net of the copy desk, errors occur. And some errors could be costly. The scariest two words in a media newsroom are still “libel suit.”

“I don’t take that lightly,” Hiner said. “I never have taken that lightly. We don’t take the potential for libel lightly.”

But mistakes happen. Hiner points out they happen with a full copy desk available too.

“Anything that goes in print goes through the same editing that our normal stories go through.”

s c o t t l a M b e R t

Central hub a possible solution

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Campus Newspapers in Crisis

The college press has long existed in a kind of alternate universe from the one its commercial counterparts inhabit. Blessed with demographics that publishers of commercial newspapers can only dream about (and that never change), most college publications have managed to keep enough advertising to avoid the worst of the financial bleeding that has plagued the newspaper industry in the past decade.

But change is coming. For some college newspapers, it is already here.

The days when college newspapers could assume they would continue to publish forever are over. Some might go to online only (or mostly), some might cut back print publication and some might go out of business. Evidence is anecdotal because no one keeps statistics, but many people who work in college media agree that college newspapers are in a kind of holding pattern, waiting to see how much advertising drops and what percentage of their readership no longer wants a printed newspaper.

“College newspapers aren’t yet losing readership as much as professional newspapers are,” said Bryan Murley, an assistant professor of journalism at Eastern Illinois University who serves as the online adviser to the Daily Eastern News. “They don’t have quite the same pressures with regards to profit margins.”

Advertising has dropped significantly at many college papers, but not to the degree it has at commercial papers.

“The market is so attractive and so narrow that advertisers are still really interested in tapping that market,” said Rachele Kanigel, an associate professor of journalism at San Francisco State University and the author of “The College Newspaper Survival Guide.”

“I think they’re pretty much safe there. For maybe five more years,” Murley said.

The independent papers, which make up about 5 percent of the nation’s college newspapers but include some of the field’s biggest names, cannot land on the safety net of student fees or other support from their universities. For these college newspapers, it’s make enough money to survive or go under.

The Daily Illini, which was founded in 1871, recently faced such an existential crisis. Illini Media Co., the nonprofit corporation that operates the Daily Illini, WPGU radio and other campus media, said it owed $250,000 in past-due bills to vendors and was behind in mortgage payments on

its building. The company, financially independent from the University of Illinois since its inception 100 years ago, built a new headquarters in 2006, a bad year for a media company to take on debt.

“I don’t see the differentiation between our problems and commercial media’s problems. I think they’re one and the same,” said Lil Levant, publisher and general manager of Illini Media.

Movie critic Roger Ebert wrote a letter to fellow Daily Illini alumni, asking them to donate to the company and raising the prospect of the newspaper ceasing publication. In March, University of Illinois students approved a fee of $3 per semester to help keep Illini Media afloat.

A week after the Daily Illini asked students to vote for the fee, the Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia announced it would no longer publish a print edition on Fridays. The Cavalier Daily, which relies solely on advertising revenue, said the move would help it stay both solvent and independent. Newspapers at the University of Minnesota, the University of California-Berkeley, Syracuse University and elsewhere have made similar decisions in recent years.

The Daily Universe of Brigham Young University announced in January that it would move to printing once a week and focus on a digital-first format. In announcing the decision, Susan Walton, associate chairwoman for student media, said the move was intended to prepare student journalists for the future of the field, but acknowledged financial pressures played a role. She said the paper had been operating at a loss since 2009 and was no longer sustainable.

In fall 2011, The Red and Black at the University of Georgia moved its daily news coverage to the web, with a weekly print edition that features more in-depth stories. The paper, which is set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, had seen a drop in advertising revenue but was not in a crisis. Publisher Harry Montevideo said the move was intended to position the paper for the future and prepare its staff for the changing nature of journalism.

e R i c F i d l e R

Campus newspapers: hard times, hard choices

“ “College newspapers aren’t yet losing readership as much as professional newspapers are.





In one of its earliest incarnations it was simply called the Bluff Newsletter.

Yet it was no false promise. Presumably named to reflect Principia College’s perch on the yellow-gold eastern bluffs of the Mississippi River, the student newspaper has held a steady presence on campus since 1943 when students gave it a name without potential double-meaning: the Pilot.

Whether the bluffs on which the college sits or the great river nearby, geography matters here at Principia. A small four-year private college for Christian Scientists, Principia sits on 2,600 acres of rolling woodlands in southwestern Illinois. And with a student body of 526 students, there is plenty of room to roam. Do the math. That’s about five acres per student.

Geography also matters in terms of the scope of the Pilot. The nearest community is the tiny village of Elsah, long on charm and short on population. The campus is a world unto itself, and thus over the years the Pilot has kept its focus squarely on the campus community.

The Pilot played a particularly high-profile role in 2006-2007 with stories about an internal administration dispute. Student coverage helped bring new information to the campus community and the Pilot became a vehicle for letting alumni and others weigh in as well. In the fall of 2007 there was a change of leadership of the institution followed by a major revamping of its rules of governance.

Today, the Pilot appears three times per semester as a 52-60 page, full-color magazine and is distributed for free. There is an online presence as well, though current students seem less interested in the ease and accessibility of the digital version than in a publication they can hold.

The old-school appeal of the print magazine may have something to do with the specialness of an event that occurs only every five or six weeks.

For much of the Pilot’s history, a portion of funding came from the office of the college president, who acts as publisher. However, that funding practice was ended four or five years ago when the administration reckoned a student newspaper should be supported wholly by student funds. The funding change was also prompted by a pattern of cost overruns that students routinely assumed the president’s office would assume, according to a spokesman for the college administration.

Each March, the Pilot is asked to submit a budget for the following academic year. The request goes to the Student

Activities Board, which allocates resources to a number of activities, including social events, clubs, the yearbook and the Pilot. Principia students pay an annual $300 activity fee, giving the SAB $150,000 to dispense. The Pilot generates only token revenue from ads and subscriptions.

Students working for the Pilot get varying credits, depending on their time commitment, and are graded by the adviser. Currently, the Pilot has a staff of 34, including writers, designers, editors and photographers. About one-third of them are Mass Communication majors, with the others scattered across design, business and English.

