(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.

This clip is both an accurate assessment of the IU situation with the exact level of specificity the university seems to be offering as to how this will all work.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third 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 and Part II.)

THE CULTURAL CONCERNS

In looking into the convergence model decades ago, it became readily apparent to me that this wasn’t a situation where technology or news values would be the sticking point. It would be the culture of the newsrooms and the social identity those newsrooms created.

The general gist of all of this comes down to the idea that you can’t just pour a bunch of people together into a media operation and assume this is going to work. In fact, the opposite is true, as we reaffirmed more than a decade after that first look. A few things have to happen if this kind of convergence is to work:

• It has to be a self-directed, organic movement. The few operations on the student level that have worked out tend to be those in which the staffs themselves decide this is a good idea and want to participate. Outside influence and demand tends to dramatically undermine convergent operations.
• There must be a heavy investment in new resources. One of the easiest ways to get kids to play together is to give everybody new, cool toys. That works for my 3-year-old nieces and it works for most corporate organizations. If you come to the party feeling like you have “your toys” and that people want to take them from you, things are going to get ugly. Even more, in a situation in which resources are limited, groups tend to hoard things for themselves, even when a more equitable distribution might benefit the greater whole. Although university officials insist there will be investment in additional professional help, most of this is aimed at adding master’s students with professional backgrounds to the mix. As both a former grad student and someone working through a project that involves the use of grad-student labor, I can assure you it isn’t the same thing as dedicated, trained professional staff.
• The groups must have the appropriate shared goals and vision. One of the primary reasons early convergence operations hit some significant rough patches was that the newsrooms tended to have mutually exclusive goals. In the world of journalism, being first (a.k.a. getting the scoop on the competition) is a primary goal.
  At the time, television had the advantage of going live first, so when newspaper people found out something of value, they tended to keep it quiet so they could publish it in print the next day. Instead of seeing the goal of getting information out to the audience in a timely fashion, regardless of platform, it became, “I want to be first.” This was a microcosm of what tended to go wrong due to a lack of shared goals and vision.
• People must value and appreciate the importance each group brings to the collective.  The best way I have found to describe how this works is like this: I, as a writer, don’t have to do what you, a videojournalist, does to make this operation work. I do have to understand what you do, appreciate what it brings to the table and find ways to augment what you do in a meaningful way.

This last one might be one of the biggest sticking points for this IU effort, based on how the students explained their own operations and those of their potential convergence-mates.

WIUX President Trevor Emery said that the media operations tend to remain siloed and that they don’t have any sense of what each of them could do for the other.

“Us and the newspaper, don’t talk about it. Us and the TV station don’t really talk about it,” Emery said. “These guys are kind of on their own game, creatively, for sure, like we are. I’m gonna be completely honest. We’re primarily music station and that is our main focus. And the newspaper mainly does news. Their arts column is kind of piddly, and the TV station is, I don’t know, they do like everything. I’m not super familiar with them… sometimes (The IDS will) interview an artist that we booked or something, but other than like news and sports, there’s not a whole lot of crossover that’s possible because we mainly do music and entertainment.”

IDS co-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Meador said she had brief contact with members of the radio station and the TV station after the announcement broke. Although she hasn’t had a lot of interaction with the broadcasters, she said what she does know doesn’t fit the model established at the IDS.

“From what I’ve heard, I feel like WIUX, the radio station, is kind of fundamentally different,” she said. “They put on a music festival, and a lot of their people are just interested in music. They aren’t journalism majors at all, and so the idea that they’re now supposed to be generating a profit or generating revenue and selling advertisements? From what I’ve heard from the few representatives I’ve spoken to, they aren’t super excited about that idea.”

In terms of convergence efforts, Emery said the specifics have been horribly lacking.

“They really want us to combine all the podcasts,” he said. “They want us to be on an app together. It’s very, very confusing, and they’re kind of like, “You guys are going to be steering the ship for this thing you don’t want to do, but we’re also not going to fully support anything you’re doing, either. It’s very confusing.”

The student leader of IU Student Television did not respond to interview requests for this piece, so it’s unclear how engaged or enthusiastic the staff there feels about this situation. As part of an hour-long talk show on IPM’s Noon Edition, IUSTV news director Ashton Hackman spoke in favor of the plan, in large part because of the resources the TV station would be getting.

