(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final part of a multi-part series on the decision of the IU Media School to unilaterally converge its student media outlets, the Indiana Daily Student, WIUX and Indiana University Student Television. Part of the plan calls for the elimination of the final print edition of the IDS, something upsetting to the students.
If you want to help the students keep their print paper, they have listed this link as a way to do this: https://forms.gle/cisJyhvAxuQbC4co7.
If you want to tell Dean David Tolchinsky what you think about this situation, you can email him here: mschdean@iu.edu
In case you missed them, here are Part I, Part II and Part III.)
Dynamics of Writing has obtained this exclusive footage of the IU Media School announcing and attempting to implement its plan to converge student media without consulting the student media outlets.
One of the questions I had for Dean David Tolchinsky involved the mechanism by which the Media School could impose this plan. The radio station and the TV station both have club status at the university, meaning they get housed under a department or college. They can also beholden to whoever holds their FCC license and their status makes them unable to earn revenue in the way a student newspaper can.
In short, someone else holds the leash on these media outlets and the staff knows it.
“They just expect us to change, but none of them are brave enough to be like, ‘You need to have the IDS on your NewsHour,’ or ‘You guys need to do music on the TV station,’ or ‘You need to do this,'” Trevor Emery, the president of WIUX radio, said. “And while they do have a point (that) it is quite wasteful and confusing when everyone has their own equipment and everyone has to move money differently for that, that’s not a problem that we have any control over.”
But does the Media School have control over the fate of the IDS?
“We’ve kind of been wondering that as well,” IDS co-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Meador said in a recent interview. “We aren’t even sure what authority they have to make that decision. Our organization, it has a charter that was developed by the Board of Trustees, and so I could understand the Board of Trustees potentially having the authority to do this, but the media school, I’m not completely sure how that happens… We are asking those questions as well, and haven’t gotten an answer so far.”
Several media reports have referred to the IDS Charter as the controlling document. The charter refers to the board of trustees approving the agreement and the dean of the school appointing the director of student media in consultation with the faculty. Aside from that, it’s difficult to see who is in charge of what outside of the IDS ecosystem.
The IDS doesn’t receive funds from the university. In fact, it is required to pay some sort of financial tithing that a previous president created, so it’s basically paying rent. It pays its full-time professional staff both salary and benefits. (Tolchinsky mentioned something about the Media School chipping in on bennies in one of his letters, but the students assured me that the paper is on the hook for the brunt of the bill.) The IDS also covers student wages, equipment purchases and travel costs.
I could imagine the Media School could claim some sort of investment in the place, having helped clear the $1 million debt the IDS had on the books. As part of an hour-long panel discussion on Indiana Public Media’s Noon Hour, Associate Dean Galen Clavio mentioned that the Media School had taken financial responsibility for the paper’s accounts, although how that all worked was not clearly discussed. That said, that’s not the same as owning a controlling interest in the actions of an organization.
The only real “authority” that is clear from the documents provided here appears to be at the board of trustees level. This is why I asked Tolchinsky for some sort of document or agreement that provided the school with the right to do this. I’d try to make an open records request for whatever they’ve got on this, but given IU’s track record on transparency, I’ll probably be dead and buried before I get something back.
So that leads to the next question: What if the IDS just said “no” to all this?
“We are kind of wondering the same thing,” Meador said. “We’re thinking, you know, what, if we just said no. I don’t know if it’ll come down to this, but we’re even thinking, ‘Is there a way that we can, as students, independently fund-raise or pay with our own money?’ … I think the key thing that they have, the key bargaining chip that they have is that I believe that they have the power to discipline our professional staff members. And our professional staff members are the ones who sell the ads and, you know, handle the print contracts and all those things. So that’s kind of our one concern there.”
SO WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY KNOW?
When I decided to put a week’s worth of blog posts into this, I wasn’t entirely sure what the best answers were, but as I talked to the students and got the runaround from the administration, a lot of things came into focus.
Here are the things I clearly know:
Student media outlets at IU are starving: The radio station, and presumably the TV station, don’t get enough money to fully thrive in the ways they once did. Emery told me his staff doesn’t get paid and that an adviser is getting a tiny stipend to keep everything afloat. When the place went from getting 70 cents per student to zero, it was just a matter of time before the clock ran out on them. During that Noon Hour panel discussion, IUSTV news director Ashton Hackman said the TV station just recently gained space in the media school, operates without professional staff help and generally has to subsist on crumbs. Why this happened is beyond me, but that’s the situation and the center can’t continue to hold.
The IDS still generates money, but it’s unable to continue to spend what it currently spends without some level of assistance from the university. That assistance could come in the form of a student fee, removing some of the red tape that prevents them from tapping other streams of revenue or even allowing work-study money into the newsroom in some way. The April report on the IDS was clear: You can’t keep expecting them to do more with less and it’s not fair to force this place to run at a profit in this current environment.