The magazine comes together on “Pilot night,” a marathon production into the wee hours fueled by copious amounts of junk food, music and camaraderie.

Principia College recently transitioned from the quarter system to semesters and that topic has commanded center attention in recent Pilot issues. The switch meant students carry more courses concurrently and, as one might expect, the daily class schedule was scrambled beyond recognition. Worst of all, many students found themselves booked through the lunch hours and in classrooms where food was not allowed. You could hear the cries across campus. The classroom food prohibition was dropped like a stale scone.

The Pilot’s latest issue has helped fuel a budding campus conversation about grade inflation. It did so by providing real news.

The administration had released numbers showing that more than 61 percent of all grades last semester were in the A range. Because the figure included grades for everything from athletics to public service practicums, many faculty members said the number needed refinement to be useful. Principally, they wanted to know the percentage of As for core academic courses of at least 3-semester hours of credit.

The Pilot answered the call and in a lengthy article by co-editor Maija Baldauf, reported that 53.5 percent of all grades for 3-credit hour classes or more were As. Shortly thereafter, a faculty senate was devoted to a discussion of grading practices on campus, grounded in the Pilot-produced figure.

Today’s slick color magazine is a far cry from the Pilot’s first issue in 1943. The stapled and mimeographed 8 ½-by-11-inch sheet newspaper, with handwritten headlines, stated in a front-page editorial: “We want to appeal to campus interests. We believe we are starting a worthwhile activity.”

Pa u l va n s l a M b R o u c k

Small school papers still sustainable


My first thought when asked to write a 1,000-word column about the financial health of college newspapers was, “this topic should be a piece of cake.” I mean, that many words roll off my tongue almost every day about this subject. An entire novel could be written on the decline of the newspaper industry.

To make the topic more manageable, I will begin with the variety of college newspaper business models and address just a few issues from the plethora of financial problems they face.

There are college newspapers that survive on an allotted percentage of student fees every semester, those that get student fees along with the advertising revenue it earns, and those that survive on advertising revenue alone. The college newspapers surviving on their advertising revenues alone are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of the declining economy and print industry. There is no safety net in place to save them from the dangers of declining advertising revenue, rising printing and circulation costs,

rising minimum wage and the influx of competitive, technology-driven media.

The question is: Can these college newspapers continue to survive without the assistance of student fees?

Declining Revenue

National Adver t is ing

Most national advertising in the college newspaper industry is placed by an advertising agency known as, ReFuel. ReFuel plays middleman for large companies that want to target the college audience but do not want to deal with placing individual ads with college newspapers across the country. With national advertising revenue steadily decreasing among college papers, representatives at ReFuel claim the pullback is due to their advertisers changing strategies because of the poor economy. National advertisers are moving advertising dollars to higher population, higher-

J e R R y b u s h

College papers’ financial health questionable


For every dollar gained in a digital media, seven dollars are lost in print.


income colleges, to reach students with the most purchasing power. Small and mid-sized college newspapers across the Midwest and Southern regions suffer revenue loss due to the demographics of their students. Expendable income, purchasing power and location of the student population trump high readership and circulation numbers of the newspapers, not a good indication of things to come for these papers.

Local Adver t is ing

Local business owners are facing their own economic challenges. Some local retailers in our city claim their 2011 profits are as much as 30 percent less than in 2010 and that most of that decline is due to the student market. With SIUC facing a lengthy trend of declining enrollment, local retailers and landlords fear and prepare for the worst. Cutting back on advertising expenditures has become a necessity for many local businesses — not because they are dissatisfied with the audience delivery of the newspaper, but because they must make sure they can pay their bills at the end of the month.

Campus Adver t is ing

Campus Advertising has remained more consistent over the years than have retail and housing. Campus departments still realize if you want to get a message to SIUC students that the campus newspaper remains the best way for it to be seen. However, there have been budget cuts across our campus that have impacted departmental advertising over the last several years. Also, campus information that was published in the newspaper can now be published online. Large documents such as the student conduct code (that used to fill two pages twice every year) can now be found on the university’s website.

Digital Media

The move to online advertising has been slow in our area. The small audience of a college newspaper website is a hard sell to advertisers. The biggest part of our website audience is alumni and faculty, not current students who still mostly read the hard-copy edition. Web sales are

increasing, but not quickly. There have been attempts to establish a college network for online advertising, but there has yet to be a business model that has succeeded in that venture. I recently read an article that stated, “For every dollar gained in digital media, seven dollars are lost in print.” Unfortunately, this seems to be the case.

Rising Expenses

Minimum Wage

Every time the minimum wage is increased by 25 cents per hour, the Daily Egyptian is set back more than $20,000. In 2005, when the minimum wage was increased by one dollar, the effect on the newspaper was tremendous. For a non-profit business facing declining advertising and rising expenses, these kinds of blows to revenue are impossible to make up. This means staff cuts, which means fewer student opportunities and eventually an impact on the quality of the newspaper.

Supplies

The costs of newsprint and ink will likely increase. The price of fuel also continues to rise as well as the cost of vehicle maintenance. There is always a need for new computers, software updates and maintenance contracts, cameras, vehicles, press equipment and tools, and the list goes on and on.

I have addressed a few problems the college newspaper industry faces. Is there any way to survive without seeking student fees? The answer for most is “probably not.” Every college newspaper has its own set of problems now. With no other place to turn, student fees and alumni donations seem to be the best solutions.

Jerry Bush is Business and Advertising Director for Daily Egyptian Newspaper, SIUC.

“ “Can these col lege newspapers continue to sur vive without the

assistance of student fees?

JG TEWAY

OURNALISM REVIEW

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l o l a b u R n h a M

Squeezing blood from a college newspaper

Like many college newspapers, The Daily Eastern News is facing its share of financial woes these days, but watching the budget and expenses has enabled the paper to remain in good shape so far.

The News is published five days a week at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, claiming as its main audience about 10,000 on-campus students and more than 1,900 full- and part-time employees. In addition, the newspaper has a companion website, dailyeasternnews.com.

