All the way across the country, the university newspaper of the University of California, Davis, the California Aggie, is in danger of extinction just before its 100-year anniversary. Despite cutting the paper from a daily to a weekly and docking the paychecks of its editors, The Aggie is proposing that the school enforce a $9.30 campus fee to all undergraduate students to stay afloat.
Mike Thomas, senate president pro tempore at UC Davis told the Sacramento Bee that “a fee referendum is the only way the Aggie could keep its integrity as a newspaper.” While this proposal might seem like the easiest, and to some the only fix for the publication, it seems wrong to force a student body to fund a singular campus organization.
The Bee noted that the Aggie is primarily funded through its own self-raised advertising funds. Perhaps one way the administration could help keep the school paper afloat would be to designate a certain amount of money to it each year the way Suffolk University does with the Journal. Attracting advertisers can be difficult for any school newspaper not named the Harvard Crimson, so the Aggie should be proud of its success on that front. If UC Davis would cover half or even a smaller portion of the annual cost to publish for its student paper, it is hard to believe the Aggie could not continue to publish.
The Suffolk Journal is about to celebrate its 75-year anniversary next fall. While our editors hope Suffolk’s paper is never faced with the Aggie’s issue, it would not be right of the university to keep it afloat by tacking on another cost to students. The state of Washington did not bail out the Seattle Post-Intelligencer back in 2009. The paper has since run as an online-only media outlet.
It is only a proposed $9.30 fee for each student, but the cost of attending college anywhere is already high enough. Part of the reason that student newspapers exist is to teach future journalists, editors and photographers, as Aggie Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Orpina noted to the Bee. It is harsh, but part of that preparation for the real world is that the government will not bail out your paper if you are failing by increasing taxes. UC Davis should not essentially tax its students with this proposed fee to keep the Aggie alive. Instead the university should simply find money within its budget to allocate to the paper in order to help declining advertising income.
College newspapers give voice to and inform the student body and are an important part of any school’s campus atmosphere. It would be great to see the Aggie make it to its 100th anniversary, but not at the expense of the entire undergraduate body. If the UC Davis administration truly values its student paper, it can find at least some money to keep the Aggie afloat.
