Print media or dinosaur media as it’s sometimes called, has been hurting for a while. Now, as college newspapers are experiencing the same problems, they’re increasingly turning to funding from student fees.

Allie Grasgreen of Inside Higher Ed reports.

Who Will Pay for the Paper?

While declining print readership and advertising revenue started prompting layoffs and paper shrinkage at professional newspapers decades ago, campus publications managed to stave off those financial woes for a while. But in the last couple of years, campus newspapers have been hit – in some cases, hard – and are increasingly turning to their student bodies for help.

Using student fees as a revenue source is not entirely new – the newspaper at Rutgers University, for instance, has done so for three decades – but as the journalism industry continues its transformation into a more digital-centric enterprise, more campus papers are taking that route.

“If not quite a time of reckoning for some campus papers, we have definitely entered a prolonged period of profound change,” said Daniel Reimold, assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa.

But to adopt a fee the papers need the blessing of the students, testing the readership’s willingness to personally invest in a product whose relevance (in the industry sense, at least) is declining on many campuses — and to do so amid unrest over already rising tuition and fees, no less.

Western Michigan University, the University of California at Irvine and Rutgers University are among those putting a fee to a vote this month. The Western Herald in Michigan can rest easy, as students there voted last week to approve a new $5 student media fee to save the newspaper and campus radio station from imminent dissolution. The situation at UC Irvine (whose student body approved a new fee this week) was slightly less dire, as the print edition could have survived another year (at most). The Rutgers paper, though, awaits fates as the votes are counted.