College Newspapers Under Assault?
Of course they are, and they always have been.
Yesterday, Atlantic Magazine published an article titled, “The Plot Against Student Newspapers?” The headline asks a question that I could have answered a decade ago without hesitation. Yes, there is a plot against student newspapers. And if you happen to end up at a college that has a history of hatred toward the student press, well, you’re screwed.
I’ve been researching the status of journalism programs and student newspapers for over a decade, focusing primarily on California community colleges. After years in traditional magazine print media, I began teaching courses at several community colleges in Southern California and was surprised to learn of the fractured state of journalism and student newspapers.
In the beginning of the 21st century, budget cuts were hitting the state hard and would continue to get worse. Education, as always, was being hit the hardest with entire programs being cut. Journalism programs seemed to always end up on the chopping block.
My first adjunct teaching job was at the college where I work now. When I was hired in 2004, Mt. San Antonio College was offering few journalism courses. The student newspaper, The Mountaineer, had been put on hold indefinitely. I was hired to teach an Intro to Mass Communication class.
It was at Mt. SAC that I would first hear about a troubled student press from the students. I was approached one evening at the end of class by a very enthusiastic student, Ben Horak, who had worked on the Mountaineer as a designer. According to Ben, he and the students were determined to bring the newspaper back and he thought I was the one who could do it.
“Would you please consider helping us?” he asked, or I should say, pleaded.
Ben and I talked about what had happened with the journalism program. He told me that the college had a rocky relationship with journalism. It appeared the problem had more to do with the college trying to find the right fit for its student media and never quite succeeding. The program had been bounced back and forth between the speech/communication and English departments with adjunct advisers. The result was a fractured program without a newspaper and the students were writing letters to administration in an attempt to get it back.
I set up a meeting with the chair of the speech/comm department where the program was being housed but was told there was no money to pay for an adviser.
I was a “freeway flyer” during that time, a term used for adjuncts who teach classes at several colleges, so I was able to get a good look at a few of the journalism programs around Los Angeles. I taught an Intro to Mass Comm course at Los Angeles City College and became friends with the adviser. The adviser and students were publishing an award winning print newspaper but stories about a lack of support from administration and looming budget cuts permeated the air.
It wasn’t until I was hired to co-advise a print newspaper and teach an advanced newswriting class at Los Angeles Pierce College that I would see the inner workings of a college newsroom. What I found was a thriving program with significant enrollment and an award winning print newspaper.
I arrived on campus each day with this crazy happy look on my face and a spring in my step. I loved being in the middle of the action. The longtime journalism professor and adviser Rob O’Neil got a kick out of my enthusiasm, but made a comment that I will always remember.
“Just wait, Toni. One day, after you’ve been teaching as long as I have, you’ll look old and tattered like me.”
I thought Rob was joking until I landed my first full time job at Oxnard Community College. Gary Morgan, the full time professor and student media adviser was retiring and wanted me to fill his shoes. But the job came with a warning. “They hate me here and they hate the newspaper,” he said. “Maybe you’ll have better luck.”
I applied for the position and was hired. This small community college located in the agricultural fields of Oxnard had a very small program that put out a biweekly newspaper. The staff was small; maybe eight students, but they were passionate.
“Dr. Morgan said you’re really good and we should listen to you so we’re all yours,” said one of the editors, Karina Gonzalez.
And so we began. The newsroom was small and had 10 outdated computers. The staff resembled The Breakfast Club and I would learn that the relationship between administration and the student newspaper staff was similar to that of student John Bender and Principal Richard Vernon.
These students had stories to tell and most of them were juicy. Apparently, the administration had a history of trying to stifle the student press. Gary was a force to be reckoned with and would threaten lawsuits if they even thought of messing with him.
When Gary took a one year sabbatical, he brought in Elena Jarvis, a strong willed powerhouse who didn’t take guff from anyone. Somehow, the program was intact when he returned, but a second sabbatical years later with a different adviser would not fare as well. The program was left in a broken state and Gary was having a hard time putting it back together. The college had already tried to cancel the program twice, but when he announced his retirement, he had already convinced his division to approve a full time hire in an effort to preserve the student voice on campus.
