THE LEAD: In yet another ham-handed, “we grownups know best,” maneuver, administrators at Indiana University decided to kill the weekly print edition of one of the country’s best college newspapers, without discussing it with anyone involved at the Indiana Daily Student:

The IU Media School plans to eliminate the Indiana Daily Student’s weekly print edition beginning this spring as a key part of its plan for student media, claiming the move will save money and help make a converged IDS, WIUX and IU Student Television operation revenue neutral within three years.

The school announced the plan publicly Tuesday afternoon before consulting with student media leaders or the IU journalism faculty, even though the school had scheduled meetings with both groups Wednesday. Most of the IDS’ student staff members, including the designers that work to design a print product each week, were unaware of the change when it was announced.

THE FALLOUT: Well, for starters, not telling someone that you’re about to do something painful to them, without their consent or input, only to have them find out on their own is not really going to build confidence in the approach.

(It reminds me of when Zoe had to get her 18-month boosters and no one mentioned it until the nurse came in and plunged three needles into her leg before Zoe got a glance. The fourth needle hit and she began to sob uncontrollably as she looked at me with the, “Why hast thou forsake me?” look and I wanted to die.)

The IDS staffers, who were supposed to have a meeting on Wednesday to talk about this with administrators, found out when a draft of the plan leaked early (because of course it did) and a press release leaked (because, y’know, these kids are good journalists who find stuff).

Let’s just say their letter from the editor reflected that sense of betrayal, but also the clarity of a newsroom that understands big, sweeping changes may sound great, but they impact granular-level aspects of daily life:

We believe this plan was made with good intentions, but we do not believe it was made with proper consultation of the people who know the most about the IDS. That is clear throughout the report, where many ideas that sound good in theory have left our professional and student staffers wondering how they will work.

Since 2017, the IDS has undergone multiple reductions to its print edition, as well as its professional staff members — decisions that were made to combat the growing financial burdens that plague newspapers nationally. Years later, these cuts have not solved the deficit. The Media School’s latest decision — the first time a print cut has been mandated by administrators — will only perpetuate the problem.

We believe slashing print will have unintended negative consequences for our revenue. The plan poses a host of logistical problems associated with a reduced paper delivery schedule, such as the challenge of retaining delivery drivers.

(NOTE: I’ve got emails out to the editors and advisers at the IDS and we’ll do more on this Monday if those things bear fruit. If not, I’m sure I’ll still have enough outrage for a post or 12 in the next week or so.)

WELCOME TO 2000: One of the primary things the university has cited here is that by converging the media operations, not only will things run more smoothly from a content-delivery standpoint, but the university can save money.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because we’ve tried this before. Convergence was a concept that popped up in the late 1990s, but really became prevalent in the early 2000s. Laws had previously created walls between various media operations, so only a few operations like the Tampa Tribune, WFLA and TBO could exist in this converged environment. Once those laws went away, bean counters… er… corporate media titans found ways to couple up and thruple up as many of their organizations as possible.

The goal was multifold:

• Eliminate redundant financial operations and general day-to-day expenses. (Why have three websites when you can have one? OR Why have three front-desks staffed with workers when you could have one?)
• Expand advertising packaging to improve sales across multiple platforms (This is why you still get a landline with your cable and internet package, even if the last time you used a landline was never)
• Create synergistic content creation among reporters, editors and media professionals from previously competitive backgrounds (Hold on to that one. We’ll get to it later.)
• Dominate a particular area against the sad one-platform operations (Presupposing, of course, that bigger is always better. Is it? Asking for a friend…)

DOCTOR OF PAPER FLASHBACK: I first heard of convergence when my doctoral adviser came in from a weekend conference at the University of Kansas in a huff.

“Some jackass out there said that KU had already started working on some aspects of this convergence thing and that it planned to roll out some ideas in the next year or so,” she said. “I stood up and told them we had a guy who was already ahead of all that from a research standpoint and was probably doing his dissertation on that topic.”

