Is there a story here?

On 21 Sussex Avenue, behind Robarts, sits The Varsity newspaper’s office — two well-furnished floors with a broken espresso machine, rooms alive with barely-containable ambition and asbestos. 

All the way across Queen’s Park in Goldring Student Centre is the office of Victoria University’s student newspaper, The Strand, housed in a high-ceiling office, complete with a kitchenette, a roomful of desks, and couches. 

Nearby is Brennan Hall, home to a stale, windowless room where St. Michael College’s newspaper, The Mike, resides, fitted with a single desk and printer. 

Compare that to The Gargoyle — currently operating out of a musty closet shared with all the ancillary University College (UC) groups. Boxes of leftover UC Orientation shirts threaten to collapse on their one desk, a surface lost under years’ worth of clutter. As I ran from office to office, out of breath and late to my interviews with each paper, I pretended not to notice the clear disparities between our student publications.

I am one of the lucky few editors who can add an “-in-chief” to my title. I am co-editor-in-chief (EIC) at the UC Gargoyle, and I still had no idea of the sheer number of student papers we have on campus. 

Despite the decline of print media, all seven of UTSG’s colleges boast their own publications. That’s not to mention the other campus papers, the dozens of miscellaneous literary reviews, academic journals, magazines, and of course, the pages you are reading from now: The Varsity. 

For these campus publications, each page, word, and drop of ink is funded by students. This money shapes everything — printing costs and editorial alike. Increases in funding can quickly become a leash tugged taut by media relations and administration, but a lack of guaranteed financial support threatens to make U of T’s unique variety of student papers yesterday’s news. 

Money talks, but not to us

As I researched further into the funding and resource disparities among smaller campus publications, I noticed that, despite all our experiences of being EICs this year, we were running in complete parallel and I had not met any of them before interviewing them. Although all of us are running a paper, we don’t talk much — or ever.

In writing this article, I relied on a mix of interviews, publicly available budgets from current and previous years, governing documents, and email exchanges with each publication’s EICs. Transparency levels varied wildly from publication to publication, with much of the financial picture having to be patchworked together from current incomplete records or last year’s budget. 

Listed below are the 2023–2024 budgets for The Varsity, The Medium, The Underground, The Gargoyle, and Toike Oike, and the 2024–2025 budgets for The Mike, The Strand, The Innis Herald, and Trinity Times.

Neither Woodsworth College’s magazine The Howl nor their Student Association have public budgets. I reached out to The Howl for comment, but they declined to discuss “anything budget related” and did not respond to further questions regarding print circulation and frequency.

There is a large financial divide between the publications with a levy and those without one. A levy is a fee collected from students’ tuition each semester, and is designated to the levied group. Unlike a grant, usually a one-time payment you’d have to apply for, a levy is a consistent, compulsory payment intended to fund its cause. If a student paper is levied, it theoretically shields its budget against cost-saving efforts from student governments or administrators. 

Non-levied publications have to negotiate budgets each year with their respective student societies, who are under no obligation to provide them with funding. This lack of financial security strains these papers’ print circulation and schedules, making it harder to maintain readership and a larger team.

The table demonstrates that The Varsity’s budget overshadows all other student papers across campuses. Its $593,727 budget from last year comes from each full-time, fee-paying student at U of T, along with the year’s available advertising revenue, which is $88,000 to be exact. 

Every U of T student pays for The Varsity because it is the official newspaper for the entirety of U of T’s community — not a college, campus, or program-specific publication. The Varsity’s budget surplus from 2023–2024 alone could run The Gargoyle, Toike Oike, The Innis Herald, and Trinity Times for an entire academic year, with some left over. 

It’s hard not to feel jealous of this funding when every other paper runs on pennies and a dream in comparison. The Gargoyle spends all of our funding and then some, so knowing that The Varsity does not need to put each dollar toward printing feels blasphemous. 

Media monitoring

How much funding a publication receives fundamentally shapes the attention it garners and whether it’s vulnerable to the influence of outside forces.

U of T’s Media Relations (MR) is responsible for maintaining and shaping the university’s public image, liaising with journalists at the global and local levels to do so. One element of its role is to comment on media requests or claims about the university. 

MR is often in direct contact with The Varsity to raise concerns or request corrections about published articles. While other student publications may also reach out to MR for comment, MR tends not to initiate further communication with student publications other than The Varsity. 

To learn about MR’s processes and practices, The Varsity contacted U of T MR and spoke with its director, Philippe Devos. 

