UWO Advance Titan staff: 'We Need the A-T'

Facing $74,000 in debt, the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh student newspaper is seeking alternative funding.

The Advance-Titan launched a fundraising campaign Monday, and while it is working with UWO administrators to develop a plan to pay off that debt $5,000 a time each February for the next decade, university officials say they will not bail out the paper if it cannot come up with that amount.

"That may mean doing what they did last year and not publishing one of their last editions," UWO Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Petra Roter said. "We won't be covering those expenditures if they go in the red."

Faculty adviser Vince Filak fears that if the A-T shuts down, it won't reopen.

Student organizations apply for and receive funding through the UWO Student Allocations Committee, whose members are appointed by the Oshkosh Student Association. In the 2015-16 school year the Student Allocations Committee has control of $876,000 to divvy up to student groups.

Of the A-T's $25,000 budget in 2014-15, the organization gets about $17,000 from the Student Allocations Committee to pay a bookkeeper, university documents show. It relies on advertising revenue as its sole funding source for operations.

Many involved agree the A-T's current revenue model is no longer viable, and it needs to find a new way to sustain the newspaper in order to solve the debt problem, but A-T supporters say they are getting little to no cooperation from the Oshkosh Student Association.

The debt began to rise just under a decade ago and continued to snowball until it peaked in 2014 at $80,000.

In an effort to address the debt, the paper has already cut the paper's length from 12 pages to eight pages and reduced the number of copies from 5,000 to 1,500. Staff members no longer travel to conferences or competitions, they've switched printers and are currently working to change their website in an attempt to save more dollars, Filak and Editor-In-Chief Kaitlyn Knox said. Salaries have been cut, writers and photographers aren't paid and advertising representatives aren't paid unless they sell ads.

Roter said her office has tried to help the organization by providing Student Titan Employment Program money, which pays the editorial staff of six $500 each a semester. Filak stressed his gratefulness for it. It averages out to about $36 a week per student; editorial staff work about 15 to 30 hours a week.

"We've been incredibly industrious in our efforts to squeeze money out of any pocket that has it," Filak said. "And every effort we have attempted has been met with resistance or obstruction or in some cases, as is the case with student government, just hostility."

OSA President Jordan Schettle said the A-T has "misused" funds but that the association is not trying to punish the paper.

"When we look at the negative balance in their account, in our view that is a misuse of student dollars and it's also a misuse of taxpayer dollars," Schettle said. "But we don't have the final say or anything, so we're just trying to make sure that any plan that's put in place is equitable for both the Advance-Titan as well as the student body as a whole."

OSA wants to avoid having any influence on the press, he said.

A-T staff previously pitched ideas like using differential tuition or raising student segregation fees by $3 a student as a subscription. Both were denied by OSA, Filak and Knox said. Knox said other college campuses have used similar subscription models to fund their newspapers successfully.

Petra Roter said the university cannot raise segregation fees. However, a Segregated Fee Committee report shows the fees were raised by $50 this year, setting the total per student at more than $1,000.

Last year was the first year the paper didn't end in the red, Filak said. Even with it being the A-T's best year, they wouldn't have had $5,000 on Feb. 1. To ask the organization to come up with $5,000 in less than 100 days, and during the worst time period of the year to raise money, presents a daunting challenge.

"How can I guarantee something for 10 years that quite frankly I don't think I can do once?" Filak said.

Ultimately Filak would like to set up a multi-prong system in which an endowment fund supplements advertising revenue.

"But you have to get all the parties willing to play," Filak said.

Instead of worrying about deadlines, finding good stories on the campus and writing them well, A-T students are worrying about how to find the money to continue printing, Filak said.

Journalism Department Chairman Tim Gleason said learning to handle money is something everyone needs to learn how to do, but he wondered why efforts by the A-T to come up with new ways to do so have been turned down in the past by the same group that is now demanding them.

It seems unreasonable to ask the students to come up with a different budget model by Feb. 1; the timing is not conducive to a successful outcome, he said.

"It's frustrating for (Filak), it's frustrating for the students when they offer alternative models and are told, 'No you can't do that you have to rely on ad revenue,'" he said. "And then they're criticized for not bringing enough ad revenue in when we know print advertising revenue has gone down."

The student paper is important for the culture of the university, Gleason said. It also gives journalism students the experiences they need to have before entering the field.

He said he hopes administrators and OSA take the opportunity to move the A-T forward and to be on the cutting edge.

"A lot of great people are involved in this and if they cut loose a little bit they could be on the forward rather than the backside," he said. "But they have to be given some of that freedom to do it."

In an interview with an A-T reporter, UWO Chancellor Andrew Leavitt said he would not let the A-T end. He could not be reached for comment Thursday before deadline.

Reach Noell Dickmann at 920-426-6658 or ndickmann@thenorthwestern.com; or follow her on Twitter @ONW_Noell

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