The paper began in 1915 as the weekly Normal School News, when a group of students got together because they wanted to promote the football team, said John Ryan, director of Student Publications.

The students ran it independently of the university until the paper went bankrupt in the 1920-21 school year. Ryan said the university then gave it office space on campus and brought in a faculty adviser who, in the early days, acted as a censor. The paper went through several name changes, to the Teachers College News, Eastern Teachers News, Eastern News and finally the Daily Eastern News, increasing publication frequency until today’s five-times-a-week during the fall and spring semesters and twice a week for 10 weeks in summer.

One recent budget-cutting move reduced the daily press run to 6,000 copies, down from 8,500. Business manager Betsy Jewell said she asked other members of the College Media Association what their press runs were, and most said their run was about 30 percent of enrollment.

Along with cutting the press run, the paper now usually only runs eight pages a day, with four allotted to news, one to opinion, one to sports, one to classifieds and one split between the classifieds spill and sports. The News also publishes a four-page weekly entertainment supplement, On the Verge of the Weekend, and several special sections a year, such as the upcoming Greek Week Guide. Twice a month, a minority-focused publication called Fresh!, produced by a separate staff, is published as an insert.

Conserving paper by reducing the press run and the number of pages each day cut one newsprint delivery a year, saving about $15,000.

Other budget cutting in recent years has been to reduce the number of landline phones in the newsroom, dropping cable TV service, reducing the number of part-time front-office student employees and cutting a couple of editorial positions.

The News is part of the Student Publications Department at Eastern, separate from the Journalism Department, and its publications are not part of laboratory classes. However, the advisers to the various publications receive release time for advising. Thus, rather than considering the News and its sister publications as extra-curricular activities, the university considers them co-curricular. In addition to The News, its website, and Fresh!, other student publications are the Warbler yearbook and The Vehicle literary magazine. Students contribute all content for these publications.

These publications are supported in part by a $4.40 fee that every full-time student pays each semester. The fee generates about $93,000 among the fall, spring and summer semesters —about 30 percent of the budget. Advertising in the News accounts for about 68 percent of the budget. Jewell said the remaining 2 percent comes from such things as job printing, recycling pressroom negatives and alumni gifts.

Advertising revenue is budgeted at $210,000, but the actual amount the past couple of years has been below that. Advertising revenue so far this fiscal year (beginning July 1, 2011) is nearly $105,000, down from $138,000 at this point last year. But because attention has been paid to revenue, expenses have been reduced accordingly, Jewell said.

The budget covers the salaries of two full-time employees (the business manager and the pressman) and all the student editorial staff, advertising representatives and managers, pressroom workers and front-desk employees for the newspaper and editorial staff for the yearbook. Paper, ink and printing supplies make up another large part of the budget, as does the yearbook printing bill. The remainder is spent on such things as office supplies, telephones, equipment, the newspaper delivery car, crossword puzzles and Associated Press membership.

The editorial staff of the newspaper consists of 22 paid student editors and copy editors. In addition, a group of about 15 students contributes regularly as unpaid staff reporters and photographers, along with a varying number of students who write articles or take pictures to satisfy journalism course requirements. All but one of the current editors are journalism majors, with the sports editor being an elementary education major.

Most of the other reporters and photographers are either journalism majors or communication studies majors. However, because any Eastern student is welcome to join the staff, reporters and photographers have come from such other majors as history, political science and English. Most volunteer for a semester or two before applying for one of the paid positions. Most carry a full-time academic




b a R b a R a k i n G s l e y -W i l s o n

Long Beach State keeps college paper

The Daily 49er at Cal State Long Beach is a 63-year-old campus news enterprise. While largely dependent on advertising funds, the paper has enjoyed a recent boost in the university’s financial commitment that should help it survive and, some day, thrive.

The newspaper started in 1949 as a newsletter months after the university first opened its doors. At one time it was run under the auspices of student government. Then in the 1970s it was assimilated into the journalism department and became a “lab paper.” In the early 2000s it was largely severed from journalism department classes.

Now the Daily 49er is something of a hybrid. It could be called “lab lite” with an optional news and reporting class tied to it, and a television production class that plugs into the paper’s growing Beach News video enterprise. It has a content and design adviser, and the newsroom takes up a good bit of journalism department real estate in the windowless basement of campus’s social science building.

A controversy in 2007 over how the 49er should be run — which included possibly moving the paper online — led to the dismissal of Journalism Chair William A. Babcock. (Babcock is editor of GJR.) He, along with most faculty and students, opposed going online-only.

The flare-up shined a spotlight on media operations and helped direct the university’s attention -- and at least some resources -- to the struggling newspaper and website. In the short-run, university officials pooled resources to purchase new Apple computers and software. In the long run, administrators applauded faculty efforts to add classes that would be tied to the newspaper.

So far, the classes have acted as a stabilizing force for the website and paper, which circulates 10,000 copies four days a week to the 35,000-student, largely commuter campus. (Most of the newspaper’s students are journalism or broadcast majors, but not all. The current editor majors in philosophy and economics.) The writing class has proved fertile ground for future editors. The “lab” also makes it much easier for the paper to draw instructional-related funding, which now makes up 30 percent of the Daily 49er’s overall budget -- more than triple the previous commitment. The bulk of the 49er’s revenue, however, still comes from print and online advertising.

With just 20 paid business and editorial staffers — taking home 5- and 20-hours-a-week of minimum-wage pay, usually a small slice of the actual hours worked — the Daily 49er is still a modest enterprise. Most newspaper students, including all writers and photographers, are unpaid. A

few student sales reps work on commission. The Daily 49er’s staff and budget are a fraction of that at, say, the Daily Bruin at UCLA, about 45 minutes up the 405 freeway in Los Angeles.

Being smaller sometimes means trying harder and being creative. The 49er recently partnered with the design department to redesign and repair rusted campus news boxes. The process is slow, but the 49er hopes to see refurbished news boxes on campus by summer. And editor Zien Halwani and General Manager Beverly Munson are trying to partner with the College of Business to draw marketing and other majors to the newspaper office to sell ads and eventually survey its readers.