Print, at this level, still matters: The one-day-per-week model for the IDS makes money, according to the information I was provided. It also connects the IDS to the larger community it serves, provides the community with a signpost to let folks know they’re still working and helps draw eyes to their content. Even more, it teaches students how to design traditional print products and keeps those skills sharp. For all the excitement the Media School seems to be putting forward about retaining special issues in print, it’ll be a pretty ugly set of special issues if the students’ design skills atrophy.
One of the arguments Clavio made about cutting print (aside from cost, which we’ll get to later) was that newspapers keep dying at a pretty steady clip. He cites a Northwestern University study that says these are going away at the rate of about 2.5 per day. True, but that means there are still approximately 6,000 papers out there that need people who can design to spec, write headlines in holes and generally publish something relatively well composed. That doesn’t account for the hundreds of other jobs in which students could bring to bear design skills for printed or print-related items.
Beyond that, it matters to the students right now. They have a connection to this print edition that might not make sense to other people, but it is a motivating and galvanizing factor for this staff. Any alleged financial savings this generates will be dwarfed by the loss in morale this ham-handed approach to killing it has created.
These organizations are extremely incongruent: To say these organizations have little in common is a massive understatement. The IDS is really the news driver here, while the entertainment comes from the radio station in the form of events and on-air music/shows. The TV folks declined to respond to requests for interviews, so it’s unclear to me what they do and the information I got from the folks I did interview was as clear as mud in this regard.
When the positives of the plan were discussed by students, it was primarily Hackman who noted the benefits that would come to his media outlet through this approach. That’s not the same as embracing the new cross-platform, digital-primacy model the Media School is touting.
In a lot of cases, it makes sense to put certain operations together. Most of the convergence efforts I saw were of news-oriented operations, in which all of the participants valued the idea of putting out news content across multiple platforms. This was also helped by the ability for each organization to bring something particularly important to the table that the others were unable to bring. When all of the organizations saw the benefits each other brought to the table, in that shared senses of congruity, things worked out. When they didn’t, it got bad quite quickly.
As I said in an earlier post, this isn’t like putting a bunch of soup cans from three shelves onto one shelf. This is more difficult than that.
This could not have been done in a worse way: People are far more likely to agree to things, and be motivated to participate in them, when given an opportunity to participate and they are treated with respect. In the Self-Determination Theory, autonomy is a primary cog in making people feel like they’re engaged, valued and part of a process.
In one study we did involving SDT, we had people doing a Boggle grid and they were in one of several conditions. In one situation, they were given the ability to pick either a blue, a pink or a yellow grid without seeing what was on the grid. In another, they were told which grid they had to take, also without seeing what was on the grid.
The people in the group that got a choice felt better about the experience, tended to do better in finding words and felt like they would enjoy persisting in the activity, even after they were no longer required to do so.
The kicker? All of the grids were exactly the same. What mattered was the perception of choice and autonomy.
In the radio show, IDS Co-Editor-in-Chief Jacob Spudich made the case that he and his co-EIC were never consulted about the changes, let alone the cut to print, as part of the process. Clavio rather derisively noted that previous IDS students had been part of the plan back in April and that to expect the university to just keep rebooting its plans every time the IDS had leadership turnover was not feasible.
To his point, the original report from April included the names of the co-EICs from the newspaper and, no, you can’t start from scratch each time someone new comes in. However, Spudich’s larger point was that a lot happened between that April report and the one issued in October, none of which involved IDS student input (or input from any other students, it would seem).
Clavio noted that much of the work was done over the summer, when students weren’t present. Back in my student media days, we called this the “Dump the Garbage Time,” as it was a lot easier to do things that might upset students when they aren’t around to make a fuss. I’ve seen people hired and fired, attempts to cut athletic teams and generally unpopular “restructuring” occur during the summer. It’s like going on vacation for a week and finding out your roommate sold all your furniture and redecorated.
Even more, they had TWO MONTHS after school started to call in the students and say, “Here’s what we’re thinking, this is why we’re thinking it and we want to know what you think.” That, of course, is if they actually WANTED input. As co-EIC Marissa Meador noted in an earlier post, the IDS was supposed to find out about all these changes an hour before they went public.
That’s not a good-faith effort and unless Clavio is a total idiot, he knows that to be true.
A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR THE IU MEDIA SCHOOL
I know it’s easy to sit back in Snarkville and lob shots at people who are actually attempting to do something. It’s a lot harder to actually find ways to fix things.
I lack a time machine, so I can’t technically undo this. I also am still stuck on the whole “Can the Media School mandate what the IDS does or not?” aspect of this. Even more, I have no actual authority here whatsoever, which might actually be the exact same level of authority the Media School has, but I’m not going to pretend I have any.
That said, here are a few things I would recommend going forward:
Money comes first: Before you think about engaging in anything you have planned here, get a handle on the money. Whatever requests the Media School needs to make to the university to get funding should be done now. Whatever requests it needs to do to loosen some of the red tape on outside earning potential should be done now. Whatever decisions need to be made to make sure the budgeting works should be made now. Technically, it should have been done well before the plan was released, but, again, I have no time machine.