Devos explained that MR doesn’t “monitor any [specific news] outlet at all.” Instead, they receive two reports a day of all media coverage about U of T, generated by Cision, an artificial intelligence-powered public relations service that scrapes mentions of choice keywords in online and offline media. The reports include the full published world, from blogs to broadcasts. 

Student media “might get caught up in [Cision reports] sometimes, but we’re not actively monitoring them,” Devos said. MR also logs any publication’s request for U of T information, so that it can respond with them.

The Varsity’s internal policy is to reach out to all involved parties in a reported article. 

For example, for all university administration-related topics, The Varsity contacts MR for interviews with professors and staff or information and documents about U of T that are not publicly available. Each request is coupled with a brief overview of the in-progress article with the section editor’s name. This effectively means MR gets notice in advance of all Varsity coverage of U of T, leaving room for them to have an early say about articles before publication. 

“Someone from Media Relations has called The Varsity’s editors on their personal phones to provide more information on our Media Relations inquiries, and added that there would be no point in reporting on the stories,” wrote The Varsity’s EIC Eleanor Yuneun Park in an email to me. 

“They did not, however, contact us arbitrarily or obtain our phone number without our consent. Editors who were contacted provided their phone numbers upon Media Relations’ request.” 

Even for this article, Devos asked, “I’m still trying to grasp, like, where’s there an interesting story in this?” While U of T MR is not directly preventing The Varsity from publishing a story, this can put pressure on the paper’s editorial autonomy. 

According to Devos, only a few publications other than The Varsity have reached out to MR this past year: The Strand, The Medium, and the U of T Faculty of Law student newspaper, Ultra Vires. Other papers like The Gargoyle and The Mike do not require anyone to reach out for comment on articles, so writers and editors are not under the same obligation to contact U of T MR. 

Essentially, except for the rare request for comment or information from non-Varsity publications, MR will only read published student articles about U of T if they appear in the two daily Cision reports.

Admin’s agenda

Theoretically, university administrations should not interfere with what student publications choose to print. Many of these student papers — such as The Medium, The Gargoyle, and The Varsity — have a clause in their constitution stating to protect editorial autonomy. Of course, this alone does not fend off editorial interference from administrators. 

In fall 2024, after The Strand announced a special issue on Palestine, Victoria University President and Vice-Chancellor Rhonda McEwen emailed the editorial team ahead of publication. The college had received “concerns from members of the Victoria University community” regarding the upcoming issue. 

To address these concerns, McEwen reminded The Strand to adhere to the university’s codes prohibiting “discrimination and harassment, such as antisemitism and Islamophobia.” The Strand’s EIC Michael Elsaesser joked to me, “I wasn’t planning on it, but thanks for the reminder.” 

McEwen’s email also recommended that if The Strand needs “support with this issue or future editions,” they should reach out to the college’s Director of Communications. While the offer of support was a gesture, not a demand, this exchange reveals the administration’s interest in The Strand’s content.

The Strand’s “Palestine Special Edition” and The Gargoyle’s similarly themed “Liberation!” issues were printed within a day of each other in October, but both The Gargoyle’s announcement and publishing of the issue received total silence from the UC or U of T administrations. 

The Gargoyle regularly prints politically radical and sexually provocative articles, and we have not heard a word from anyone ‘upstairs’ about it. No one important seems to read The Gargoyle, and certainly not anyone important enough for concerns to reach our college president — exactly how we like it. 

The politics of paper

Beyond administration hurdles, student papers also risk having funding denied by our peers in student governments. The relationship between campus journalists and student politicians carries an unspoken understanding: a publication’s funding can be reduced, delayed, or cut entirely due to editorial disputes. 

Every student paper mentioned in this article was once tied to a student union, association, administrative council, or government — only gaining independence after actively fighting for it. Even The Varsity was once under the University of Toronto Student Union’s (UTSU) umbrella. 

As The Varsity’s publisher, UTSU, formerly the Student Administration Council (SAC), was in control of the publication’s financial and legal responsibilities. However, it did not have editorial or financial control once it approved The Varsity’s annual budget amount. 

The Varsity pushed for separation from the UTSU, formerly the SAC, to control its finances and prevent the threat of financial punishment. The SAC, in turn, supported The Varsity’s independence to avoid legal liability for its publications and the burden of covering budget deficits. 

