Since the inception of journalism, universities have played a part in ensuring people are informed about the world around them. But, in the ever-changing industry of news media, many campus newspapers are struggling to keep up with the times.
According to Cameron Raynor, president of the Canadian University Press (CUP), an organization that helps promote co-operation between campus papers all over Canada, this is mainly due to tough financial times across the whole industry.
A decline in the journalism industry
According to Statistics Canada, the newspaper publishing industry as a whole reported an operating revenue of $3.2 billion in 2016, down nearly one fifth from 2014, which is a loss of more than $620 million in just two years.
The major problem lies in the following statistic. Advertising revenue made up 63 per cent of the total revenue for newspapers in 2016, followed by circulation sales which were 23.3 per cent of revenue.
Both are declining, and newspapers have not figured out a way to replace that income or stall the decline.
This is combined with the fact that people are increasingly getting their news from digital and online news sources, notably Facebook and Google, leaving newspapers to feed off the scraps, according to Kenny Yum, chief of staff at the CBC.
Advertising sales and revenue are disappearing, and this is mainly due to the internet, according to Statistics Canada.
The web also provides unlimited space for advertising, which lowers costs.
Yum said transitioning more towards digital media is just a realistic approach to the changes happening in journalism.
“You have to publish where your audience is living. This generation has grown up with the printed form not being their native calling,” he said. “They’re more likely to go watch YouTube than turn on CBC.”
The problem lies in making this profitable.
Newspapers can sell digital ads like they would in print, but the money does not normally end up in their pockets.
Instead, it falls into the hands of aggregators, for example, search engines and social media platforms.
According to the Financial Times, outside of China, Facebook and Google account for 84 per cent of digital advertising revenue, which totals around $100 billion. The next biggest competitor is Amazon.
Newspapers have tried subscription-based services, but the problem with that is a lot of news is available for free.
Outside of papers like the New York Times, who have a massive international reach and reputation, smaller news organizations cannot convince people to pay a monthly subscription fee, and they cannot generate advertising revenue when competing with giants such as Google and Facebook.
How student newspapers are adapting
Student newspapers are also feeling the pinch of declining advertising revenues.
When Sabina Wex was going into her final year of school as editor-in-chief for the Dalhousie Gazette, she surveyed some students she knew, asking them about the paper.
“I talked to a lot of people about what they liked about what we were doing, and most people just said they didn’t know that we had a paper at Dalhousie,” Wex said. “That was really disappointing because we worked so hard on it, but we realized we kind of had to adapt to our generation and their reading habits.”
That’s why for her final year at school, along with the co-editor-in-chief, Eleanor Davidson, they decided to focus more on online content, and Wex started in a new position as engagement manager.
“It was too much work for one person to do on their own, so we split the roles,” Wex said. “Eleanor was better at organizing people and managing a team in the newsroom. I have a marketing background, so I took the lead on the online stuff.”
Jacob Lorinc, the editor-in-chief at The Varsity, said student levies also play a big part in keeping student papers running, and many campus papers have been fighting to increase their levies to match inflation.
The Varsity, the University of Toronto’s (U of T) main campus newspaper, was forced to hold a referendum asking for a levy increase of $0.80 per student to help ease their budgetary concerns.
“Without them we would be toast. Ad revenue continued to spiral down, and running on that alone was not sustainable,” he said.
Even with the guaranteed income a levy provides, some campus newspapers are still forced to adapt due to shrinking print advertising revenue.
According to a recent article from The Varsity, since 2007, their advertising revenue has decreased from nearly $400,000 to just over $85,000.
This sum of money is now lost from their budget. Combined with the recent increase in minimum wage to $14 adding large additional costs to the salaries The Varsity pays its editors and staff, the levy increase was the best way to keep the paper running, Lorinc added.
The referendum to increase their levy finished on March 3. Around 650 students voted, with around 500 voting ‘yes’ for the increase in the levy.
