In its first 113 years, the University of Texas at Austin's student newspaper, the Daily Texan, campaigned against segregation, took on the state's oil barons, and battled regents and lawmakers who wanted to shut it down.

It produced notables such as Walter Cronkite, Mike Godwin, Lady Bird Johnson, Willie Morris, Bill Moyers and seemingly half the state Capitol press corps.

Yet the Texan may only have two more years left to live because its advertising-dominated business model has been ravaged by the Internet, a problem exacerbated by falling circulation.

“It's still a very viable publication,” said UT journalism professor Wanda Cash, a former chairwoman of the Texas Student Media board, which oversees the Texan and its operations. “The challenge is to get everybody to understand that we're not just selling ads in the printed edition anymore.”

Cash estimates that the paper's losses will burn through the remainder of TSM's reserve fund over the next two years unless significant changes are made.

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Unlike many newspapers, which are owned by private companies or large conglomerates, the depth of the Texan's financial problems are public record and so are its struggles to come up with a plan to remain solvent as advertising and readers continue to move online.

The Texan does not have an advertising staff. Instead, the responsibility to sell ads falls to Texas Student Media, which is the auxiliary corporation of UT that owns the Texan, UT's student-run television and radio stations, and other media entities. TSM does not receive funding from UT, apart from student fees. Nor is the university administration supposed to be involved in its day-to-day operations.

In the past, the Texan served as TSM's money-making machine, paying for all of TSM's operations, with enough left over to build up a healthy reserve. However, as the Texan's fortunes have declined, the future of the student-run radio and TV stations has come into doubt.

TSM Director Jalah Goette could not be reached for comment before the Express-News' deadline.

During the fiscal year that ended in 2007, the paper brought in $2.2 million in advertising revenue; five years later, that had dropped to less than $1.3 million, according to budget numbers compiled by Friends of the Texan, a nonprofit group founded by alumni of the paper.

The impact of the Internet can be seen most starkly in the deterioration of the newspaper's classified ad sales, which declined from nearly $665,000 in fiscal year 2002-2003 to just $46,000 in fiscal year 2011-2012. Most of those ads have gone to Craigslist and other similar online listings services.

The newspaper's efforts to sell advertising online, meanwhile, have seen little success. The newspaper brought in nearly $100,000 in online ad revenue in the 2006-2007 fiscal year. But that had fallen to slightly more than $46,000 by 2011-2012.

The online advertising picture has not substantially improved this year, according to budget documents provided to the TSM board in April.

The Texan's financial problems are emblematic of the struggles experienced across the newspaper industry, which has been dealing with declining print revenue and disappointing online sales with layoffs, buyouts and budget cuts.

College newspapers have not been immune.

Students at the University of California at Berkeley recently approved a $2-per-semester student fee to help support its college newspaper, the Daily Californian, which was losing $200,000 a year. Administrators at the University of Connecticut approved increasing their college newspaper's student fee after the paper warned last year that it could fold in 2014 without additional support.

However, the focus at Texas Student Media has remained on spending cuts.

This spring, TSM's budget troubles led Goette to propose cutting the Texan's print schedule from five days a week (Monday through Friday) to four, generating a significant backlash from the newsroom and the paper's alumni.

A showdown over the budget cuts occurred at TSM's April board meeting, at which newsroom leaders and alumni harshly questioned Goette's proposed cuts. The meeting reached its crescendo when Texan faculty adviser Doug Warren announced his departure from the organization because he was tired of the budget fights and the lack of a long-term business plan.

“Frankly, the process getting to this point has been so unsavory to me that I'm not particularly interested in continuing with that,” he said.

Warren, a veteran of the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe, had been at The Texan for three years.

The TSM board voted at that meeting to slash student wages and tuition reimbursement for student managers instead of cutting the paper's production schedule.

Throughout its history, the newspaper earned the anger of the regents and the Legislature for its campaigns against segregation, the Vietnam War and the state's powerful oil interests.

After regents voted to cut off funding to the Texan and UT student government in 1974, the Texan retaliated by printing a front page that was blank, save for a text box that contained a quote from the paper's longtime nemesis, UT regent Frank Erwin Jr.: “We do not fund anything that we don't control.”

Students petitioned and protested, and the regents backed down.

The paper was so widely read that when a character in one of its cartoon strips launched a write-in campaign for student government president, the cartoon won, beating Paul Begala, who would go on to be a chief strategist for Bill Clinton's winning presidential campaign in 1992.

Now, with the rise of competing news websites, the newspaper's position on campus has diminished. The paper's circulation has shrunk from a high of about 30,000 to 12,000. However, Cash feels the newspaper's renewed emphasis on its social media presence will help keep it relevant.

“I think the students, over the last six or seven months, have rallied,” Cash said. “But unless they get the entire management of TSM behind them with not just a long-term strategy, but a short-term plan to escape this crisis, I'm deeply concerned about the future of the Daily Texan.”

nhicks@express-news.net

Twitter: @ndhapple

Hicks was a staffer at the Texan on and off from 2006 to 2010; he worked as a reporter, copy editor and wire editor.