(EDITOR’S NOTE: When I started digging into the Indiana University Media School’s plan to merge the Indiana Daily Student, IUSTV and WIUX, I thought this was going to be a quick post on one week and then a Q and A with the staff, if I got lucky.

However, in looking into this more deeply, this officially started getting out of hand over a week or more. Thus, I wanted take a couple bites at the apple to try to understand what this is, how we got here and why one of the best student media operations in the country is in this situation. Buckle up. Stuff gets weird…. — VFF)

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In early October, the Media School at Indiana University announced its plan to converge multiple student media outlets in an attempt to save money and develop synergistic editorial efforts. The Indiana Daily Student, WIUX radio and IU Student Television would be gathered under one umbrella, whether they liked it or not. In addition, the plan called for the elimination of the final print edition of the IDS, something that was clearly upsetting to the students.

The students published several pieces, including an editorial and an article, that outlined the general problems with this approach and the ham-handed way it was presented to them. For the IDS, this was like a mob hit: They never saw it coming and now they’re left picking up the pieces as they grapple with what could be a new reality for them.

“Obviously, we’ve been looking for ways to address our deficit for quite a while now,” Co-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Meador said in a recent interview. “We’ve been cutting print from five days a week to two days a week to one a week and that was part of that process. All of those previous print cuts were made by IDS professional staff in consultation with student leaders, not the Media School. So that’s a key difference here: This proposed cut of the weekly print edition is not supported by our professional staff, by student leaders, was not done in consultation with Jacob or I, and is being conducted by the media school and not the IDS. So that’s an important distinction.”

The paper faced both a deficit built up over time as well as one that was likely to continue into the future. How this happened is a big part of the story…

THE SITUATION

Not to overstate the obvious, but newspapers in the United States are dying at an unprecedented rate. More than a decade ago, it became clear that newspapers were essentially getting killed due to several market forces: Decline in advertising revenue, expansion of options for consuming content, decline in journalists creating content and a drop of interest people had in reading newspaper papers. A Medill Report from 2023 found that nearly one-third of all U.S. newspapers that existed in 2005 would be gone by the end of 2024. That would leave about 6,000 papers in the country, compared with nearly 24,000 in the early 20th century.

Campus newspapers found themselves facing a similar problematic future along those same timelines. The salad days of ads pouring in, as advertisers rushed to the only platform that could deliver them the campus market, ended and students were left to scrambling to deal with the change. A 2013 report from the Pew Research Center found that these publications were engaging in many of the behaviors as their professional counterparts for many of the same reasons.

The Indiana Daily Student is both the oldest and largest member of the student media on the IU-Bloomington campus. It is also one of the most award-winning college media outlets in the country. It has experienced many of the problems outlined above, despite weathering them better than many of their peer publications while receiving no financial support from the university itself. The paper had a $1 million reserve as far back as 2005 and had maintained a reasonably stable financial condition into the mid-2010s.

However, a confluence of events, including cuts to print, decreases in national advertising, university-mandated payments and COVID led the IDS to run a debt of nearly $1 million as of early 2024. In July 2024, Media School Dean David Tolchinsky emailed the IDS staff and said an arrangement with the provost’s office had led to the decision to wipe clear the million-dollar debt. However, underlying financial issues meant the IDS was likely to build that debt back up.

According to Meador, the paper appears to be on pace for another deficit-spending year to the tune of around $300,000

THE REPORT

Part of the decision to let the paper run a deficit in the first place back in 2021 was the agreement that the IDS and the administration would put a plan in place to both fix the deficit and prevent it from coming back. James Shanahan, dean of The Media School at the time, and Jim Rodenbush, who remains director of student media, issued a press release together, explaining the goal of this maneuver:

As we work together to secure the long-term future of the IDS, and with agreement from the Office of the Provost, the IDS will be permitted to operate at a deficit for three years beginning in the 2021-22 fiscal year. Any remaining deficit after that time will be covered by The Media School. There will be no immediate changes to the professional staff structure.

Discussions on the future of the publication have been in progress for some time. Media School administration and faculty have continued to work behind the scenes while responding to urgent modifications to teaching and staffing models necessitated by COVID-19.

As with most things put on a multi-year plan, things languished for a substantial portion of that time, with no real movement toward any reasonable solution. The IDS staff was concerned and said as much, while various options, including selling IDS swag, closing the campus yearbook, using newspaper racks for advertising on campus and other cash-raising options, were not allowed by the administration.

Tolchinsky commissioned an ad-hoc committee to figure out what was going on and what was the best path forward. In April 2024, the committee, which included representation of professional staff from the three student media outlets, issued its report. A few key takeaways were:

• Student media at IU is not unique in its struggle to persist in the face of changing dynamics in the areas of newspaper, radio and TV operations.
• The university red tape regarding marketing and sales rights has hamstrung student media in any attempt to generate revenue beyond the distributed content created by the student media outlets.
• The university is out of step with the trend of current student media paradigms, as most colleges and universities provide student media with some form of financial support.
• The administration needs to start thinking about student media the way it thinks about other learning opportunities that exist on campus and stop thinking about it as a profit-making enterprise.

The recommendations from that report were two-fold:

1. Unify the operations under one umbrella as both a cost-cutting and editorially synergistic maneuver. This would eliminate redundancies while connecting students across the media platforms in a way that could improve content.
2. Get the university to pony up some significant cash to keep these operations running. The report noted a $6 per semester student fee could allow the publication to continue as it stands while remaining in the black.

“Their overarching point there was that any plan moving forward should treat the IDS as an educational experiential learning opportunity, not as a business,” Meador said. “That was a big point. A major part of it was asking for some sort of direct University support, maybe in the form of a mandatory fee, which a lot of other college newsrooms have.

“What was not on our radar at all was that they were considering cutting the weekly print edition. We did not think that was that was on the table. It was no one talked about it in the report, and yet, that’s one of the few things in this October report that actually is being implemented right now. All the other things are, you know, future, future things. So, you know, we’re kind of, we knew this whole time that they were developing their plan, but we had no idea that it was going to involve print until the report got leaked to us and then it got announced on Tuesday.”

UP NEXT: The plan to converge and the fall out.