College Journalism's Slippery Slope

[DFW HOYA]

A shot across the bow of the vibrancy of student journalism at places like GU, where the Oregon Daily Emerald announces it's ditching print in favor of an online paper and two entertainment alt-weeklies in its place.

However online we may all be, there is still a place for the printed as well as the online word. Advertisers will never fully support an online product and students won't pay to subscribe to it. The upshot is that without a regular product in students' hands, so to speak, college papers/web sites eventually fold, or otherwise disappear into electromagnetic oblivion.

As for Georgetown, the Voice is essentially ad-free at this stage and relies almost exclusively on University subsidy. The HOYA has lost a third of its ads in recent years. The former may be tempted to repackage itself as 100% online in the coming years, while I sincerely hope the latter does not. There is still an audience that wants to read a paper in Leavey, in the dining hall, or to class. A multi-channel media strategy is the future, but not by cutting off the immediacy of a free product available to anyone that walks by the newsstand.

The DC-area student still has a run of great print newspapers at his/her disposal and may not be as willing to drop the Times, Post, WSJ, etc. for an e-reader and the iPad. In Eugene, they may not have a choice.

www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/05/why-we-killed-our-college-daily-paper-for-a-more-digital-future145.html

[TC]

May 25, 2012 13:50:04 GMT -5 DFW HOYA said:

Advertisers will never fully support an online product and students won't pay to subscribe to it.
The upshot is that without a regular product in students' hands, so to speak, college papers/web sites eventually fold, or otherwise disappear into electromagnetic oblivion.
...
There is still an audience that wants to read a paper in Leavey, in the dining hall, or to class.

I'd challenge both those points. I haven't been on campus for more than 10 years, but is there really an audience that wants to read a printed paper in Leavey or the Dining Hall vs on their tablet, their phone, or their laptop, and is there really an audience that finds reading a paper while walking easier than just reading something on their cell phone?

Mary Meeker's presentation last week was pretty interesting in that it shows one thing - print newspapers are highly overmonetized in terms of time spent and the Internet and Mobile traffic is undermonetized in advertising. If you believe her charts, I think you can easily dispute the idea that you are promoting that advertisers will never fully support an online product - which I'd really dispute for a college paper - what exactly are the costs for running a volunteer college paper exactly?

allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-explains-the-mobile-monetization-challenge/

My own experience : no one reads the print newspaper versions of the 2 crappy local+syndicated-content papers in my town, everyone reads the town's Patch.com site which is far better.