USA TODAY International Edition
In digital world, college papers printing less
Moves improve their reporting and put them on the platforms students want, they say
“I didn’t want to turn around and tell my staff, ‘ We’re not going to pay you.’ ” Hanna Alani, Indiana Daily Student editor- in- chief
When Dana Branham started attending the University of Oklahoma, the student- run paper, the OU Daily, printed, well, daily.
But as a managing editor in 2015, Branham was part of the editorial team that oversaw the Daily’s transition to a twiceweekly publication. Now, as she wraps up her tenure as the OU Daily’s editor- in- chief, she thinks the transition was for the best.
“I think it’s really kind of freed us to just cover the hell out of things digitally,” Branham told USA TODAY College. “Print is never our top priority. Top priority is always, always, always the website and how we’re doing things digitally.”
By worrying less about putting out a print product, the team can focus on more thoughtful, investigative stories, Branham said.
The shift in production also allows the team to be more agile in breaking news and, most important to Branham, meeting their audience where that audience chooses to consume news.
“We print 13,000 copies a week, but we are consistently over 60,000 or 80,000 page views a week,” Branham said. “We’re just reaching a much broader audience online than we’re even able to in print.”
The OU Daily isn’t the first student paper to change production schedules, and it certainly won’t be the last. Like national, mainstream newspapers, college papers are seeing a decline in circulation and ad revenue, and they too are figuring out how to adjust to an increasingly digital reality.
Print newspaper circulation dropped more than 6% from 2014 to 2015, according to the latest data from the Pew Research Center. Print advertising revenue has also declined by over 7% nationwide. In that same time, digital ad sales increased by over $ 9 billion.
Increasingly, college newspaper editors facing these realities are settling on a survival plan: Print less.
Hanna Alani was editor- inchief of the Indiana Daily Student at Indiana University when the paper switched from five days a week to two.
“This has been a change that has been brewing for some time, probably for the last six or seven years, honestly,” Alani said.
The decision was partly based on the need to save money for the independent, student- run publication.
“This is an independent gig. We didn’t want to take that away. I didn’t want to turn around and tell my staff, ‘ We’re not going to pay you,’ ” Alani told USA TODAY College. Printing fewer issues cuts costs, she said.
Alani added that, by diverting resources away from publishing five papers each week, future staff at the IDS will be able to use social media more effectively to reach and connect with students.
“Our use of social media has been reactive, it’s been very storytelling, but we need to use it for news gathering,” Alani said. “We need IU students to engage in the IDS, and we need to say that, ‘ Yes, we care about that.’ ”
Some student media organizations are even turning to digitalexclusive platforms. The Triton at the University of California- San Diego, for example, launched about two years ago and now, according to its editor, drives thousands of visitors a day.
“We’ve seen a massive uptick in people just searching for our website,” said Gabe Schneider, the online newspaper’s editor- inchief. Initially, he said, traffic came from social media platforms.
Schneider said he was really never concerned about putting out a print newspaper because that’s not where his audience was.
“Students aren’t really reading newspapers. Sometimes you have faculty or administrators reading a print product, but we assume that students are going to be reading the digital stuff,” he said.