It’s news to no one, but newspapers continue to suffer changes both cyclical (the recession, which continues for industries that are reliant on ads for revenue) and structural (the increasing importance of online media, though no one has figured out how to make more than a buck from online advertising). The Varsity is only partly sheltered from this storm.
Just over a month ago, The Varsity Board of Directors launched into the unenviable task of restructuring the corporation in response to the recession—two years too late. “Why such a delayed response?” you may very reasonably ask.
In part, it has to do with The Varsity’s position as a student organization. Like any student group, we have institutionalized high turnover: the vast majority of jobs at the paper are one-year contracts and the expectation is that each role will be filled by someone new every year. Add to this that, as student jobs, most Varsity editors do not make much money, meaning that any cut in salaries is substantial, and may significantly change how an editor expects to shelter and feed herself. These features make it very difficult to negotiate a salary cut mid-year without disrupting the quantity and quality of content.
Printing, our other large expense, is equally difficult to slash mid-year because we set our publishing schedule in March. That schedule, as well as our distribution numbers, become a promise to advertisers. Advertising, for those who do not know, remains our greatest source of revenue. Last year, The Varsity tried to solve this problem by reducing page counts. An eight-page issue, for example, was fairly common.
In my opinion, The Varsity has a duty to print as much content as it possibly can. To paraphrase The Varsity’s statement of policies, our mandate is to offer comprehensive, fair, and accurate coverage; promote the study of journalism; offer all U of T students the opportunity to participate in the paper’s production; provide a forum for members of the community to exchange information and opinion; and protect the paper’s editorial autonomy from undue external influence. For a university of U of T’s size, fulfilling at least three of these objectives requires that we print more than eight pages twice a week.
Printing and salaries are our two greatest expenses; all others are really drops in the bucket. As no restructuring in regards to printing or human resources happened last year, The Varsity was essentially set on a debt course. Yet despite an even worse ad-selling environment and increased printing costs this year, we’ve managed to lose only so much as we did last year.
The cause for the delayed response was the following. The Varsity’s Board of Directors fell by the wayside several years ago, and it has been a long struggle to bring the board back to compliance. The Board of Directors is absolutely essential for oversight of the corporation and for providing the proper reporting measures for the paper to keep track of its own financial health. Many of us at The Varsity have worked extremely hard this year to bring together a fully constituted, active board composed of student representatives. In the midst of end-of-term assignments and essays, this board has launched into a comprehensive restructuring and budgeting process where-
in we consulted with the current masthead; our primary creditor; the company that sells our ad space nationally; and the office of the vice-provost, students. In this process, we have tried to balance three priorities.
One: Maintaining weekly page counts at a level comparable to what they have been this year, in order to fulfill the mandate noted above.
Two: To pay off our debt within a reasonable timeframe based on sensible projections and expectations.
Three: To continue providing good student jobs to the editors without whom the paper’s quality would suffer.
Our budget for next year is based on a very conservative projection that, ad sales will not improve, despite the uptick in the economy. We have cut costs across the board, though we have tried to minimize the cuts to student jobs. Based on our projections and conversations with business partners, if the paper follows the regimen set out in this budget, The Varsity will be out of debt in two to three years.
As part of this restructuring plan, The Varsity is becoming a weekly. By printing once a week, we can maintain comparable page counts to this year while also cutting printing costs. We are also devoting more editorial resources to online content, which is the best way to break news. As a weekly, our strategy going forward is to develop thevarsity.ca as its own publication, and to emphasize what online does best, and vice versa for print.
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Nobody likes a recession, and nobody likes restructuring a company. The sombre tone of this letter distracts from the fact that it has been a great year for The Varsity editorially. There will always be haters and political hacks, but that aside, the healthy back-and-forth of opinion in these pages this year is evidence enough that The Varsity is doing well. Comparing this year to the one before, traffic for thevarsity.ca is up by 40 per cent. None of this would have been possible without the extremely dedicated group of editors and staff who put together the paper and the website, and the over 275 people who contributed. On a personal note, recession be damned, this past year has been the best of my life. Thank you all for the amazing ride.
Sincerely,
Jade Colbert
Editor-in-Chief,
The Varsity, 2009-2010