Such efforts take time and are not nearly as efficient as having the cash on hand to pay for improvements and staff. Cal State Long Beach is a working-class campus in many respects. Virtually all the newspaper students hold down jobs outside the class and newsroom and roughly one-third of all students are the first in their family to attend college. Students who go to class and work full-time off campus are less likely to have time to put in the consistently long newspaper hours.

But the increase in campus support — fueled by a president-imposed fee increase that opened up additional funds for multiple programs including student media — has helped the 49er survive harsh economic times. While there is still no budget to send students to newspaper conventions, the editors can come up with the money on occasion to send a sportswriter out of town, instead of always begging the president or college for money.

Moreover, the students have a strong esprit de corps and the paper is starting to win awards.

Its report on high student government salaries won the national Society of Professional Journalism award last year for General News Reporting, and coverage of the violent protests at the California State University chancellor’s office and the soccer team’s NCAA tournament appearance last fall won statewide awards.

But in this state, all colleges are hurting. And as this goes to print, the provost has announced new, profound cuts to the university and it isn’t known how these might affect the Daily 49er.

For now, the Daily 49er is holding its own and growing which, given the relentless budget woes and the ongoing contraction in both higher education and the newspaper industry in general, is saying something.




JG TEWAY

OURNALISM REVIEW

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b e n c o n R a d y

University News provides a student voice for St. Louis University

The University News is the student newspaper of St. Louis University. Founded in 1921 by Claude Hassius, it was created in order to seek the truth and to instill a forum in which students could express themselves. The University News has remained strong through the years by trying hard to keep up with the progression of media forms. The University News is a weekly paper, produced on Thursdays with a circulation of 6,000. Papers are delivered to various outlets on the main campus, as well as the medical campus and at various cafes and shops downtown.

The paper is considered a private business under the umbrella of St. Louis University. It does not receive funding from the university, but the school does provide a space to work as well as paying for electricity, internet service, air conditioning and heating. The University News attains 100 percent of its funding from the sale of advertisements. Of the 14,000 students enrolled at the private university, 60 make up the staff of the paper, ranging in age from 18 to 22 years old and undergraduates, though graduate students can also be employed. The editorial board is made up of 21 members who also serve as editors for various departments and desks. The editors give story ideas to the reporters, as well as write articles themselves.

Saint Louis University does not have a journalism program, but a track in media studies is available in the General Communication department. Because of this, only 5 to 10 percent of the students who work for the University News plan to pursue journalism as a career. A typical student reporter at the paper is an English, communications or science major.

“I think we’re making a lot of strides toward reaching an audience in the 21st century,” said Jonathon Ernst, a senior

at SLU that has served as editor and chief of the paper for two years. “Working with online and print, we try to make them complement each other instead of competing with each other. I would say we are a pretty healthy organization, moving toward new media and making a paper that students want to read.”

In the history of the University News, one of the biggest stories covered was that of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on campus. This year’s most important story was the coverage of the law school moving off campus to downtown St. Louis, Ernst said.

“That’s the biggest story because it has a lot of moving parts and will affect the way that campus looks,” he said.

Another story that drew a lot of interest from readers was the Billiken men’s basketball team’s recent run to the NCAA basketball tournament.

Ernst said that the future of the University News is bright, and that the paper will continue to adapt to the way that mainstream media are covered. The paper has not faced the same financial troubles that other student newspapers have, in part because of its weekly printing schedule limiting the use of supplies and a steady amount of funding from advertising.

“We will be in print for a while, and continue having things in print that complement our online paper,” he said. “We have recently added a Religion and Science section that has been a hit with students and faculty alike. We will continue to give people something fresh and relevant.”

Ben Conrady is a journalism student at SIUC.

Campus Newspaper in Crisis • Features


a R n i e R o b b i n s

Robbins says good-bye to Post-Dispatch

Arnie RObbins resigned as editor of the Post-Dispatch in May. His resignation followed years of hard financial times that included a structured bankruptcy. The most recent circulation figures showed the Post-Dispatch losing circulation both weekday and Sundays. Robbins will be replaced by Gilbert Bailión, the editorial editor. Here are Robbins remarks to the newsroom:

After hiking through New Zealand earlier this year, after thinking about life and work and balance in my life, I have decided that it is time for me to embark on the next chapter of my life. I’ve been in this business for 37 years, my Post-Dispatch career began 15 years ago Monday, on April 30, and I have a big round-numbered birthday coming up early next year. As a friend recently wrote: It’s time to see more, do more, live more.

My last day here was Friday, May 18.

I have been Editor for more than six years and was Managing Editor for nearly seven years--since February, 1999. I have loved it--the work, the journalism, this newsroom, this company. It’s been rewarding. Sometimes it’s even been wonderful! But the past few years also have been a difficult and challenging time to lead a newsroom as you all know so very well.

I have a lot of mixed emotions right now. I’ll miss walking around the newsroom. I won’t miss waking up at 3 a.m. and worrying about the newsroom. We’ve been through a lot together. I’m happy--but I’m sad. I’m excited. I’m anxious.In many ways, it really is pretty simple: It’s time, it is just time, for me personally and professionally. And, yes, this was entirely my decision.

I will be an absolute ambassador for the Post-Dispatch, for Lee, for all of you. I promise that I won’t ever call you to discuss the good old days and about how you are doing it all wrong!

Even with a smaller staff, I believe, as Adam Goodman says, that pound for pound we deliver more consistent and better public service journalism, high-impact journalism, and investigative journalism than ever before. That’s absolutely what you have to continue to do. That’s what makes us vital.

I’m really proud of our body of work. In particular, our investigative work, our breaking news work, our coverage of big events, and our digital growth.

--Our investigation into the firefighter disability pension system in St. Louis showed it has been made so lucrative and received so little oversight that more than half of retired firefighters are on disability.

--An investigation that drew national and state attention last year showed that the vast majority of deaths of 45 infants in child care in Missouri occurred in unregulated and illegal day cares.

--Also last year, the taxpayer-supported St. Louis Science Center made significant changes after our reporting showed a generous bonus system and payroll loaded with high-end positions.