It all began innocently enough. I was invited in the first two weeks to meet with one of the vice presidents to discuss the vision of the student newspaper. We exchanged some small talk about journalism and then it happened. He proposed an editorial board comprised of himself and a couple of administrators who would go over the newspaper before it was printed. They said it would help protect me, at least until I “got my feet wet.”
I may not have been a seasoned adviser, but I knew quite a bit about media law. I was sued years before for libel by a very famous rockstar. The First Amendment Coalition brought in a firm to represent me pro bono and I was eventually released from all liability. That lawsuit was a crash course in media law. The first words that came to mind were, “Over my dead body,” but I instead said, “This is not going to happen. Ever.”
After leaving the meeting, I was given a quiet warning in my ear by an administrative assistant. “If you ever want to receive tenure, or even keep your job, you’ll keep your head down and do what they say.”
What followed was a slew of attacks from administration that sparked calls to every student media organization that existed.
I arrived at Oxnard at a time when the district had just hired a new chancellor. In the music industry when someone refers to an axeman, they’re talking about a guy who could shred on guitar. In education, an axeman is an administrator who shreds, or axes programs. The new chancellor was one of them.
The students did some digging at the chancellor’s former place of employment and the reviews were not great. They wrote stories detailing what they found which made the attacks on us escalate. The student newspaper would disappear from campus as fast as it was distributed. Staffers found stacks of papers hidden under piles of trash in trash receptacles across campus. One day we came to the newsroom to find the hard drives on our computers wiped clean. We just kept going.
It was no surprise in my second semester of teaching that we landed on the chopping block. Budget cuts hit the district and low enrollment programs were the first to go. Ours was on the list.
What followed was an intense fight to keep the program alive. The Journalism Association of Community Colleges and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists rallied its members.
Students, faculty and local advocacy group members lined the halls of the district’s board meeting that would decide the fate of the program. Protests and sit-ins were organized, and petitions were gathered before the meeting but the final result was inevitable. The college administration hated us, just as Gary warned, and now they had an excuse to cancel the program — budget cuts and low enrollment. So they voted to kill it.
“Even the dust bunnies aren’t leaving this newsroom,” the Campus Observer’s editor in chief said to the local news. But even tying herself to the newsroom door wasn’t going to reverse the board’s decision. The program was gone and it wasn’t coming back.
The Ventura County Community College District Board of Trustees didn’t stop with Oxnard College. A longtime professor of journalism and adviser of student media at Ventura College had just announced her retirement, leaving the program vulnerable. This gave the board a reason to kill a second program — one that had been operating for 80 years. Ventura College still does not have a journalism program or student newspaper.
This is one of the most devastating parts of killing the student voice. Once a program is cancelled, getting it back is a difficult process and few succeed.
I was starting to resemble that tattered newspaper adviser that Pierce’s Rob O’Neil described. There was a rusty spring in my step but I kept going.
I began a study, “The Vulnerable Status of California Community College Journalism Programs and Student Newspapers.” My intent was to explore the status of California community college journalism programs. I began surveying every community college in the state that had a journalism program, and if a college didn’t have one, I wanted to know why.
As the responses came in, I was more convinced than ever that there was a conspiracy among administrators to kill journalism programs at community colleges, especially ones that put out student newspapers.
During that time, I was asked to restart a student newspaper at Los Angeles Trade Tech College in Downtown Los Angeles. LA Trade Tech, like Oxnard, had a troubled history with journalism and hadn’t published a student newspaper in years. Rosa Santana, a west coast representative with NAHJ, was teaching a newswriting course at the college and was determined to help bring back the student newspaper. The department chair wanted to see the newspaper published again and Rosa suggested they hire me. I wanted to see firsthand what was happening in college newsrooms so I took the job.
