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Posted: Friday, 05 September 2008 9:49AM
Syracuse University Paper Cutting Back on Print Editions
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SYRACUSE, NY (AP) -- Worsening finances are forcing the student-run newspaper at Syracuse University to eliminate its print edition on Fridays and instead put the day's news on its Internet site.
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The cost of printing and distributing The Daily Orange makes it impractical to continue publishing on Fridays, said Stephen Dockery, the newspaper's editor in chief.
``We had to make the decision for the future on The D.O.,'' Dockery said in a Daily Orange story. ``The budget concern was only part of the Friday cut, but it is also a way for new media implementation.''
The newspaper said its decision to eliminate Friday's print edition comes in the wake of two major financial drains on the publication.
A pending lawsuit against the paper by a local business over a story published in 2006 has forced management to scale back spending in order to pay legal fees, the paper said.
The other financial setback was a failed magazine inserted in Thursday editions for four semesters starting in 2005. The paper dropped the insert after it didn't attract greater weekend advertising.
The Daily Orange has been an independent student newspaper since 1971. The paper receives no financial backing from the university.
The paper has a circulation of 9,000, but regularly suffers a steep readership decline on Fridays, the school week's slowest day. Its readership is approximately 20,000 thanks to a large online readership of parents and alumni.
The paper said it will print six football game previews on Fridays this fall before each of Syracuse's home games.
The problems at The Daily Orange appear to be unusual, said Dawn Zuerker, president of the College Newspaper Business and Advertising Managers Inc., a professional organization with more than 150 member schools.
``Most newspapers are having great advertising revenue right now. It (The Daily Orange) appears to be an isolated situation. Most papers are doing well even though we are dealing with a tough economy,'' said Zuerker, the advertising manager for The Daily Toreador, the student paper at Texas Tech University.
The only other student newspaper that has cut back its print editions is the University of California-Berkeley's The Daily Californian, which last month also went to four days a week, she said. Like The Daily Orange, the Cal-Berkeley paper also operates financially independent of the university.
Campus newspapers have seen increases in advertising revenues in recent years, according to Alloy Media + Marketing, a New York City-based company that places 75 percent of the national ads that run in college newspapers.
In 2006, advertisers spent $30 million on college newspapers, according to Alloy's market research. In 2007, those revenues rose 15 percent. In comparison, print advertising revenue at mainstream newspapers in the U.S. dropped 9 percent in 2007, down to $42 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
Although advertisers usually cut their budgets in tough economic times, campus newspapers offer them direct access to a pool of more than 17 million college-aged students, a coveted demographic, according to Alloy.
Additionally, research shows that about 80 percent of students read their campus newspapers at least once a week, compared to about 33 percent of the general population who read their local daily newspaper on a weekly basis.
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