Outside a modest basement room at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a sheet of paper hangs on the wall with “The WAR Room” scrawled across it.
The student journalists inside are huddled around a table, strategizing what campus news to cover. Their Instagram feeds show there’s going to be another protest over the war in Gaza, and faculty are speaking out about the Trump administration’s cuts to biomedical research funding.
But the students leading New England’s largest college daily newspaper aren’t just focused on this week. They’re also trying to plan for the future.
Fewer local businesses are buying ads with student newspapers these days , forcing the publications to rely more heavily on financial support from the same institutions they cover.
Like traditional print media, the Massachusetts Daily Collegian used to sustain itself primarily through advertising revenue. But when that funding dropped to unsustainable levels, the newspaper started taking a budget from the university to keep paying its leadership team and occasional printing costs. Today, about 75% of its funding comes from the university, and the Collegian operates with a mostly volunteer staff of more than 200.
“It can be complicated,” editor-in-chief Caitlin Reardon, a 22-year-old senior from Southampton, Massachusetts, told GBH News before the meeting. “It is interesting to be covering a body that does fund us, but there’s a line. We’re independent, completely student operated.”
The Collegian is the paper of record at this public flagship university, serving as a vital watchdog on campus since it was founded in 1890. In those early years, student reporters used the hip, new typewriter to cover events just like professional journalists at nearby papers.
Today, the Collegian’s social media–savvy staff are among the few journalists still covering issues important to the surrounding community. The paper’s staff recently covered the release of an external report on UMass Amherst’s response to last spring’s Gaza encampments and the university’s informational webinar on immigrants’ rights .
“Towns like Amherst kind of get lost in the shuffle,” said managing editor Johnny Depin, a 22-year-old senior from Dennis, Massachusetts. “We’re able to cover Amherst more thoroughly than anyone is really financially able to anymore.”
Across the country, local newsrooms have been gutted as ad revenue dwindles. More than half of U.S. counties are now classified as news deserts , with limited or no access to local journalism. Student-run newspapers are trying to step in. But student journalists are seeing that increasing reliance on university funding can come with consequences.
“We see administrations trying to take editors out of their positions or telling news outlets, ‘Well, if you cover that, we’re no longer going to give you money,’” said Jessica Sparks, a journalism professor at Auburn University in Alabama.
Sparks and her research team analyzed more than 500 student newspapers and found a troubling trend: financial instability is putting their independence at risk .
It’s happening nationwide, as the collapse of the traditional media economic model trickles down to student-led outlets.
Last month, Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania shut down its student newspaper The Setonian, citing, at least in part, a “lack of support for journalism in culture.”
Stanford administrators tried to punish a student journalist arrested while covering a pro-Palestinian protest last year, but reversed course after public backlash.
When the University of Texas-Dallas fired the campus paper’s editor over a conflict about the administration’s editorial involvement, the entire staff quit, raised their own money and started an independent newspaper, The Retrograde.
So, how bad is this problem?
“It’s bad and it’s getting worse,” said Dan Kennedy, who attended Northeastern as a student and now teaches journalism ethics at his alma mater.
Kennedy, who as a student edited what is now The Huntington News, noted that the student paper became independent a decade ago. Today, publishing online, it thrives without university subsidies — an increasingly rare feat.
Other papers, like The Harvard Crimson and The Daily Free Press at Boston University, also operate independently. In an era when print editions are fading, Kennedy sees an opportunity.
“If you’re not hung up on putting out a print edition, you have the opportunity to be more independent than you’ve ever been,” he said. “It’s very difficult to make money, but you’re not really spending money either.”
Still, he said, the current political and social climate of harassment can discourage young journalists.
“They’ve never dealt with this before, and some of them say that they really question whether they want to go into journalism,” he said.
Back in the basement at UMass Amherst, the Collegian’s leadership staff wraps up its weekly meeting.
Carson Cornelius, a staff advisor who is paid by the university, is thinking through ways the Collegian can rely less on school funding.
“There are 85 different restaurants in Amherst,” Cornelius said. “You can’t tell me that a couple of them don’t have some spare change kicking around.”
He said even though he’s on the school’s payroll, the students “take the lead on everything” — and that’s the way it should remain.
He says an independent Collegian is a win for both student journalists and the community.
“I think it’s important for the students to maintain that sense of independence and flexibility,” he said. “If we didn’t exist, I don’t think there would be coverage of a lot of these events that are happening on campus.”
Asked why student journalism matters beyond this campus, editor-in-chief Reardon didn’t hesitate.
“We have our finger on the pulse, and we know how young people are feeling about things,” she said. “When we’re entering the working world, we can offer different perspectives, and we already have the real, tangible experience to back it.”
Next week, the staff will be back in “The WAR Room” for another editorial meeting. But right now, as their meeting breaks up, Reardon is giving a visitor a copy of the newspaper’s 2024 election special issue — as always, it’s courtesy of the Collegian.
She smiles and says, despite the popularity of social media, her generation likes the tactile experience of holding their trusted news in their hands.
