TSM considers cutting print from 5 days to 1

By Samantha Badgen / The Horn / Texas Student Media will meet on Friday, Feb. 21 to discuss its budget and the prospect of cutting back on The Daily Texan’s printing schedule. The Daily Texan might not stay daily for long. Texas Student Media (TSM) will soon be voting on whether to keep the campus newspaper daily, or whether to reduce its circulation to one day a week. “Decisions relating to the Texan’s publication frequency will be made as part of the annual budget process,” said Frank Serpas, TSTV-KVRX Studio Engineer and TSM Interim Director. “The budget was to be a topic of discussion at a TSM Board meeting scheduled for February 7, but that meeting was not held as a result of UT being closed due to weather conditions.” According to Robert Quigley, a TSM board member and senior lecturer at the UT School of Journalism, the meeting where they will discuss the budget has been rescheduled for Friday, Feb. 21 at 1 p.m., where Serpas will address the question of the Texan’s publication frequency. The circulation of the Texan is a budgetary concern of TSM where, among other issues, there seems to be a continuous downward trend in advertising revenue. According to Serpas’ preliminary budget narrative, TSM started the year with a little over $600,000 dollars, which shrank to $550,000 after subtracting the money allocated for the Live Remote Broadcast System. If the loss in revenue continues, Serpas’ rough projection is that TSM could stand to lose $239,000 this coming year. The largest expense category currently in place is the printing and delivery cost of The Daily Texan, though cuts have been made in the form of pagecount reductions and a decrease in student wages. In order to reduce costs and keep the Texan in place, Serpas suggests making a single transition, “switching the publication frequency in fall and spring from five days per week to weekly, matching the schedule already in effect for summer.” In contrast to the current 8-page model, the weekly paper would be restored to a larger size. Wanda Cash, Associate Director of the UT School of Journalism, believes TSM should do whatever it takes in order to keep The Daily Texan alive on the UT campus. “TSM needs to explore all the options available in order to keep the Texan going,” Cash said. “I think losing the Daily Texan entirely would be devastating to the campus and journalism in general.” Robert Jensen, a professor at the school of journalism, agreed that the loss of a daily paper would negatively affect the UT campus. “On a large campus a daily newspaper is an important vehicle for circulating news, opinions, ideas, all sort of things,” Jensen said. “Large campuses have long had daily newspapers, any time fewer ideas circulates, that has a negative effect … it’s not that the campus will fall apart if it doesn’t have a daily, but UT is a major state institution with a tradition of a daily newspaper, so losing that would be negative … I would hope they will explore every avenue and find a way to save it.” Jensen also pointed out that historically there have been tensions between the administration and The Daily Texan. “I said nobody wants to see the daily paper go away; the real question is, ‘Are there people who don’t care?’ which I don’t know the answer to. There haven’t been those kinds of hostilities in recent times, so I assume it’s just a crisis about revenue.”