The unsurprising reason student newspapers are thriving

An amazingly ignorant article in the National Post analyzing the state of university newspapers in the wake of a recent national conference of student journalists. They are “unexpectedly… thriving,” says the incredulous author, expressing shock that campus papers would still be attracting contributors in an era of overall newspaper decline.

I was a student journalist for pretty much the entirety of my six-year career in post-secondary academia. I’ve worked as a columnist, reporter, editor, editor-in-chief, and chairman of the board of several different papers at several different colleges. In 2007 I was even nominated for the presidency of the organization that ran the conference the article refers to. So it’s a world I am somewhat grounded in.

Here’s the newsflash: Regardless of the quality of journalism they may or may not be producing, student newspapers will always be able to attract contributors for the simple reason that they are not really newspapers at all, but rather subsidized, cash redistribution rackets whereby smart kids can effectively enrich themselves at the expense of the apathetic campus majority.

Because they are directly funded by the university — year in, year out, completely indifferent to any sort of market forces — campus papers are barely analogous to real-world publications, which of course must actively cater to their readers in order to survive economically. Campus papers can, and do, publish whatever the hell they want, compete with no one, and sleep easy knowing they will enter the new year with the exact same level of guaranteed funding. Only breathtaking levels of self-inflicted fiscal incompetence can usually hurt them in any meaningful way.

Smart students will figure out a way to weasel themselves into jobs at their student paper, and through the ensuing paycheques, snag a chunk of cash that has been involuntarily taxed from their peers. It’s really just a classic example of what the economic people call “rent-seeking,” whereby savvy folks are able to extract gains for themselves by manipulating an existing economic system (in this case, a university’s legally mandated obligation to distribute some share of tuition fees to “student organizations”), rather than produce something of worth in their own right.

Working for student newspapers is fun and satisfying, obviously, or I wouldn’t have done it for so long. And lots of enormously talented people are similarly attracted. But anyone who has spent any amount of time in the subculture knows that the appeal of employment (especially long-term employment) at such places is often very brazenly cynical and exploitive.

If student papers were not thriving then that would be a very sad commentary on the collective intelligence of Canadian university students.