Tuesday, September 27, 2005

More Media Consolidation: Now They Want College Papers!? It may not be a first, but it's certainly something new: The E. W. Scripps Co. bought the campus newspaper at the University of Colorado-Boulder on Monday. This is the third change in ownership of the Colorado Daily in roughly as many years. Until 2002, the Daily was run by a staff collective, but the tech bust and subsequent revenue slumps led to the paper being purchased by Randy Milller, a would-be media mogul with a couple of other local shoppers (which he gets to keep). Miller now gets himself a title and paycheck with the Cincinnati-based Scripps. Several things are problematic about this, chief of which is that Scripps already owns the Boulder Daily Camera. Where once the Camera had to compete with the Daily for campus news, the Daily now will act as a feed for the Camera. One can even envision a scenario (without too much difficulty, really) where Scripps decides the Daily could be closed if it doesn't make its revenue targets some quarter. What does a mainline newspaper chain want with a college paper, anyway? Sure they're trying to snag young readers any way they can, but college papers are special institutions. They exist as training grounds for the next generation of reporters. Often they are outposts of independent, world-changing thinking. College papers are often where you learn that the role of journalism is to "Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." Nobody ever makes great gobs of money, either as staff or management.  Now the Colorado Daily is more likely than ever to become just another faceless cog in the machine. Here's one hope, at least, that students at CU seize the opportunity to build their own journalistic enterprise. 11:14:36 PM    comment []