With the rise of social media over the past several decades, there has been an increasing and disturbing trend among many people to discount and discredit the work of professional journalists who write about and disseminate the news.
Student journalism in particular has become more and more underfunded in recent years. The Dickinsonian was able to persevere through the pandemic and returned to distributing physical copies of the newspaper last school year — it even placed as one of the country’s best student newspapers in “The Princeton Review”. Yet, the service we provide to the student body and Dickinson community is being discounted and ignored. Pre-pandemic, The Dickinsonian printed once a week throughout the semester; last year, as we eased through the transition out of COVID-19, we printed six times per semester. With a reinvigorated student body who are once again interested in being able to read the newspaper, we hoped to increase this number further to eight print issues each semester this school year.
The money we received from Dickinson’s Student Senate, however, only covers the cost of nine print issues throughout the entire year. We are not alone in having our budget so thoroughly cut: nearly every student club on campus received highly reduced funding for the 2023-2024 school year. But this is particularly a problem for The Dickinsonian, as it reflects the overall cultural trend of disregard for the contributions to society of a free and organized press.
Because of this budget decrease, the student body, many of whom receive most of their news — especially college-specific news — from social media, don’t realize that there is an organization on campus that is completely and wholly dedicated to them, their interests, their desires and their grievances both about the school and wider issues in society. The Dickinsonian is not the mouthpiece of the college; we desire to authentically represent the student experience and provide a forum where students can thoughtfully and freely discuss the things that are going on around campus and the issues and events that matter to them.
Such a forum — provided by the press — is integral to the functioning of any free community, but our lack of funds means that we cannot be as visible to the student body and therefore cannot represent them in the necessary way. Though our decrease in funding was most certainly not malicious on the part of Student Senate, the ramifications of this are quite significant. It limits our ability to report on events in a timely manner and makes it harder to notify the student body of the findings of larger and long-term reporting that we do.
The trend of decreased funding for student newspapers certainly isn’t unique to Dickinson. Penn State’s The Daily Collegian this school year had their funding from the school cut by 50%. Next year, it will be cut to $0 of funding directly from the school. The price of newspaper printing has gone up, both for student papers and full-time professional papers. While the notion of “print media is dying” is pervasive in the journalism industry, it plays a different role for a college demographic such as ours. Posting our stories online helps get our stories out there, but having them on paper, in front of you, is important for the student body to know that it is still around and to see what is happening on campus that they may not know about.
Despite the issues that we have faced since getting back to print last year, we are still hopeful and optimistic that we will be able to make this year even better than last year. While costs are certainly a factor in what we can do, it is not our only limit, and our content will hopefully show the great work we can do.