--In 2010, we revealed that the Missouri Board of Healing Arts allowed doctors to continue working despite serious violations such as operating on the wrong organ and lying on medical records to cover up the mistake.

--We also changed the conversation about economic development in the region through our series, “Can St. Louis Compete,” resulting in scrutiny on the use of tax incentives.

--We have been a finalist three times for a Pulitzer in the past four years. We have won five Lee president awards in the past six years.

I’m really proud that we are up and running on four platforms--print, desktops and laptops, tablets, and smart phones. Clearly, that’s the future. Clearly, making our content even more valuable and then getting paid for that content, is a significant part of our industry’s future.

Our digital growth is impressive. We averaged about 45 million page views a month in 2007; we average nearly 61 million page views a month now. We averaged about 2.3 million unique visitors a month in 2007; we average about 4.5 million unique visitors a month now.

I want to thank our publisher, Kevin Mowbray, who has always supported our newsroom and been there for me. I want to thank every division in the company, too. Truly, it takes a team--a skilled team of people proud to work here, proud of what we do, proud of what we stand for. And I want to thank all of you, in this newsroom. I am really proud to have worked with you. You’re talented, you’re smart, you’re hard-working, you’re passionate, you’re a little crazy. You care about our community, about St. Louis. You care about our readers and viewers. You care about each other.I appreciate all of that more than you can imagine. I appreciate all you have done for me, both personally and professionally. You’ve touched my life and made me better.

So thank you for day-in and day-out terrific work, for the pride we took in doing it, for making a real difference in our community. Thanks for the too-many-to-count great memories.

It’s been an incredible privilege.


Features

Features


Reading the collections of the underground press from half a century ago makes time traveling real. They transport you to a period where young writers burst with ideas to reform and/or revolutionize the country they loved. Early last year, many of the underground press reports were republished in four separate books. They were updated by the original

editors and writers from throughout the country.

That creative period of the underground press continues to affect the media. Today’s numerous critical blogs do not call themselves “underground,” but reflect the independence of that earlier day. Indeed, the publication you are reading is an outgrowth of that period. “Those who were touched remain touched,” says the editor of the books, Ken Wachsberger. He is right. Wachsberger himself an underground press publisher in Lansing, Mich., and is the key in contacting editors and assembling their contributions.

In a Foreword, Paul Krassner, who launched the Realist in 1958, distinguishes between authentic underground publications during the ‘60s and ‘70s secretly and anonymously published, and the many alternative papers. By 1969, he says there were some 500 underground papers distributing 2-4.5 million copies. Abe Peck, contributor to the Chicago Seed and author of “Uncovering the Sixties” who became a professor at the Medill School of Journalism, suggests that perhaps 1,000 more were published at colleges and high schools.

I received “Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press,” the first book of the four-part series, after it was released early last year. I also received the third book, “My Odyssey through the Underground Press.” The books offer more than enough material to fill this page. The chapters in the “Insider Histories” offer readers memories of goings on inside the publication they edited as well as happenings within their communities.

The Underground Press Syndicate was founded in 1965 by five publishers of underground papers, all critical of U.S. foreign and domestic policies. Of the hundreds of workers on these underground papers, writes Wachsberger, “They were mission-oriented, and that mission was politically, economically, artistically, spiritually and culturally anti- the officially sanctioned viewpoint of the corporate press.” Even the release of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg,

called treasonous by the U.S. administration, “had long been known by readers of the underground press.”

This brief review cannot do justice to the richness of these publications representing the aspirations of feminists, Native Americans, blacks, farm workers, gays and lesbians, artists, students and a host of other groups who found their voices for which they were prosecuted by local and national “law-enforcement” agencies.

While the books offer a wide and rich array of information, the following episodes show that even authorities living through that strange period in our history cannot possibly cover all the byways of protest publishing during those years.

While eager to join the battle for a just America in 1962, I was too staid and then hoping — futilely I learned — to make FOCUS/Midwest a self-supporting publication. Others were more aggressive. Locally, the publisher of the underground paper “The Outlaw” called me hoping that I could find a printer for him. Because he spelled America with a “k” printers refused to publish it. (FOCUS/Midwest was safe because we featured well known writers and notables such as Irving Dilliard, Arthur Goldberg and Hubert Humphrey. These camouflaged some of our more radical pieces such as a survey of police misdeed throughout Missouri and Illinois.)

The Outlaw publisher thought I would have the connections to find a printer. When I could not, I called a friend of mine, then Illinois House Representative Paul Simon, for advice. He immediately said, call Ken Stevens in Astoria, Ill., a staunch conservative who believes in a free press. Ken not only printed the Outlaw, but another even more radical local publication. That publisher had learned about the Outlaw’s printer.

A few months later Ken called me about the second publication. He said, “They are a bunch of liars.” I wondered whether they had paid their bills. “Oh yes, they paid everything. But the FBI called me to find out who the publisher was and when I gave them their names and addresses, the FBI discovered these were fictitious and they could not trace them.”

The publisher’s foresight was well placed.

The value of the underground press is highlighted by their absence during the Iraq invasion. While there were hundreds of publications critical of U.S. foreign policy during the Vietnam War era, Markos Moulitsas, founder

c h a R e s l . k l o t z e R

Underground press revisited


Warren Buffett continues to show off his penchant for success in the notoriously tough newspaper publishing business.

The famous billionaire and value investor has acquired a stake in Lee Enterprises, which owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the The Southern Illinoisan in Carbondale, among other publications.

Despite Buffett’s investment, the circulation numbers coming out of Lee’s preeminent paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, are down. Most U.S. newspapers were reporting circulation increases this spring to the Audit Bureau of Circulation because of new counting rules including digital copies. But the Post-Dispatch’s weekday circulation, including digital, fell 4.2 percent to 187,990, while Sunday circulation dropped 7.5 percent to 333,530.

The Wall Street Journal reported April 12 that a unit of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. bought $85 million of Lee Enterprises debt in November from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Buffett reportedly paid 65 cents on the dollar on the debt. Goldman Sachs had bought it months before at around 80 cents on the dollar, resulting in a loss of at least $13 million.