In short, if the money isn’t in the proper places it needs to be, moving forward makes no sense.
Too often, and believe me I’ve seen this a lot, academics make these broad-based plans or grandiose project outlines with the idea that money somehow will arrive as needed at some time in the future. Promises are vaguely made about “being supportive,” but the admin never locks down specifics, and thus everything ends up falling to pieces rather quickly.
To quote a Jean Shepherd book title: In God we trust, all others must pay cash.
Get hard numbers with in-writing commitments from people authorized to say “yes” or slam the brakes on this whole thing.
Make a hard budget decision at the IDS: This is likely to be as popular as bacon on Good Friday, but I’d recommend a serious look at where most of the money for the IDS goes. I was told that about $300K goes to the professional staff, and that can’t be wiggled. I also know print costs and web costs are pretty well fixed, but likely they represent a small fraction of the budget.
I would imagine a large swath of cash goes to student employees, which is where the cut would need to happen. In listening to Tyler Emery, I heard that IDS students get a certain amount of money per story or per piece they create. I’d cut that, as it’s likely something that would go a goodly way to biting into the budget deficit. I’d also strongly consider where the other editorial salaries are and see if there are ways to cut them down, either by eliminating additional positions (assistant, assistant editors) or by whacking down on the payroll per position.
I hate the idea of students doing work for free and I surely hate the idea of cutting student wages in general. That said, if the IDS wants to make the statement that all sorts of other student newspapers get X, Y or Z from the university, they also have to understand that most of them don’t pay staffers at the lowest levels. In addition, most editorial salaries are more of a gesture of goodwill than they are actual salaries. Based on what I’ve seen at other places, and given what the radio station kids are doing, it is possible to get quality help without having to cough up an inordinate amount of cash for it.
If you can make the budget work that way, it could be a chance to keep the ball in your court moving forward while you figure out other revenue streams to augment your finances.
Leave print alone: I get why the Media School wants to kill the print edition as part of this: It gives them some sort of “convergence cred” by shedding the “old media” as part of what’s going on with this merger. It also has that surface-level look of saving money, as printing a dead-tree edition of a publication always costs more than just sticking stuff online.
One problem is that they’re not really killing print, but rather attempting to cream-skim some special issues while dumping the weekly issue for that “cred” they want. A second problem is that this isn’t really saving money at all, given the way the math works outs.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of this entire argument about the print edition came on Noon Hour. When the hosts asked about the cost vs. revenue associated with the print edition, Clavio did the whole, “That’s almost impossible to quantify” thing, but assured everyone that it was a money pit. Student Media Director Jim Rodenbush didn’t have much in the way of a concrete answer either, keeping his focus elsewhere.
Spudich then said, “Here are the numbers” and laid out what it cost to print (about $60K) and what the revenue associated with print was ($90K). He also explained how he got the numbers and that he checked them with both the IDS and Media School’s finance people.
Clavio then said something to the effect of, “Those numbers are not accurate, based on the data we have.”
Did he present that data? No.
Have they presented that data elsewhere? Not that I can find.
Could he explain it now? “This requires more than a five-minute discussion here,” he said in a tone I’d characterize as part annoyance, part bluster. It kind of felt like this to me.
A lot of what he said on the air fits this same approach of applying vague generalities and deflections to the concrete questions people asked of him.
Even if none of those other concerns about print were taken into account, killing the print edition is doing more harm than good to the overall morale of the IDS.
Call it a mulligan and back off of print.
Less convergence, more JOA: Based on what I’ve been able to ascertain, these three media outlets have almost nothing in common. That might be something that could change, but not here, not now and not with this plan being crammed down everyone’s throat.
In addition, it’s clear there’s a financial imbalance in terms of revenue generation, expenditures and even student pay. These things are likely to cause friction throughout any process to bring everyone together to sing kumbaya in a converged newsroom. Add in the idea that these people have almost nothing in common in terms of background and goals, this forced editorial connection is going to short circuit at best and blow up at worst.
That said, I’d recommend the idea of creating kind of a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) that covers the business ends of these programs. I know our newspapers in Madison had one, in which everything from ads to bills got handled by the Madison Newspapers Incorporated (I’m sure the name has changed over time). Meanwhile, the Cap Times and State Journal newsrooms operated independently and were freely capable of trying to beat the crap out of each other each and every news cycle. A couple times a year, there were joint projects that were based on finance, like a graduation tab that ran in both publications. However, for the most part, the places were left to their own devices.
A JOA would get the finances in order without having to make the more uncomfortable part of convergence work as well at this point, particularly since the pieces, as they stand, don’t fit well.
I somehow doubt any of this will get through to the people in charge, but my hope is that if the staffs at these places see these options, it might give them some ammunition to fight the fight as they see best.