Just as a failing Marxist cafe at the University of California-San Diego couldn’t survive without a school bailout, The Daily Californian at Berkeley is claiming it’s in danger of shuttering.
The Editor’s Blog begged students Sunday to sign a petition in the next five days that would put a student-fee provision on the student government ballot, saying the future of its journalism was threatened:
The Ink Initiative Student Fee would replace an existing $2-per-semester fee — set to expire next year — with a $2.50-per-semester fee in effect from 2017 to 2022. One-third of the $2.50 would go toward financial aid for all students, with the other two-thirds funding the continued creation and distribution of our newspaper and online content.
The Daily Cal needs this money, because it is financially independent from the campus. That means we rely, like any other newspaper, largely on print advertising sales. But the rapid dawn of the digital age has hurt those sales drastically, hurling the entire journalism industry into financial turmoil.
To cope, the Daily Cal, over several years, made cuts that shrunk our budget by more than $120,000. These include slashing pay, staffing and printing costs, and eliminating our Wednesday print edition.
But it’s still running a deficit every year and it can’t cut print completely because those ads are too lucrative.
The editor uses ’70s nostalgia that students never had, combined with the recent Oscar win for Spotlight, to convince students to open their wallets:
I know the Daily Cal will get where it needs to be to survive. We will not go gently into the night of an industry that uncovered misconduct in the nation’s highest office and shone a spotlight on years of hidden sexual abuse.
The Daily Cal will have a “sustainable funding model” eventually, just not while today’s students are enrolled, the editor said.
The University Daily Kansan at the University of Kansas is issuing a similarly dire warning without threatening to close shop entirely (h/t Student Press Law Center).
The editorial board is trying to put pressure on the student senate to restore the $45,000 funding cut it imposed last year, allegedly in response to a critical editorial. (The paper also filed suit on First Amendment grounds last month.)
Last week the senate finance committee rejected the paper’s request to increase the $1 fee, assessed each student each year to fund the paper, back to $2. The senate is abusing its authority, the paper says:
The Kansan’s duty is to fairly and accurately report on the University and its community. By reducing our funding, Student Senate is sending a clear message that it doesn’t value the Kansan’s purpose: to keep readers informed and hold those in power accountable. It also makes clear Student Senate sees nothing wrong with continuing to violate the Kansan’s First Amendment rights, no matter the future implications for the newspaper, our readers or Senate itself.
If Student Senate keeps our funding at $1 per student per year, we will be forced to forgo a full-time news adviser, student staff positions and a financial support base — which means our content could suffer as a result. Our readers deserve much, much better.
Look what the editorial partly blames for this predicament:
None of our student staff members are permitted to clock more than 20 hours per week, per the Affordable Care Act and University rules. Several of our editors — including the editor-in-chief, news editor and sports editor — work upwards of 70 hours a week, much of it unpaid, to ensure that the best content possible is delivered quickly to our readers, even if news happens early in the morning or late at night.
Read the Daily Cal and University Daily Kansan missives.
RELATED: Public university to bail out struggling Marxist-inspired ‘Che Cafe’
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter
IMAGE: starmaro/Shutterstock
Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.