Editors of The Guardian, UC San Diego’s scrappy student newspaper, say they’ll likely have to close their print edition — and maybe their digital operation — if they don’t get a financial lifeline from students.
In a sign of the times, the money the paper got from print advertising has largely vanished as readers have moved online.
“Advertising is inconsistent with (the) digital age, pushing The Guardian into a budget crisis that has put it at risk of shutting down,” the paper said in a public statement.
The Guardian also says its budget, like those of other student organizations, has been trimmed by the university, which is dealing with its own financial problems.
The fate of the 58-year-old paper — which has covered everything from Vietnam War protests to the school’s current enrollment boom — will be known by late Friday.
That’s when the school will reveal the results of its student government elections, which includes a measure that asks UCSD’s students if they are willing to pay $3.50 per quarter to underwrite The Guardian.
Similar fees already exist at University of California campuses in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Irvine.
Adalia Luo, the paper’s editor, said the publication’s budget was about $130,000 when the academic year began but was cut to roughly $60,000 due financial pressures that went beyond a downturn in advertising.
She said the issues included a request by the university that The Guardian raise about $120,000 to pay the salary and benefits of a journalism adviser — something it hasn’t had for years.
As a result, The Guardian is now producing a print edition once every two weeks, instead of once a week. It prints about 3,000 copies of the paper per week, down from about 10,000 about a decade ago.
Similar cuts are being made at college newspapers nationwide.
The Guardian has published digitally for at least a decade. It has generated more than 200,000 visits since last fall, and has quickly published news of pressing interest to the campus community — including the news last weekend that five students’ F-1 visas had been cancelled.
“It’s coming to a point where if we don’t get money, we will have to choose between quality reporting or maintaining regular issue releases,” Luo told The San Diego Union-Tribune on Wednesday.
“If we aren’t able to have any consistent money, we could go digital-only. But it would kind of betray the thesis of what journalism is trying to do here,” she added. “We have a lot of people from the student body saying that — ‘You are the only print newspaper at UCSD. We want you you guys to stay in print.’”
The newspaper was established in 1967 as the Triton Times and changed its name to the Guardian in 1978. For a short period, it published three times a week. It went to twice-weekly in the early 1990s — a print schedule it kept until 2017, when it became a weekly.
UCSD doesn’t have a journalism program — unlike San Diego State University, whose school of journalism and media studies is widely known and respected.
And for much of its life, The Guardian has not had a regular journalism adviser. But it has been a big springboard, producing journalists who went on to work for the Union-Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.
“In this time of political attacks on universities concerning free speech and academic freedom, it is important that students and schools independent papers like this,” said one-time Guardian co-founder and later Union-Tribune reporter Roger Showley. “It is an integral part of the school. Don’t lose it.”