With this increase in the budget, The Varsity is seeking to add an editor position at the U of T’s Scarborough and Mississauga campuses, because they want to provide better coverage for all students, according to Lorinc.
This also allows for them to fund the public editor position, according to Lorinc, which was added back in 2016.
“We were following what the New York Times was doing . . . the Toronto Star, etcetera, and we thought it was a healthy addition to the newspaper,” Lorinc said of the public editor job. “I don’t know of any newspaper that is free of criticism, so it has definitely been useful for us.”
The idea behind a public editor is that they are a bridge between the public and the newspaper. This allows people to give more feedback on issues they may have with a paper’s coverage, and allows for the paper to relay their methods and their journalistic process.
This has been the key difference the position has made, Lorinc said.
“The main idea was accountability. We are all just student journalists, and we aren’t necessarily the pinnacle of journalistic skill,” he said. “We think we are seeing better understanding amongst the people who come in to see the public editor of how we do our work.”
At The Eyeopener, the independent campus newspaper at Ryerson, their mandate dictates that 30 per cent of the budget for any issue of the paper must come from advertising revenue.
So even if they would be able to support themselves on the student levy they recieve, if advertisement revenues go down, that means the cost of production must go down as well.
Sierra Bein, editor-in-chief of The Eyeopener, said that they have introduced new digital products to help try and fill the gaps in ad revenue.
Raynor added that he’s seen more and more papers launching new digital projects to increase student engagement.
Journalism and digital tools
Going digital was something the CUP is trying to emphasize for student journalists all over Canada, and was the main theme of 2018’s NASH80 conference, an annual gathering for the country’s student journalists.
“We have started to emphasize digital first. The session with Buzzfeed reporters always sells out. It has just kind of naturally moved that way along with the industry, and the kind of panelists we get more and more often are working in digital,” Raynor said.
Yum, who gave a presentation on student newspapers going digital at NASH80, said one of the most successful uses of digital media was done by the Ryersonian, the faculty paper at Ryerson.
“They followed the women’s volleyball team on Instagram stories when they went to nationals, and I only found out about it because I followed the account,” Yum said.
The Ryersonian, like other campus news groups such as The Eyeopener, have been leveraging social media and new media like podcasts to increase engagement.
Their podcasts, focusing on one specific issue a week, feature the reporter, or an editor who will talk about specific articles.
The podcasts only started two months ago, so according to Bein, it is too early to gauge the success of the project yet, but, podcasts have been seeing big success in the journalism industry.
According to WIRED, with the advent of the podcast app on Apple products, and the massive popularity of Serial, podcasts exploded as a medium for journalism.
Now organizations such as CBC, the New York Times, and the BBC produce content specifically for the medium.
At Dalhousie, Wix also began to introduce podcasts and other new elements during their move towards digital, a concurrent shift that’s been happening across the media industry.
“We started doing podcasts, video, photography and using more social media. One of our biggest successes was our Instagram stories,” she said. “One of our editors who’s very passionate about mental health talked about her own challenges she faced on the daily, and she was very open about it. People seemed to really respond to that.”
The future of student journalism
Bein was involved with planning NASH80, and said she has one major takeaway from the event.
“Something that might work for one community might not work for the other. Think of Dalhousie or Queen’s, student newspapers are the only real news sources in their towns, it’s a different news environment to the one of Toronto and Ryerson, where there’s more competition,” she said.
“There’s a lot of different ways that newspapers are trying to stay alive and change but I don’t think anyone really has a clear idea of what works,” she said.
There are a lot of different avenues that newspapers are taking to reduce cost and increase public engagement, but Yum said the big thing is to remember the importance of student media.
The public funding of student newspapers makes them more similar to a public broadcaster, such as the CBC, than a conventional news organization, Yum said.
“I don’t know that they can fill gaps in coverage for professional newspapers,” he said. “But they can potentially act as watchdogs, like public broadcasters who are free from commercial interests.”
After all, every good reporter knows that the first responsibility of journalism, is to the truth.
Graphic by Manoj Thayalan