In a Varsity advertisement from 1979, the SAC itself urged students to vote in favour of The Varsity’s independence, stating “a student government cannot actively participate in a newspaper’s decisions before its freedom to criticize is jeopardized.” 

A successful referendum was held in the spring of 1979, and a year later, The Varsity formally incorporated as a separate entity — divorcing the student union and securing its complete financial independence. 

For similar reasons, The Mike held a referendum in the spring of 1982 and separated from the St. Michael’s College Student Union. Its then-co-editors explained that the student government members would often enter The Mike office to review issues before publication — jeopardizing the paper’s editorial autonomy.

The Underground — then known as The Balcony Square — was frequently shut down by the Scarborough Campus Students’ Union for publishing editorials critical of the council. Eventually, they held a referendum in the fall of 1982 to become independent. 

The Medium — formerly Medium II — followed suit in 1983, separating from the University of Toronto Mississauga Student Union, then called the Erindale College Student Union (ECSU). Its editors explained in an editorial they had published in February 1983, that they were compelled to hold the referendum due to the “very real danger that ECSU might use its control over purse strings to interfere with the freedom of the press.”

All the publications mentioned in this article — except The Varsity, The Mike, and The Medium — remain financially tied to their student governments. For levied publications, the student government holds the funds in trust and can reject budget requests. Non-levied publications are listed as a single line in the student government’s overall budget, leaving their entire funding subject to the council’s discretion. 

At $3,300, the Trinity Times has the lowest reported budget of any active printing publication previously discussed — largely due to its status as a non-levied club under the Trinity College Meeting, its student government. Founded in 2020, the Trinity Times is also a newer publication. While it publishes monthly online, its budget only covers two print issues a year. 

The three publications with the lowest budgets and lowest circulations — The Toike Oike, The Herald, and the Trinity Times — are also non-levied organizations. While The Gargoyle has a levy, it cannot be adjusted to inflation without a referendum, unlike The Varsity’s and The Mike’s levies.

The more a publication tries to scale down operations to meet financial demands, the less cost-effective printing becomes. The cost for printing is initially for setting up the printing press, which is upfront and fixed, rather than based on the number of copies that end up being printed. This makes it more cost-effective for printing companies to scale up orders than scale down. The more copies you order, the less per copy you pay. 

You can see this in The Gargoyle’s printing costs: 500 copies of a 24-page issue cost $1,013.61. Now, with 700 copies for the same number of pages, we are charged $1,047.51. For an additional 200 copies, the difference is 30 bucks and some change. As soon as you add another four pages and colour, the invoice costs go up more and more.

Cheaper printing deals require high minimums that far exceed the demand for any publications other than The Varsity. 

We can see the effects of printing costs on The Toike Oike. Their EIC Mila Markovski wrote to The Varsity that, while they used to print six issues a year, they now print five due to “time and money constraints.” 

The Trinity Times budget barely covers the two print issues a year. The Innis Herald would find a higher budget helpful “to print more colour in our issues.” Similarly, The Gargoyle’s aesthetic is black-and-white — fortunately, because we cannot regularly afford to print in colour.  

The Gargoyle has a levy from UC students, which should ensure autonomy from our student government. However, the $1.50 levy per semester has remained unchanged since 1990, leaving the publication several thousand dollars short of its actual operational costs. Each UC Lit budget meeting reveals that The Gargoyle consistently exceeds its levy amount just to cover basic expenses. In the end, The Gargoyle must rely on the UC Lit to cover the shortfall out of goodwill.

Essentially, the publication’s printing is tied to the temperaments of students dressing up as politicians — the very group The Gargoyle is supposed to keep accountable. The Gargoyle held a referendum in UC through March 14–16 to increase its levy from $1.50 to $2.69, but the proposal failed by just 14 votes. 

As the adage goes, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

Compensation challenges

The role of an EIC, or any leadership position on a student paper, requires a substantial commitment. For a bi-weekly publication on campus, the EIC works an estimated 20 hours a week, often more. This time comes at the expense of courses, other jobs, a social life, and sleep — you get the picture.

Both co-EICs of The Gargoyle receive a $175 honorarium for the year. In comparison, The Strand’s co-EICs are paid $1,000, The Innis Herald’s EIC receives a $1,000 scholarship from Innis College, and The Mike’s EIC is paid $4,400. 

These honorariums and scholarships are a step toward compensating students for their labour, but they do not fully offset the financial sacrifices required for the position. At smaller student newspapers, any significant compensation often begins and ends with the EIC. For example, a section editor at The Gargoyle earns $50 for a year’s worth of work, and a copy editor earns $25. 

