Editorial: Our shift to a primarily digital world
December 13, 2017
To our readers and community:
In today’s media climate, people aren’t picking up newspapers like they were previously. This is a problem that news organizations all over the country and the world are facing, and the Massachusetts Daily Collegian is no different. Advertising revenue has decreased exponentially in the past few years, as advertisers become aware that Collegian pick-up rates have dramatically declined. With the fixed cost of payroll and printing, our current advertising revenue is no longer enough to sustain the finances needed to continue production and sustain payroll.
Our digital world has transformed news consumption, and we are looking to transform as well.
We have decided as a staff and with consultation from Collegian alumni that in January of 2018, the Collegian will shift from printing four days a week to printing twice, out for readership on Mondays and Thursdays. We are then anticipating a change in the fall of 2018 to printing once weekly. This is NOT going to change how we write and produce our news, nor will it alter the high standard that we hold ourselves and our writers to. We are proud to continue publishing 12 to 15 stories a day in each section of the Collegian, and we will continue to publish our work online daily. We have even added a translation section this semester, which translates our top stories into German, Chinese, Korean and more.
With these changes, we will work to bring a fresh, more innovative structure to the Collegian’s everyday operations, and we hope that you are as excited about this transition as we are. In order to aid our progress to a more digitally-friendly organization, we ask for any help that you can provide. You can donate to our MinuteFund, which is in the link below. The funds we raise will be going toward strengthening our website, which will have more space for digital advertisements and will be more mobile-friendly and interactive. Social media is also one of our top sources for article traffic, and we want to fully utilize and invest in the features that social media has to offer our readers and the community.
We will further use the time we save for more collaboration between editors and staff members, creating more opportunity for in-depth, investigative, long-form and data-driven storytelling that may not have been given top priority in the past because of print deadlines. We also plan to spend more time on journalistic workshops for our editors, writers and photographers.
The world of journalism is becoming primarily digitally media-based, and so are we. We think it is the best option for the Collegian to move into the digital age of multimedia storytelling and journalism, while still staying true to our responsibility as a daily news organization. We are looking forward to what the future holds and are ready to explore the many different facets that journalism provides, and hope that you will all support us in this exciting transition.
Sincerely,
RS • Jan 15, 2018 at 8:33 pm
Are there ANY commenters here anymore that aren’t far-right trolls constantly repeating the same tired lines? Like any at all, ever? This is supposed to be a forum for student writing…you don’t have to host comments. Just saying.
Ed. Cutting • Dec 10, 2017 at 12:49 pm
In insisting on being an undergrad newspaper, you ignored two large segments of the campus community — and advertising that those segments would bring.
.
First are Graduate students — somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 if you include UWW and nontraditional (older) undergrads. I know that the Hussain Ibish mess is why you are undergrad-only but that was 20 years ago!
Second are the staff — the janitors, secretaries and such — UMass has about 5000 of them and many are of the generation which still reads newspapers. So while you might not care about the Physical Plant guy who won an ice fishing contest, his buddies will — and that’s how you get ads from Boyden & Peron, who sell/repair snowblowers. Etc.
So too with the grad/nontrad students, many of whom are parents. That’s a market a lot of advertisers want to reach. The 19-21 niche, not so much…
My point: UMass once had three other newspapers — the weekly Campus Chronicle for the staff and the bi-weekly Graduate Voice, along with various incarnations of The Minuteman.
Those are all markets that the Collegian ought to have sought to serve.
John Aimo • Dec 7, 2017 at 7:12 pm
Wow , welcome to 2017 and the 21st century… It took a while for the Daily Collegian to get there.