These are dark days for the newspaper business. Newsrooms are shedding jobs by the hundreds; major metropolitan newspapers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer have cut their foreign desks (according to The New Republic, only four U.S. newspapers now have one); and whole sections are vanishing, as evidenced by The Boston Globe's recent decision to do away with its weekly stand-alone Health/Science section.
Essentially, newspapers have become obsolete. More than anything, they have been undercut by the Internet, whose proffered plethora of free information makes paying for a newspaper simply unnecessary for most people. As circulation declines, advertisers — who historically have been the main bastion of newspaper revenue — are beginning to take their services elsewhere.
Perhaps newspapers will formulate a brilliant and forward-looking business model for the 21st century. Perhaps they will simply become an anachronistic curiosity, or perhaps they will go the way of the evening edition and disappear altogether. Whatever happens, Tufts is not an island and student publications are struggling with how to sustain content as wallets everywhere tighten up.
The Tufts Daily's editor-in-chief Evans Clinchy's Feb. 23 letter, entitled "Cutting back," spoke to the spirit of the times. Clinchy writes that "We're cutting the little things here and there — a comic strip today, a sports article tomorrow and so on — to make ends meet." Clinchy also underscores the migration of content from printed pages to the Daily's Web site, a move he correctly identifies as paralleling "the way of the future in journalism."
The Daily, as Clinchy is careful to mention, is Tufts' only fully self-sufficient student publication. That means that they don't show up in the expenditures column for the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate's budget. This allows the Daily to ensure absolute autonomy, precluding the possibility of the administration exercising any sort of editorial review.
Financial struggles are nothing new for the Daily, Clinchy told me, noting, "We've always had to make these difficult calls." The price of refusing the administration's largesse is a perennial balancing act, as the paper's staff tries to maximize content while remaining fiscally stable. As rising paper prices push up the costs of printing, the Daily will have to drop down from 16 to 12 pages more frequently, according to Clinchy.
"Cutting content is a last resort," managing editor Sarah Butrymowicz told me, an assurance that Clinchy echoed. Butrymowicz added that the Daily is trying to forestall taking on additional debt "to make it easier on future generations."
The Daily aside, Tufts features a multitude of campus publications that do rely on a flow of money from the university's coffers to stay afloat. The administration has already staked out its position in regard to the financial crisis' impact on the Hill: Offering the financial aegis to allow students to remain at Tufts is the preeminent concern, followed by retention of quality faculty.
So in the interest of balancing the budget, cutbacks are coming. Any campus editor has to be warily scrutinizing the horizon for the specter of curtailed funding, something that will necessitate tough choices about content and visual quality. Additional pages or more professional-looking glossy material cost money, and editors are going to have to make some tough decisions about which aspects of their respective publications are ultimately expendable.
"A couple magazines or newspapers may have to sacrifice an issue here or there," TCU Treasurer Matt Shapanka told me. "We're not forcing them to; we're not asking them to accept a reduction in quality. At the very least, we're trying to maintain the status quo."
Michael Snyder, editor-in-chief of the Tufts Observer, told me that he is "not concerned" about appreciably diminished scope or quality of content. He noted that the magazine's level of funding is not a constant but fluctuates from year to year, which has always forced the Observer to adjust accordingly. He said that the Observer may be forced to reduce the length of some issues, but will continue to put out the same number per year.
Shapanka's use of the term "status quo" is telling. What constitutes the status quo? I would be shocked if campus fixtures such as the Observer, The Public Journal or The Zamboni ceased to exist. But less established media would seem to be more susceptible to potential future rounds of cutbacks.
Of course, the Internet has a role to play in all of this. By bolstering its Web site's content, the Daily can avoid having to omit stories or attenuate coverage when financial constraints limit the amount of available page space. The growing number of blogs on the Daily's Web site speaks to the advent of the Internet, particularly in expanding the news cycle beyond the timeline of a publishing schedule to allow for a far more flexible (and often more demanding) timeframe for coverage. The small litany of user comments appended to numerous Daily articles online tells me readers are attuned to the switch.
But the stakes are not the same for publications such as The Zamboni or The Public Journal, whose focus on students actually picking up an issue and leafing through is evidenced by the fact that these publications' Web sites stop at offering PDFs of back issues. Onyx, Tufts' black literary magazine, is still basically in the planning stages with its Web site. Such publications rely on the availability of physical copies — and I fear that as financial woes intensify, these issues could become thinner and more infrequent.
--
Jeremy White is a senior majoring in English. He is the university's public editor. His columns are available online at http://ase.tufts.edu/publiceditor and he can be reached at jeremybw1@gmail.com.