Lee Enterprises, which went through bankruptcy, owed about $965 million as of January.

In December, the publishing company filed a “pre-packaged” refinancing plan in bankruptcy court, according to information gathered by the Post-Dispatch’s Jim Gallagher.

“The plan had the support of more than 90 percent of creditors, and the court forced the holdouts to accept it,” Gallagher wrote.

The company emerged from bankruptcy in January. The deal increased interest payments on the debt, and it also gave creditors 13 percent of Lee Enterprises’ stock. Berkshire Hathaway’s debt holding gives it the rights to a 4 percent stake in the company, according to the Journal’s Matt Wirz, quoting bankruptcy court filings and unnamed sources.

Wirz, who spoke to several people familiar with the transaction, said Buffett has made a tidy profit – at least on paper – on the loans since the transaction took place late last year. As of mid-April, the deal was worth about 82 cents on the dollar.

This isn’t the first time that Buffett has made money off of Goldman Sachs. He invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs

during the credit crisis of 2008, when most investors were steering clear of securities firms. Goldman Sachs paid back the loan within three years – and the firm sent dividends to Buffett that amounted to an additional $1.6 billion.

Wirz wrote that a Goldman Sachs spokesman declined to comment on the loan sales, and Buffett didn’t return his requests for comment.

Through BH Finance LLC, Buffett bought more of Lee Enterprises’ loans in early April, Wirz said. A person familiar with the situation said the amount of Buffett’s newly acquired loans of Lee Enterprises was $5 million. He paid 81.5 cents on the dollar this time around, which is 25 percent more than what he paid Goldman Sachs.

The sale of the Lee Enterprises loan appears to have been prompted by two key worries among Goldman Sachs officials. One of those concerns emerged during discussions of new regulations that could restrict the investment banking and security firm’s ability to both own and trade loans.

The other concern arose after some officials within Goldman Sachs expressed worry that the world financial markets could head south after starting the year on a promising note.

Unnamed sources who are familiar with the Lee Enterprises transaction informed Wirz that Goldman Sachs loan traders decreased the company’s exposure to hundreds of millions of dollars of leveraged loans, but those transactions came at a loss for the firm. Many of those loans have increased in value since those deals took place.

Buffett was involved in another newspaper deal in November, when it was announced that he had purchased the Omaha World Herald Co, the parent company of his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World Herald. At the time, the 81-year-old billionaire was quoted as saying, “I think newspapers . . . have a decent future. I wouldn’t do this if I thought this was doomed to some sort of extinction.”

Lee Enterprises was founded in 1890 by A.W. Lee, is based in Davenport, Iowa. In addition to its presence in Carbondale, Davenport and St. Louis, its newspaper markets include Madison, Wis.; Lincoln, Neb.; Billings, Mont.; Bloomington, Ill.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Napa, Calif. In all, the company has 48 daily newspapers and a joint interest in four others. Its newspapers have a circulation of 1.3 million daily and 1.6 million Sunday, reaching more than 4 million readers daily.

J o h n J a R v i s

Warren Buffett adds Lee Enterprises Inc. to publishing portfolio

Features


Whether a decline in quality will only accelerate the demise of newspapers is open for debate. By some measures, quality has already suffered with fewer copy editors, but most chains find it an acceptable tradeoff so far.

“Corporate executives are paid to assess risks and take reasonable risks, and one of those is balancing quality against getting sued,” Fisher said. “You want to translate it into dollars and cents, you go to Bermuda and make the case to the libel insurers. Until they do that, they’re basically spitting in the wind.”

Sullivan and Fisher know the old model is not coming back. The issue, as always in journalism, is tomorrow. Reporters need to realize that no one is going to clean up their copy for them anymore, Sullivan said. Young journalists need to learn to think like editors, because they will often find themselves posting their own stories online and they will not have multiple layers of editing to catch their errors, he said.

“The only people who are necessary to a news organization in the 21st century are reporters,” Sullivan said.

Fisher teaches his editing classes with that in mind.

“I’ve shifted my classes to teaching with the idea that I’m teaching reporters to be editors,” he said. Fisher wants to be sure his editing students learn to find holes in stories and to look for potential libel.

“I do sometimes fear my colleagues assume I teach moving commas around on the Titanic. That’s not editing and it never was,” he said.

With reporters using Twitter, blogs and the Web as well as newsprint, they are increasingly becoming their own brands and need to make sure they can protect their brands. Sloppiness and poor writing are unlikely to help them prosper in the age of journalist as entrepreneur.

Despite all the changes in the field, journalism schools should focus on developing old-fashioned critical thinking skills. More than ever, journalists need the ability to analyze and synthesize information, spot holes, and detect the odor of falsehood. They need to be able to do those things quickly and they need to be able to organize their thinking into clear reporting, no matter the format.

When those skills are no longer necessary, journalism schools won’t be needed either.

A copy desk future?Continued from Page 7


Copy desk Trends

“The intent is to find the minimum number of people required to produce each newspaper without eliminating critical functions,” said Mitchell, a Poynter affiliate who served as a member of its faculty, in the story from July 22, 2009.

At the website for the American Copy Editors Society (ACES), www.copydesk.org, freelance visual journalist and instructor Charles Apple had this to say in an Oct. 27 blog post: “I’m against any consolidation that puts editing of local copy – about local cities, local people, local streets and landmarks, local history – into the hands of folks who aren’t local. Any such effort will result in a decline of quality and an increase in errors.”

Tim McGuire, the Frank Russell Chair for the business of journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, agrees with Apple. McGuire, in a blog entry dated Jan. 20, 2010, at the website http://cronkite.asu.edu/mcguireblog, described the value of newspaper copy editors: “I think just whacking a bunch of copy editing positions out of the system and expecting spell check to pick up the slack is a terribly ill-advised path. Copy editing is a subtle, nuanced art that goes way beyond spotting typos. That is proofreading, not copy editing. Most spell-check systems can catch some typos, but not all. Copy editing corrects context errors, provides expertise on local points of history and location, and supplies subject matter expertise that often saves a piece of copy. Copy editors also supply a little thing called judgment. Every writer pushes a point too far, uses language that is ill-advised or makes assertions that can’t be supported. A copy editor’s job is to catch those.”

