Penn State eliminates funding for well-respected, student-run newspaper The Daily Collegian

Terry Mutchler, a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and former Daily Collegian writer, likened Penn State University’s elimination of funding for its storied student newspaper to “ditching the Creamery,” another mainstay on the University Park campus.

“Am I aware of it? I had to double my blood pressure medication,” quipped Mutchler, a staff writer and editor from 1983 to 1987. “I think it’s shortsighted.”

She was referring to a decision, now final, to phase out financial support for The Daily Collegian — meaning a 53% reduction to $200,000 this coming academic year and then zero by 2024-25.

It’s not yet clear what it means long term for a publication that in its 136 years has been a strong student voice, training future journalists who have won Pulitzer Prizes and gone on to publications from ESPN to The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal.

They and other supporters had gathered petition signatures and sent out letters of appeal this spring.

In the end, though, their pleas weren’t enough. The cuts became final as the administration and board of trustees signed off on operating budgets for the next two years earlier this month.

Officials including Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi have said the institution is trying to balance its budget from a deficit that at one point was $140 million.

On Thursday, Lisa Powers, a Penn State spokesperson, said: “The university still proudly supports The Collegian, which now has a newly renovated home in the heart of campus in Willard Building — a state-of-the-art facility with studios, recording booths, newsrooms and the latest technology that provides students with real-life experiences.”

Administrators and students are discussing the possibility of forming a news consortium with The Collegian and several other media, among them The Lion 90.7 FM and CommRadio, to create a more sustainable funding model. That proposed funding model would align Penn State with approaches by other universities, she said.

Some alumni who devoted themselves to the publication and came away with valuable career and life skills bemoaned the funding cut and recalled on Thursday the impact The Collegian had on their lives. Some met their spouses there. They bonded through late-night deadlines and tough editorial decisions, forming lifelong friendships.

Megan O’ Matz, an investigative reporter for ProPublica based in Wisconsin and a member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Sun-Sentinel in South Florida, said she chose Penn State because of The Collegian’s reputation. O’Matz, who grew up in Bethel Park, said the decision has paid huge dividends throughout her career.

“I wouldn’t have had the career I do if it weren’t for The Collegian,” she said.

O’Matz said her time as a reporter and managing editor from 1983 to 1987 was an experience better than any journalism class.

“We were digging up stories and interviewing people and writing and editing on deadline — and putting out a daily newspaper.”

She got to interview then-Gov. Dick Thornburgh in his Harrisburg office as a 20-year-old cub reporter.

Looking back at that experience, she said, “I am just astounded that he talked to me and I had the opportunity as a very young adult interviewing one of the most powerful men in our state. It’s all because of The Collegian.”

O’Matz said the professional connections she made remain invaluable, one even helping her to get an interview at ProPublica.

“We are lifelong friends who support and help each other through career issues, ups and downs in life, marriages, divorces, deaths — I mean, everything,” she said of the former Collegians. “It’s the kind of camaraderie you can’t just get through sitting next to someone in class.”

Jordan Hyman, the past president and a current member of The Collegian’s board of directors, says the same. The networking with fellow former Collegian members has been invaluable.

“I’ve been able to pick their brains, or apply for jobs, or help someone land the job,” Hyman said.

Growing up in New Jersey, Hyman dreamed of becoming a sports reporter covering the New York Mets or Giants.

He got the next best thing as a Collegian reporter: covering the Nittany Lion football team, driving to away games hours from State College, filing under tight deadlines in a hotel room.

He also covered almost all of the other sports teams, logging 30 hours or more a week for the paper, sometimes skipping a class to cover the Tuesday news conference by late coach Joe Paterno.

“I learned about how to ask good questions, how to take notes, how to think on your feet, how to come up with a story idea and be creative,” said Hyman, an executive and head of East Coast sales at Nativo, a native advertising and storytelling platform.

He also learned how to develop a thick skin, especially after he wrote a story on a freshman volleyball player who was upset that she wasn’t getting enough playing time and was considering transferring to another university. Coach Russ Rose apparently wasn’t pleased and for a while did not talk with him. The chilled relationship lasted for about a month before they mended things, Hyman recalls.

Developing that thick skin has helped him in his various jobs in the marketing side of media companies.

Mutchler, a partner at the Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel law firm in Philadelphia, who was named Pennsylvania Lawyer of the Year for 2023, also owes her success to her days at The Collegian. She has started the nation’s first transparency law practice, helping the media, corporations and others receive public records.

She believes the decision to cut funding “comes with a lack of appreciation about exactly what it means to have an independent student newspaper.”

That has become an issue of late on other campuses nationally, said Laura Widmer, executive director of the Associated Collegiate Press, based in Minneapolis.

How, or even if, to fund student media has further stressed outlets already adapting to a digital 24/7 news cycle, burgeoning forms of media competition and skepticism about “fake news,” she said.

But the value of student media has been demonstrated, even in recent weeks with campus coverage figuring in the departure of a football coach at Northwestern University football and the president of Stanford University.

“It’s just like with any other community: You need a free and independent press,” she said.

Widmer said that needs to be better communicated to students on campuses.

The Collegian has long been a selling point for the university and boasts a long history. Grover Cleveland was in the White House when Penn State’s independent student newspaper — then called The Freelance — published its first edition in 1887.

Nick Stonesifer, editor-in-chief of The Collegian, said the university makes a point to show new and prospective students the newspaper office as part of a tour of the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications.

“Even now with all this going on, The Collegian is being marketed as something people should take advantage of,” Stonesifer said. “It shows you how important it is.”

In an interview Thursday, Stonesifer expressed both disappointment but continuing determination to maintain its print and digital operations. In a letter he published this week in The Collegian, he wrote, “Operations this year will not be impacted, and students will still be able to maintain the level of coverage they have delivered in years past.”

The Collegian website now carries a “donate” button, and Stonesifer said the publication is exploring potential funding options.

Hyman said, “It’s disappointing to me that The Collegian remains sort of a symbol of all the things that you can do at Penn State and a stop on the campus tour …” and yet “the university seems plenty OK to let The Collegian basically fade to black unless something happens.”

O’Matz, the Pulitzer Prize winner, questioned the budget priority of cutting funding for such a storied paper.

“The university has no trouble raising money,” she said. “We as alumni are always asked to give to the school. The football coach makes $7 million a year. The operating budget is something like $7.7 billion.

”So we’re really talking about a very small amount of money that has incredible payoffs for teaching students how to be journalists.”