Approximately 22 students enrolled in the production class all eager to produce a newspaper. Nearly all the students came from Rosa’s newswriting class. The students pitched all kinds of stories and most dealt with corruption on campus. One in particular was about the student government wanting to restart the student newspaper and control all content.
I was only on campus one week when I was called into one of the vice president’s office and told I was not authorized to produce a student newspaper. I asked the obvious question: “The course is called ‘Student Newspaper Production.’ What did you think I was going to be teaching?”
After some hesitation, I was told that the students could produce a newsletter for the college that highlighted all the wonderful things at Trade Tech. However, I was not to produce a student newspaper. Um, no.
It’s hard to produce a student newspaper without computers. The computer lab quickly became “unavailable” and my class was shifted over to a classroom with flickering lights. I brought in an old desktop computer and secured money to print the newspaper through a partnership with Verizon Wireless. The students were excited and the first issue was distributed across campus. The student newspaper Tradewinds was back.
Members of student government were furious that the students wrote real news stories about issues on campus. Meetings were called with administrators and I was told I would be fired if I put out another newspaper. Students gathered 1,000 signatures from the student body and local community members. Journalism faculty advisers and advocacy groups came to meetings to show their support. Letters were written, phone calls were made, and the administration backed down — at least temporarily.
But as the spring semester approached, all journalism courses were removed from the schedule. The college still does not have a student newspaper.
I’d like to say my experiences are unusual, but cutting journalism courses and entire programs at community colleges is a reality. The responses to my questions in the study told a grim story of community college journalism. The most telling were the responses to this question:
“If your program is at risk of being cancelled, or was cancelled, why?”
Responders cited low enrollment and budgets cuts as the top two reasons, but administration not liking the student newspaper came in at a close third. In the open-ended question section, advisers shared stories of budget cuts, course cutbacks, threats to the student press and censorship.
In 2006, I landed a full time teaching position at Mt. San Antonio College. After ongoing pressure from the students, the journalism program was put back in the English/Humanities department who decided to hire a full time professor of journalism to teach and advise the student newspaper.
My adjunct experience and the study’s results had changed me. I vowed that I would never be put in this kind of vulnerable position again. Instead of running the newspaper like an academic program, I would do what I did in my professional life — run it like a business.
Frank LoMonte, director of Student Press Law Center, said in the Atlantic article that he’s seeing a trend to protect the college brand.
“I don’t think there is any question that image conscious colleges are taking full advantage of difficult economic times to rid themselves of journalists they never really liked anyway. Colleges are more obsessed with ‘protecting the brand’ then they’ve ever been before, and journalism as an industry is weaker and less able to defend itself than ever before.”
LoMonte has a point. Colleges are concerned with protecting the brand.
But college advisers, especially those at community colleges, can do some things that might help protect their programs — and the student newspaper.
Full time student media advisers are often expected to teach a full course load and advise the student newspaper on top of it. Add administrative duties, curriculum development, committees, and they are stretched to the limit. But something has to happen if journalism education and the student voice on campus is to be preserved and protected.
So what can an adviser do? They can start thinking of the student media as a brand and encourage their students to do the same. But here’s a warning: If it’s just a print newspaper that they’re selling, today’s students are not buying it.
For the first couple of years at Mt. SAC, I was able to invigorate the program by suggesting some minor changes to the design of the newspaper.
I encouraged students to adopt a more visually appealing look to bring readers in. I also suggested moving the online newspaper off the publishing platform that nearly every other college was using and instead, build their own news website. I began having them study web analytics to understand their readership. But as time passed, we began to realize that our print newspaper was quietly sitting with crusty edges in the newsstands.
I insisted they talk to their student audience to understand what they wanted and why they weren’t reading the paper. I formed teams of students who had expressed an interest in public relations and gave them a client — our program and the student press. They worked to find creative ways to poll the student body. If my study taught me one thing it was to understand the climate of student media and journalism education. For the student staff, it was to grasp the student audience and find a way to engage them.