To be sure, the copy desk cuts are being fueled by a drop in advertising sales, the primary source of newspaper revenues. Ad sales plummeted by 17 percent in 2008, then fell off the edge of a cliff with a 27 percent drop in 2009, according to data provided by the Newspaper Association of America.

For his part, Apple has kept close tabs on the copy desk consolidations. In a Jan. 17 blog post, he reported that

GateHouse Media, which owns 97 newspapers in 20 states, had revealed its plan to consolidate its copy desk and design functions of its daily newspapers to hubs in Boston and Chicago. The first of the company’s daily papers to be moved to the hubs included the State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill., and the Register-Mail in Galesburg, Ill. According to Apple, “Design and copy editing desks for those two papers will be moved to Chicago by June.”

Not everyone is lamenting the consolidation trend, though. Longtime newspaper journalist Steve Yelvington, who was the founding editor of the Star Tribune Online (www.startribune.com) in Minneapolis in 1994, posted an article titled “Let’s just bury the nightside copy desk” on his website www.yelvington.com.

“Forgive me, nightside copy editors, for I have come to dash your hopes and crush your spirit,” Yelvington wrote in his June 8, 2011 post, adding: “We are seeing the sunset of print, and no amount of wishing and hoping will make it otherwise. Cutting the cost of print production as print revenues fade is the only responsible path, the only way to ‘save newspaper journalism’ for a digital future.”

Yelvington makes the argument that “editing should be tightly coupled with newsgathering and writing. If your newsgathering process isn’t producing clean, publishable copy, you’re not ready for a digital world. Fix it. Print is, at best, a static fork of a continuous digital process. If you’re waiting to post news until it’s edited for print, you’re killing your job. If you’re posting news on the Web that isn’t of publication quality, you’re killing your job.”

On that point, veteran editor John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun agrees with Yelvington.

“There, I think, is the point that is missed by the managers who are eliminating copy desks,” wrote McIntyre in his “You Don’t Say” blog at the website www.baltimoresun.com. “They would be better advised to find ways to incorporate copy editors more thoroughly into the production of the electronic editions.”

Cutting copy desks: penny-wise or pound-foolish?

“ “I f your newsgathering process isn’t producing clean, publishable copy, you’re not

ready for a digital world.

“ “Cutting the cost of pr int produc tion as pr int revenues fade

is the only responsible path.

Continued from Page 8

JG TEWAY

OURNALISM REVIEWgatewayjr.org


Copy desk Trends

Our stylebook is online, easily and quickly searched. So is our preferred dictionary (the last hardcover dictionary widely distributed in the newsroom was a 1999 edition). Electronic edits are tracked by color for each editor; notes are left in “notes mode.” While print proofs are still produced and marked for the weekly, “carets” and “hash marks” are becoming historical oddities unknown to the general newsroom.

“Search engine optimization” has arrived. Even the Monitor’s print stories make their way online. Spellings and terms in headlines and even body copy more and more need to conform to the way they are being typed in by readers in search-engine queries – not the way a stylebook

demands. The stylebook is evolving to keep up.

Yes, we still have readers who spot an editing gaffe and send a brusque e-mail asking if anyone on the copy desk happened to be awake that day.

But I’m not offended. Once a copy editor, always a copy editor.

After leaving the copy desk Gregory M. Lamb went on to serve The Christian Science Monitor as a New England regional reporter, Special Projects Editor, Features Editor, Assistant International News Editor, and editorial writer. He’s now a senior editor and writer at the Monitor.

Advertisers embraced the idea in its planning stages, Montevideo said, and in its first year under the new model, The Red & Black is at about 98 percent of last year’s local advertising revenue.

“We actually budgeted to lose money this year and we’re going to make money,” he said.

Montevideo said his biggest concern was that the student editors would not approve of the change, but that turned out to be the opposite of what happened. Students were aware of the changes in the newspaper business, and wanted more experience with new methods of delivering news.

“It was like a huge weight was taken off their shoulders,” he said. “Trying to create this daily miracle and get people to do more online -- there just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day.”

Montevideo’s concerns about his staff’s reaction are understandable. That’s another part of the strange universe of college newspapers: Student journalists who get their news from smart phones and laptops cling to the traditional notion of a printed newspaper, and many students still prefer to read their college paper on newsprint.

“Even though a lot of students and younger adults and older adults even do not read a newspaper, people are still picking up the college newspapers,” said Rachele Kanigel, an associate professor of journalism at San Francisco State University and vice president of College Media Advisers, which is made up of student media professionals.

But as today’s college students are replaced by a generation that grows up getting news from its phones and tablets, more college newspapers might drop or reduce their print editions. One of the issues standing in the way of that has been the lack of technological knowhow in most college newsrooms.

“There are very few programmers and web-type people who are solely devoted to college newspapers, whereas the New York Times can hire a whole raft of people to work on their apps and website,” said Murley, who blogs for Innovation in College Media (www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog).

Still, at some point college newspapers will have no choice but to find the resources to ramp up their technology.

“I think a lot of it comes when college papers see their return rates go up,” Murley said. The Daily Eastern News began printing fewer papers when too many of the copies it distributed remained on the racks, he said.

While college newspapers often can make such moves more nimbly than their commercial counterparts, many are bound by university regulations and beholden to either student government or an academic unit for financial support. Such ties could hamper their attempts to position themselves for the future, and lead to the demise of some.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a tragedy if a news organization ceases to publish a print newspaper but continues to publish online,” Kanigel said. “What would be a tragedy is to have no publication.”

C.S. Monitor – the way we wereContinued from Page 9



Campus Newspapers: hard times, hard choices

Copy desk Trends • Campus Newspapers in Crisis

In addition to training future journalists, college papers serve as a watchdog for their campuses, she said. “Often they are the only news organization covering a community that might be 5,000 or 10,000 or 50,000 people.”

Levant said students who work for a college paper and go on to careers outside of journalism have learned communications and analytical skills that will help them in any field. With the number of journalism jobs shrinking, that’s probably a good thing.

