Pressed

One of the most common criticisms of journalism schools is that, outside of internships, they don't offer students enough in the way of real-world experience. But that's hardly been the case for Stephanie Clary, a University of Colorado at Boulder attendee who's just ending her run as editor-in-chief of CU's Campus Press. She admits that recent events at the Press, including a switch from print to online distribution and a proposed name change that was aborted only after the staff protested, have increased her cynicism to a level most professional journalists take years to achieve. "I definitely feel a bit jaded," she concedes.

Greg Schreier, the Press's outgoing managing editor, seconds that emotion. In his words, "It's made me fully understand the phrase 'Trust no one.'"

"I'm sad that everyone got upset," counters former Denver Post national editor Michelle P. Fulcher, a CU instructor and Press advisor who is also moving on. "But I hope that, as painful as the lessons are and were, they gained something."

Over its 25-year-plus lifespan, the Press has helped ready a generation of would-be reporters for newspaper careers. But in recent years, according to Paul Voakes, the dean of CU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the Press hasn't been a must-read among members of the student body. "On average, we printed 7,000 copies per issue," he says, "and each week, we were looking at roughly 5,000 of those coming back to the recycling center."

Publishing expenses were becoming a challenge, too. For the past several years, the Colorado Daily, which had been CU's student paper before declaring its independence three-plus decades ago, printed and distributed the Press at cost. Unfortunately, this bargain ended shortly after the Daily was purchased by E.W. Scripps, the parent company of the Camera and the Rocky Mountain News. "We would have had to pay a significantly larger amount of money for them to keep printing us," Fulcher says.

In the meantime, Voakes was wrestling with another dilemma. "We're the only Big 12 university with an accredited journalism facility that hasn't had a daily newspaper since 1972," he reveals. That was unacceptable, in his opinion, but he knew that in these tight budgetary times, he'd never be able to cobble together enough money to print the Press more frequently. Then, he says, "the lightbulb finally went on. The answer to how we could economically enable students to produce daily news was to put it online."

Press editor Clary understands the reasons for this transition and thinks it will work out well in the long run. However, she objects to having been left out of the loop. For instance, she says no one told her about the situation with the Daily; she only found out after phoning the paper herself. "They said, 'It's our understanding that after a certain time, we aren't going to print you guys anymore,'" she recalls. "And I was like, 'O-kay...'" And while she'd heard about a possible move from print to online, she didn't know it would go into effect at the beginning of the fall semester until May, days after she and Schreier had designed and named a staff of about twenty for a weekly publication schedule. "We had to spend a lot of our summer restructuring everything," Clary allows. "The word we constantly used was 'blindsided.'"

Fulcher thinks that's an exaggeration. As she points out, "It's not like we walked in on the 24th of August and said, 'Tomorrow we're going to be a daily. Whoops!' Everybody would have liked more planning time, but life happens -- and it's not always comfortable for people."

The printed Press was supposed to die prior to the summer, but Clary and Schreier convinced Fulcher and company to let them circulate a welcome-back newspaper in August to announce that www.thecampuspress.com would soon be the only place to find the publication. They also tried to hype this change with promotional items emblazoned with the Press moniker -- but when the person in charge of the effort asked for funding to purchase more giveaways, Clary says, "He was told that no more money was going to be put into products with Campus Press on it, because the name was going to change. And that blindsided us again."

Voakes pleads guilty to this charge. The Press's electronic modification provided a great opportunity for advertising students "to devise a campaign, soup to nuts, for the launch of a product," he says. Hence, everything was on the table, including the name, which he saw as both "fairly generic" and "archaic," since a physical press wasn't part of the process anymore.