Hackman said the station has often operated in an inequitable position, only in recent years getting studio space in the Media School and having no professional staff to help them. Although Hackman praised the plan, he rarely mentioned the editorial convergence opportunities the school has been pitching and mostly focused on the benefits the TV station would obtain in this model.

Meador said earlier that she could understand why some aspects of this plan look great for IUSTV.

“I think that they’re, at least publicly, their organization is taking a positive position,” she said. “They seem to be publicly very supportive and celebrating this decision, which, to an extent, I think makes a lot of sense. They started with no professional staff members, and now we’re going to share the professional staff members’ work and time among all three organizations… I do see how this would be a step in the right direction for them.”

Speaking of people who see this as a step in the right direction…

THE UNIVERSITY SPEAKS (SORT OF)

IU Media School Dean David Tolchinsky seemed extremely happy and excited to announce this master plan to converge the student media outlets when he put out this press release.

“Successful media organizations are not afraid to reinvent themselves, and we have big dreams for student media at IU,” said Media School Dean David Tolchinsky. “We are proud of our tradition of excellence in student media. Through innovation, we will amplify the storytelling our students already do so well by reaching audiences where they consume content and generating revenue to support the organizations, enabling them to become the best learning labs they can be.”

In spite of student disagreement, Tolchinsky doubled down in a letter to the editor of the IDS, as he gave the “rah-rah” speech to end all such speeches:

The letter says, “‘Friday Night Lights’ with Coach Taylor telling us, ‘Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.'” The photo says, “Joe Pantoliano’s character, Cypher, in ‘The Matrix.'” Y’know, the guy who sold out the whole crew.

Jacob Spudich and Marissa Meador pose next to the famed Ernie Pyle statue outside Franklin Hall after speaking to the Student Media Board during the application process to become co-EICs. Photo courtesy of Marissa Meador.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second 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

If you missed Part I, you can find it here.)

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

Trevor Emery, the president of WIUX at Indiana University, knew something was going to change for his radio station in a fairly substantial way.

He just didn’t know what it would be or how fast it would hit.

“On Monday, we all get an email in the early afternoon, and it was three, four o’clock,” he said in an interview. “It said, ‘We’re all gonna meet Wednesday and talk about some big news for student media.’ And then Tuesday I’m my home… I get out of the shower and I look at my phone, and I have four missed calls from one of the IDS editors, and I call him back, and I’m like, ‘So what’s going on?’ He was like, ‘Have you seen what the media schools posted?’ I’m like, ‘No.’ Then they bugged me for a quote.”

The editors had received a leaked copy of a plan about massive changes coming to student media. The Media School stated it would merge the student media under one umbrella operation. It would also kill the final print edition of the IDS, shift the professional staff around to cover all the media branches and create additional media options, including a newsletter and an all-encompassing digital app.

“Then Wednesday, the next day, we all go into this meeting, and the dean starts off with, ‘Oh, the IDS got this report in a leak, and we just preempted them by posting it directly,’ The whole meeting felt like they were telling us, ‘We are here to inform you of this decision anyways, whether you like it or not,'” he said. “So then that says to me I was never going to be asked about anything in the first place.”

The mood at the IDS wasn’t any better, as the staff scrambled to make sense of what they had seen and tried to inform their readers about the issue. Co-editors-in-chief Marissa Meador and Jacob Spudich had planned to attend a meeting on Wednesday, where they thought they’d be asked for some input on a plan people had been working on since April.

“I think there was kind of like an assumption from Marissa and I that this meeting was going to be more of a constructive meeting where Marissa and I’s input would be valued somewhat, and I think that became clear that that was not the case that Tuesday,” Spudich said in an interview.

Meador said they found out the school had planned to meet with faculty Wednesday at 2 p.m. to clue them in, speak to her and Spudich at 3 p.m. and then make the formal announcement at 4 p.m.

“It’s hard to believe that anything we said was going to have an impact on their final decision if they had planned to release it right after our meeting,” she said.

With that in mind, and a copy of the plan in hand, the IDS crew went to work as reporters. They built both a story that provided the news of the plan and people’s reactions to it as well as a letter from the editors in which they expressed “no confidence in the Media School’s plan.”