Yep. I was dead.

WHY IT SUCKED: In researching the topic and how it was being portrayed in the world of media, any reasonable person would have thought this has a real chance to change how journalism works. What I found out, using the concepts I’d learned in my outside doctoral area of social psych, along with what I’d found out by working in student media, was that this thing had massive flaws that no one wanted to admit:

The forced nature of change: If you want to make sure people absolutely hate something, force it upon them without consulting them or without giving them a voice. The problem that most of these convergence-happy idealists faced was that they didn’t realize this isn’t like moving cans of soup from three shelves onto one. This was going to be about forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do for reasons that made little to no sense to them.

Social identity theory: One of the most obvious flaws I saw a mile away was that for eons, studies of newsrooms demonstrated that they retained the same dynamics as any other group in which social identity was strong. The basic idea is that you tend to relate to your group whether it’s an ethnicity (Proud to be Polish), a fan base (Go Guardians) or any other collection of like-minded individuals (Elect Smith). Newsrooms develop their own little community identities and you can’t just pour people from them together in one pot and figure, “Hey they’re all journalists” any more than you can pour baseball fans together and say “Hey, all their teams are in the playoffs right now.”

The folks at BYU figured this out the hard way almost a decade before anyone else did. In 1995, they tried this whole “converge to save money and supercharge the news” thing without involving the people actually getting stuck together. It turned out that at the end of the five-year experiment, nothing was better than when things started, including finances, content or staff attitudes. In fact, the students could only agree on three things:

• They liked “their people.”
• They hated “the other people.”
• They hated convergence.

This was the starting point for my dissertation and when I surveyed professionals about convergence and the idea of converging their operation with other operations in the area, social identity reared its ugly head. Follow-up studies I did in the years to follow showed this was still the case, even as we all stopped using the word “convergence.”

The price of cost savings: The old joke of “How can you drop 15 pounds of ugly fat in a minute? Cut off your head.” seems appropriate here. No matter how much people claim convergence saves money or improves a product, it has never been shown to do both simultaneously. In fact, you usually go the other way with it, as costs rise from things you failed to account for and quality falls because you cut a bunch of positions/people.

You might have one fewer administrative assistant and say, “Look at the salary we saved!” but you never account for the wasted time of the 12 people left over who are trying to figure out how to make things work as well as that person did. You might remove the cost of one day’s worth of print, but you might also lose out on hundreds of extra eyeballs on ads that inspired local businesses to invest their promotions budget with you. This is the dirty secret of convergence that doesn’t make the front page of E & P when the whole process goes to hell on a rocket ship and the people who decided to force it upon the organization are now off somewhere else making money on the latest batch of snake oil.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Never in a million years did I ever see this happening at IU or with the IDS. This publication is one of the best in the country and I should know, as I was constantly trying to beat it for my five years at Ball State.

Every national award, we were both up for it and we usually both got it. I remember it being harder to win first place in the Indiana Collegiate Press Association newspaper division than it was to win a Gold Crown from Columbia University or a Pacemaker from ACP. Indiana was just stuffed full with amazing places from IU, ISU, Purdue, Notre Dame and Ball State to name the ones I remember in our division.

In the past decade or so since I left, they haven’t slowed down, either. I still see IDS stories showing up in national contests I judge and state ones as well. The work they do is phenomenal from the designing of print to the deep-dive investigative journalism the kids there produce. If this media school had any smarts about it, it would pour buckets of cash into this thing and thank God it was lucky enough to do so. If these people at the IU Media School had any idea how hard it was to build a consistently excellent winner like the IDS, they’d understand that.

If the kids want to keep one day of week for print and the rest of this is humming along well, leave them alone. You can’t BUY enthusiasm and motivation, especially in the jaded world of journalism. They’ve already made cuts and taken on sacrifices, so they are willing to work with this institution to keep things from getting out of hand.

In the mean time, the students are asking for people to help. Here’s the link they posted in that regard, if you are so inclined.