But many college newspaper advisers report increasing challenges recruiting students to join their staffs and motivating them once they do. It’s difficult to persuade students to work long hours under deadline pressure for low (or no) wages when the field for which the work is preparing them is shrinking rapidly as newspapers consolidate operations, lay off journalists and close their doors.

Levant sees increased fundraising as part of the solution to keeping the doors open at college papers. Some college papers have begun to solicit donations through a voluntary pay wall on their websites. Others have launched campaigns to reach former staffers.

Some newspapers pay everyone on their staffs. Some pay stipends to editors and other key staff members, but nothing to the majority of workers. Some papers are entirely volunteer. For newspapers that pay their staffs, one of the solutions has been to cut pay and cut positions. Just as it is elsewhere, payroll is the largest controllable cost at these papers.

Eventually, though, papers that make cuts face the prospect of a drop in quality that only accelerates the decline in readership and advertising. When this happens, college newspapers can be said to inhabit the same universe as commercial newspapers, which have been doing that for years.

The answer to the problems college papers face is probably similar to the answer to the problems that confront commercial journalism. Of course, no one yet knows what it is. While independent nonprofit news organizations supported by grants and donations have made their mark in commercial journalism recently, most college papers lack the ability to land major support from foundations, and the pool of potential major donors is limited. Sales of online advertising have not kept up with the decline in print advertising in any sector of journalism, and pay walls are not going to produce enough revenue to stanch the bleeding.

One major asset college newspapers have going for them is the energy and creativity of their young staffs. It is from them that the answer is likely to appear, and if we lose college newspapers before that happens, commercial newspapers and the public will lose, too. The work done at many college papers is different only in degree from that done at major news organizations. Student journalists earn the wrath of administrators, student governments and others on campus by speaking truth to power. That should not be allowed to disappear.

“We are the protectors. We are the vanguard for truth,” Levant said. “We will be around in a different form. We’d better be, because we are part of the fabric of democracy.”

Eric Fidler teaches journalism at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he is faculty adviser to the Daily Egyptian. He spent more than two decades as a reporter and editor at the Atlantic City Press, Miami Herald and The Associated Press.

“ “Papers that make cuts face the prospec t of a drop in qual it y

that only accelerates the decl ine in readership and adver t is ing.

Small school papers still sustainableThrough the years the look, the content and the frequency have changed. For all the alterations, though, it appears the more it changes the more it stays the same. It is easy to see the cycles from a harder news approach to a more artsy, literary fare. And then back again.

Today’s co-editors, Baldauf and Ken Baughman, described the current Pilot this way in a recent editorial: “The Pilot should be a platform for our community to share news as

well as to be a forum for opinions and creative content.” There’s no bluff in that.

Paul Van Slambrouck is associate professor of mass communication at Principia College and adviser to the Pilot. Van Slambrouck spent over 25 years in print journalism and served as Editor of The Christian Science Monitor from 2001-2005 and prior to that was Deputy Managing Editor of the San Jose Mercury News.


JG TEWAY

OURNALISM REVIEW



load in addition to working 20 to 30 hours a week at the paper.

The newspaper is completely student-run. The students make their own decisions about what to cover, how to cover it and how to play it in the paper and on the website. The editorial board decides what stance to take on issues of the day, with an emphasis on local issues. The editorial adviser and the photo adviser critique their work after publication and offer advice and suggestions before publication, but the students are free to decide whether and how to cover something or editorialize about it. With this right comes the responsibility of handling criticism from the audience of faculty, staff and students.

Besides finances, the challenges that face the News going forward are the same that face other newspapers, college or commercial. The most immediate challenge is getting

the editorial staff to think online first. The staff will be reorganized in the fall semester to produce online content first and print second with fewer editors working on a centralized news desk rather than several desks organized around specific beats. The number of paid positions will not decrease, as a couple of paid reporting positions will be created.

Another challenge is the cost of equipment. The newsroom has computers, cameras, lenses and digital recorders, but in these tight budget years, no money is being set aside to systematically replace them. That is something Ryan hopes to address with a fund-raising campaign aimed at alumni.

Keeping the paper’s financial health in mind is perhaps one of the most important lessons students could learn. It certainly prepares them for their eventual future roles as newsroom leaders, especially as the people who will determine how journalism moves forward as the digital era progresses.

Lola Burnham is an assistant professor of journalism at Eastern Illinois University and is the editorial adviser to the Daily Eastern News.

Squeezing blood from a college newspaper

“ “The most immediate chal lenge is gett ing the editorial staff

to think onl ine f i rst.


Long Beach State keeps college paperContinued from Page 17

Underground press revisitedof the progressive political blog Daily Kos, writes in one of the Forewords, “What America was treated to in the months leading up to the Iraq invasion was a groveling, ingratiating, and sycophantic media brimming with co-opted insiders parroting the lines handed down by the powerful to further the interests of the powerful.” While the mass media continued to support the administration line, Moulitsas discovered an alternative, founding a progressive political blog, Daily Kos, that “exploded in popularity” and became a “strong, unapologetic antiwar” voice. It is still in business. Mass communications had changed.

By the early ‘70s, many of the founders of the underground press were exhausted. Diverse interests within

these publications competed with each other. For many, the lack of resources threatened survival from issue to issue. Their fate is similar to what happened to local journalism reviews. About 30 of these reviews closed their doors in the early ‘70s. The Underground Press Syndicate decided to change its name to the Alternative Press Syndicate.

Many of these editors have advanced to main stream jobs, have abandoned pot and their heated nightly discussions with colleagues for families and children while others did not and some succumbed to Aids or committed suicide.

These books are in many libraries. They should also be on the reading lists of all schools of journalism.


“The paper’s come a long way,” said Chris Burnett, chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication. “It’s improved a lot and, in challenging budget times, that is no small feat.”

Barbara Kingsley-Wilson is a full-time lecturer and media adviser at Cal State Long Beach. Kingsley-Wilson also wrote for the Orange County (Calif.) Register, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and other publications. She serves on the board of the California College Media Association.




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