“I feel we should have been considered in this decision,” Spudich said. “This is about more than just the money aspect. It’s about  staffing, the abundance of our newspaper stands around town, and the visibility that we have there. There’s just a lot of things that we don’t feel were taken into consideration. And really the only way they would have been is if a representative from our newsroom was there to voice those concerns early on in this process.”

Emery said the radio station also felt let down by the plan and the approach the administration took in announcing it.

“It did come out of nowhere, and it would have come out of nowhere on Tuesday, or would have come out of nowhere on Wednesday,” he said. “I don’t really have a difference on the day of the week that I’m getting screwed over. But it was very confusing.”

AT LEAST 99 PROBLEMS

When it comes to the financial aspects plan itself, the members of the IDS had several, specific concerns:

• The cutting of the print edition didn’t make sense. The paper version of the IDS was revenue-positive, and it was a key way to reach the community, both for older people who still preferred that platform and as a signal on news stands that the paper was still publishing. Furthermore, the original committee’s recommendations did not include cutting print. The plan calls for the retention of special issues, but how those are done and which ones will happen remain a mystery, the students said.
• Continual cutting had not solved any significant problems for the IDS to this point. As its name indicates, the IDS once published a daily print edition, but over the years, in response to dwindling revenue and loss of print readership, the staff had cut the paper and print run. The race to the bottom of printing still left them in debt.
• This plan was created without transparency and then forced upon the staff. As Meador noted in an interview, the previous cuts or changes the IDS undertook to fix the finances were done by the IDS itself. This would be the first time print cuts or organizational changes were mandated by an external agency.
• The resources aren’t there to make this work. Much like the convergence efforts of yesteryear, this one looked to get fewer people doing the work of more people. The comparatives the Media School was drawing to other converged student media operations involved far more professional staff and much higher buy-in from the institution, they noted.
• It’s unclear who will be paying for what. The specifics about cuts are clear, but the revenue-generation portion and such are exceptionally vague. The radio and TV stations do not generate revenue, so the cost of the professional staff will have to come from somewhere else. Currently, the IDS pays their salary and benefits, but it’s unclear how that burden will be spread moving forward.

As far as WIUX was concerned, the problems were even bigger.

“The newspaper really is like the elephant in the room,” Emery said. “They’re consistently $300,000 over budget… The newspaper as a thing works, and they know that it is profitable. What isn’t profitable is paying like five or six adult-level salaries to people with health insurance and whatever else. And we don’t have any of that. We have a faculty adviser, and she does the work of like 10 people, and she gets paid a small stipend from the school just to help out.”

Emery said the three organizations rarely interact, primarily because they all have different interests, different needs and different purposes. The student newspaper produces local news content, while music and community events drive the radio station. (A representative from IU Student Television did not respond to requests to participate in this series.)

“I sit in these meetings with the media school, with the staff and the dean at times, and I point out that we are definitely much more student-life based,” he said. “We connect with the community. We were trying to get people out in public by doing events, things like that. We just finished up our whole week of events and a fundraiser to keep our station going. None of the two other clubs that we’re talking about do that.”

With both broadcast groups run as student clubs, Emery said they were not allowed to do certain things to earn money. In exchange, they both used to receive money through student life via student fees. However, around 2020, he said, the stations got cut off from that funding without much explanation.

“We were getting, at one point, like 70 cents a student, undergraduate student on the Bloomington campus,” Emery said. “So that ended up being like $30 or $40,000 a year. And we managed that to where we had a pretty big surplus. By the end of where that landed, like three or four years ago, we had like $150,000 to $200,000… Over the past four or five years, that’s dwindled down.”

With the Media School calling for a three-year phase in, Emery said he’s worried that time and funding might run out for the station.

“They also are like, you’re going to have three years to implement this, and it’s obviously not going to make money in that meantime while we figure out what systems to use and build a client base, etc., etc., and they won’t tell us how much money we’re going to be supported with during that time,” Emery said. “I’m assuming that they’ll cover the salaries of the newspaper, and they’re like staff, the pro staff. But for us, I don’t know what that means. That’s essentially the time when we run out of money in our account.”

NEXT TIME: The problems with convergence and the background of the guy trying to make it happen at IU.

The Indiana Daily Student’s first issue from 1867.

(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)

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.