Comparatively, The Varsity’s EIC has a role closer to a full-time job in both commitment and compensation. The position is contracted for 37 hours of work per week during the school year, with an hourly wage of $18.02.

Not every publication has the resources or professional structure that The Varsity does, and smaller campus papers rely entirely on unpaid or minimally compensated labour. This creates an accessibility issue on campus: to take on such a role, a student must first be able to afford to work for symbolic wages.

It is a common dream for campus papers to pay their masthead more. As The Innis Herald’s EIC Sam Guevara wrote to The Varsity, “In an ideal world, our finances would allow us to appreciate our hardworking masthead members more than we can afford to, and what they deserve.” Elsaesser shared this sentiment, writing he has a “dream of eventually extending honoraria and payment for more members of the masthead.” 

The Mike pays its masthead the highest compensation among the smaller papers on campus. Salaries are its largest expense, thousands ahead of printing costs. To support this, The Mike operates beyond its levied income of $35,000, relying on unused budget from the pandemic years when the paper wasn’t printing to compensate staff. 

“I am definitely worried about the sustainability as costs go up,” said EIC Darian Trabold about The Mike’s budget in future years, especially as the paper continues to dip into its dwindling surplus. 

Funding, freedom, and the fine print

Financial security allows a paper to expand its coverage, increase circulation, and pay staff, but it often comes with strings attached. Larger budgets attract attention from administration and funding bodies, both of whom may want control over how they are portrayed in student media. 

Smaller papers on campus with lower circulation have editorial autonomy in its rawest form, flying under the radar, and avoiding the level of external pressures that The Varsity faces.

While reporting on Palestine resulted in a few emails for other papers, The Varsity received a flood of backlash, not only from the U of T community but also from a vocal audience beyond campus. 

“During The Varsity’s coverage of the pro-Palestine encampment at U of T in the summer of 2024, I received around 200 to 300 emails a day — some from people who accessed our articles through Honest Reporting and some personally,” wrote Park. 

“I’ve received emails telling me that I have the blood of Israeli hostages on my hands… and some professors from different universities telling me that they know my name and that I will never get a job.” 

Taking into consideration The Varsity’s relationship with MR too, other papers comparatively face less pressure on editorial decisions. It’s not that The Varsity can’t publish certain stories, but rather that its broader reach makes each article a riskier endeavour. 

Voices beyond The Varsity

As for the smaller publications on campus, we are never first, and we are often not the best. If we tried to compete with The Varsity, in our current state, we’d publish the same stories weeks later, with half the resources and a fraction of the circulation. 

But that’s the beauty of it: not every paper is The Varsity. Not every paper wants to be The Varsity. Not every paper should be The Varsity.

Smaller publications help fill the gaps in coverage, particularly on a more personal level within the colleges. The Strand was central to the All Eyes on Vic movement, advocating for Victoria University to divest from fossil fuels. The Gargoyle investigated UC Lit’s financial mismanagement over the past few years. While The Varsity covered the Innis café closure, The Innis Herald focused on the family running it and later followed up on its reopening as Acacia Café in Wycliffe College.

At The Gargoyle, contributors are not restricted by any one style for writing, allowing articles to range from the grossly vulgar to the faithfully professional. The Gargoyle also has the creative liberties to experiment with more controversial content — such as the annual nudes contest in our Sex issues, a centrefold that would be pointedly out of place in The Varsity. 

A healthy media ecosystem requires smaller publications to exist alongside The Varsity. The freedom afforded by our limited resources allows us to be unapologetically amateur — although, let’s be honest, a little more funding wouldn’t hurt. 

Without stable financial support, student papers are precariously dependent on the goodwill of student governments and over-reliant on unpaid labour. Guevara summed it up better than I can, expressing her hopes for a future where The Innis Herald is “creating without worrying about if we can afford to.” 

I’m not the first to write about the U of T student papers — I’m not even the first to write about them this year — and I certainly won’t be the last. This is a living, breathing story with no final conclusion. The one constant is that we are all students, figuring it out as we go. Even those with multi-floored offices, are, in the end, playing pretend journalists, drawing on fake mustaches, and donning our dads’ oversized blazers. 

Editor’s Note (5:36 pm): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated The Gargoyle‘s founding year as 1848. In fact, The Gargoyle‘s founding year is 1954.