Rutgers Student Newspaper At Risk Of Closing In Referendum Fail

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — The future of The Daily Targum, the Rutgers school newspaper, remains in limbo after a student-wide referendum to pay for the paper failed this month.

The Daily Targum is an entirely student-run school newspaper, published five days a week, Monday through Friday. Every three years, the entire Rutgers student body is asked to vote whether they want to keep supporting the Targum through an $11.25 per-semester student fee. This May, that referendum failed. It needed 25 percent of the student body to vote in favor of it to pass.

"It almost feels like a slap in the face," said Alex Meier, 26, a 2015 Rutgers graduate who was the editor-in-chief of the paper in her senior year. She's now a digital producer for WABC-TV in Manhattan. "It's a microcosm of what's going on in the (journalism) industry today. It almost seems like journalism is undervalued. I take a vote like this personally."

Founded in 1869, it's one of the oldest college newspapers in the U.S. And for decades, The Daily Targum was a journalism 101 training ground for Meier and hundreds of other Rutgers students. RU ndergrad, and Edison native, Shirley Yu served as associate photo editor; one of her photos was later chosen for the cover of TIME magazine. Students who cut their teeth at the Targum have gone on to work for The Boston Globe, CNN and Sports Illustrated.

Meier said she was taught journalism in her undergraduate classes, "But I executed it at the Targum. And it helped my career: I was hired for an internship at ABC right out of college and I remember an editor interviewing me saying I had faced real-life adult problems because of my time there."

"When it came time for the referendum, I remember we had stickers, posters; we annoyed people in class to vote," she recalled. "But it was a given that people would support the paper, even if it was just for the crossword. I never even considered that the referendum wouldn't pass because it has since the '80s."

The Daily Targum went entirely independent from Rutgers University in 1980, so the paper could more critically cover the school, she said.

"It was a non-profit that was separate from the university and that gave students and staff a lot more room to be critical of the university," she said.

Rutgers University said in an official statement this week only that it was "disheartened" with the referendum results, but has said nothing so far about offering to fund the paper. Even if they did, Meier said she worried the paper's impartiality could be lost.

A GoFundMe has been established for the paper; S. Mitra Kalita, a Targum alum who is now a vice president at CNN, donated $1,001. "I can't imagine the life and career I have now being remotely possible without Targum," she wrote.

This was no after-school club; the paper was run like a business: "Everyone got into the office at 4 p.m. each day, so you had to have morning classes. Students filed stories and they were reviewed by an editor and copy editors before they went to print. We had advertisers who paid to advertise with us, a professional production staff, an accounting department," Meier said.

Every night, the paper is sent to be printed in South Jersey and first thing in the morning, 10,000 copies are distributed throughout campus, in libraries, residence halls and dorms. Meier was paid a daily stipend for her editor in chief role, and under her tenure, the newspaper reported on major news, such as Condoleezza Rice withdrawing as commencement speaker after student outcry and the Mike Rice scandal, the former Rutgers basketball coach who was fired after videos surfaced of him verbally abusing players.

Even today, The Daily Targum online is usually the first to break major stories about New Jersey's state university.

Even though the paper has advertisers, that $11.25 from Rutgers' thousands of undergrads made up the bulk of their operational funding. Now the future of the paper is in serious limbo.

“We do not know what the future holds, but the Targum Publishing Company’s Board of Trustees and staff will be working to address this funding crisis,” the paper tweeted.

Meier said she would be happy to see the paper scale back from daily production and perhaps print just weekly — as long as it can stay alive in some form.

"I hope there's a way to modernize how the paper works," she said. "The fact that it was a daily made it harder to do enterprise stories. And you can't realistically have a daily print paper even if you're The New York Times right now."