I saw the death of print coming early on. I compare the death of print to my time working in the entertainment business in Hollywood. During the 8os and early ‘90s, hair bands promoted themselves along the Sunset Strip causing gridlock on the sidewalks. The nightclubs were packed and the club owners were happy. But change was coming and we all felt it. There was a scene brewing in the Pacific Northwest that would cause the Sunset Strip to fade as fast as the makeup on a glam rocker’s face. Some refused to accept it but I was already planning my next move.
I applied that same foresight to our college student media and looked at ways to preserve it. Students were no longer reading the print newspaper and they certainly weren’t interested in enrolling in courses to produce it. No matter how much we pitched the paper, and even the website, students had lost interest. They were getting their news from the Web, and soon after, Twitter and Facebook. Something had to change.
I presented the innovative endeavors of professional media and tech companies in my lectures. I wanted students to look at what others were doing to stay current and relevant and to find inspiration from the best. This is how our move to Medium came about.
After serving on a panel with professors Jim Sernoe and Mitzi Lewis of Midwestern State at the AEJMC conference in Quebec, I learned about the publication, Matter. Jim and Mitzi presented successful journalism projects on Kickstarter and Matter topped the list. This long form journalism publication had been acquired by Medium, Ev Williams’ new venture.
My students were putting out the award-winning glossy magazine, Substance. I came back with a crazy idea. Would Medium consider partnering with our magazine and letting us be its first college publication?
As journalism educators, we sometimes lock ourselves in our newsrooms and rarely venture out in the real world. But for me, partnerships are the key to survival. That one small partnership years ago with Verizon may not have saved the program at LA Trade Tech, but it allowed the students to put out a newspaper.
You’d be surprised how many people out there in the professional media world care about college journalism and are more than willing to help out. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask.
The folks at Medium are an example of how a journalism/tech company can help student media thrive. We began a partnership that, as I’ve said many times before, brought a flow of oxygen into our newsroom that revitalized our entire program. First, we moved the magazine Substance over to Medium. The readership stats were so astounding that we decided to try it with the newspaper and online news site and Sac.media was born.
We killed all print and moved the entire newsroom over to Medium.
During one of my lectures, I presented Reported.ly, Andy Carvin’s real time news effort where the content is published primarily on Twitter. Once again, the students asked, “Why not us?” We launched @Saconscene, real time news reporting on Twitter, with hyper-local teams reporting in 15 surrounding cities using hashtags for each city.
Why is all of this important to the preservation of student media? Because it is much more difficult for administrators to cancel a program that has healthy enrollment. It’s even harder for them to cut it when the world is watching.
And that’s what we’ve done at Mt. SAC. We have created an experimental lab where students can try anything and everything. Learn about a new app to create multimedia? Great. Go for it! Want to start a sports news channel? Fantastic! The climate of our newsroom is “anything goes.” And in the process, we have created a brand. This may be why media and journalism organizations are writing about us. *And you can bet our administration is sent every one of these media links, personally from your’s truly.
I believe that this new way of producing student media is the only way to save it. Students no longer want to produce something they don’t use themselves. As one of our editors said, “We are speaking our audience’s language.”
I’ve become a recruiting machine. It’s easy to sell our “brand” to an audience who uses it. Students use social media. When I visit every classroom on campus that will have me, I bring my students along. We share our latest endeavors and we tell them to join the staff and “try stuff.”
Our newsroom is not just for journalists. It’s for math majors who want to try data journalism and analyze readership metrics. It’s for English majors who want to write long form feature stories. It’s for graphic designers and animators who want to create interactive and visually appealing graphics. It’s for radio/TV students who want to create multimedia. In other words, it’s for any and all students who want to be creative. And the success can be seen in our enrollment numbers. All of our classes are full.
There will always be administrators who hate the student press, but having a strong army to help fight your battles will make it much easier to stay alive when the scythe comes at you.
Toni Albertson is a professor of journalism and adviser of student media at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, Calif. She writes about and researches college media with a focus on entrepreneurial journalism and digital media.
Follow her on Twitter @tonialbertson
