College newsrooms are also relatively immune to the market pressures of the industry. "Our primary focus isn't bringing money to stockholders, it's providing opportunities for students," said McSwane, The Collegian editor, who is a junior from Arvada, Colorado. "We don't ever have to worry that someone's going to come down and say, 'Hey, we have to cut our newsroom budget because someone in Kansas isn't making enough money.'"
That independence from the bottom line is what keeps student journalism fresh and irreverent, or so holds the common wisdom in college newsrooms, and journalism professors tend to agree. "If there is free press, it's probably on the college campuses," said Donna Rouner, a journalism professor at Colorado State who wrote an op-ed for The Collegian criticizing any deal.
No proposal has yet been submitted, but an advisory committee composed of students, including a representative from The Collegian, and Colorado State faculty members held its first meeting last Thursday to decide whether a deal with Gannett or any other media company was worth pursuing.
Blanche Hughes, the vice president for student affairs, who sits on the committee, said its goal was to gauge how the proposal would work for students as well as the university. She said the committee would look for job and education opportunities for students and assurances from any company that made a bid for The Collegian that the quality of the newspaper would be maintained.
Morton said he doubted that Gannett's ownership would change a student newspaper. "I'm sure Gannett has absolutely no interest in having anything to do with the editorial product," he said.
But buying student newspapers, Morton said, made financial sense. "It's a way of enlarging your footprint," he said.
Schwartz, the general manager of The Daily Tar Heel, said he thought Gannett was going after young readers. But he said campus newspapers, with their easy availability and focus on community-based journalism, helped to instill the newspaper habit in students.
"Let us make them newspaper readers for you," he said.
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