Q+A: Anna Pogarcic, Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Tar Heel

College newsrooms adapt to remote reporting as they cover the pandemic while living away from campus.

Anna Pogarcic is a 21-year-old junior at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, studying journalism and American history. As the recently-elected editor in chief of The Daily Tar Heel, she’s also leading an independent newsroom with a staff of around 150 writers and more than 30 editors, producing a paper with a print circulation of 10,000, and navigating a local media company through a global pandemic.The Daily Tar Heel was founded as a school newspaper, but since its incorporation as a nonprofit in 1989, it doesn’t receive any funding from UNC and runs on donations and ad revenue. 

In her two years as the paper’s city editor, Anna focused on coverage of Orange County, NC. In 2017, the staff of local newspaper The Chapel Hill News merged with The Durham Herald-Sun, leaving The Daily Tar Heel as one of fewer local newsrooms exclusively covering the Chapel Hill area. The Daily Tar Heel found itself in an increasingly common position for college papers: as local news deserts grow, student newsrooms cover not just their schools, but their local and state governments. 

In 2020, college media organizations like The Daily Tar Heel are also adapting to school closures and remote coverage due to COVID-19. Anna and I recently sat down for a socially-distanced Zoom call — me from my college apartment in Philadelphia and Anna from hers in Chapel Hill — to talk about college journalism and the responsibility independent student papers have to their readership during this pandemic. 

Study Hall: Where were you when you heard about UNC switching to online instruction? How did it feel to be coordinating coverage while also processing the fact that your school had just been closed?

Anna Pogarcic: For spring break, I took a few days to go to DC, and I was on the train home when I got the email that we were switching to online. My first thought, I have to admit, was, “Oh, God, how am I going to do my history paper?” Then I started processing that I wasn’t going to be able to go back to the office, which was really scary, because this is just completely unprecedented for any college paper, let alone the DTH. I was really lucky that almost all my writers stayed on and continued to put out the same level of work. There are a lot of questions we have to answer for our local community, like businesses closing and how the health department was going to handle testing.

SH: College newspapers — and all newspapers — talk a lot about privileging online publishing, but independent college papers rely on print for cash flow. How’s it been with remote work now forcing that digital-first mindset?

AP: We still [published the paper in print before the pandemic] because we need print advertising revenue. Making the transition to digital was definitely hard in that way. But we’ve been really lucky that a lot of donors have come forward in the month of March, so we ended up being fine for the time being. And the fact that we don’t have to meet a print deadline has given us a lot more time.

We launched the Heel Talk podcast, and we’ve been doing a lot more enterprise digital products. We’ve been freed to be more creative, and think about what we can be doing that can give people the information they need, but also give them a sense — I don’t want to say of normalcy — but that not everything necessarily needs to be about testing. Sometimes it’s good to just give people content that makes them feel like we have a connection despite the fact that we’re all so far apart.

We have two staffers who really like doing crossword puzzles, so we did an Instagram Live crossword puzzle competition to see who could fill it out first. We’re also covering more positive stories in our community. Chapel Hill has been really lucky that we have a lot of community advocates who have come forward to organize things like donation sites. Once classes went online, we made a coronavirus web page, so stories are all in one spot. Just trying to make sure that even though we don’t have the print product, that doesn’t mean that the news that we’re providing has to be of a lower quality.

SH: The Daily Tar Heel is known for its coverage of Orange County as well as UNC. What’s it been like to cover the community remotely? 

AP: I’m lucky because I’m still in Chapel Hill, so when I go on my weekly grocery run, I can look around and see what’s happening. Since that’s not the case for most of my writers — a lot of them had to go home — we’ve been monitoring social media a lot more than we usually do.

In a weird way, the fact that it’s all remote has actually made covering some things easier. All of the town meetings are now broadcast digitally, so it’s easy for writers to just lie in bed and tune in on their laptop and cover a meeting. That has been a really key part of our coverage: looking at how our local government officials are responding to this epidemic.

Usually, our office on Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill is pretty much open to anyone. We’re not in the office anymore, so we set up a Google Voice number, and we’ve gotten a few calls so far. We’ve also been trying to do other stuff where we directly ask [sources] to come talk to us. For instance, one of my assistants really likes covering education. With the transition with local districts going completely online, she sent out a survey to parents and teachers, asking them how that’s going.

We’re all scattered, but everyone’s pretty much home all the time. Even though it’s been logistically tricky — and not nearly as fulfilling as being able to sit down with somebody — we’re still able to interact with our community and make sure we’re writing stories that can help them.

SH: I know you talked a bit about the donor campaign, but now that print ads are down, are there other revenue streams that the DTH is pursuing?

AP: We were really lucky to get a lot of donations in March; some of our readers even set up matching campaigns. [There’s] one reporter named Kirk Ross who used to work for the Chapel Hill News a long time ago, but now works for a different North Carolina outlet. For a week, he was matching all donations to the DTH. In addition to that, we normally sell merch at the end of each year, but just to our staffers. Our general manager thought that it would be a good idea to open it up to anybody, especially to alumni of the DTH, if they want to help us out.

We’re trying to think of digital products that we can use for advertising. Our website and daily newsletter use ads, but we’re trying to think of any other potential revenue streams that can also be an outlet for news. We’re hoping that we can monetize stuff like our podcast and future products to hopefully make up for the loss of print revenue.

SH: Managing a student staff is hard enough when everybody’s in the same place. How has it been with staff and editor retention during this transition to online? Are there things that the DTH is doing to try to replicate not just the work environment of a student newsroom, but also the social environment?

AP: It has sucked doing remote edits because the whole thing about the DTH is that we’re a learning and teaching paper — we don’t expect anyone to have journalism experience — and a big part of that is we require side-by-side edits. That’s a lot harder to do if you can’t physically sit with [writers]. We’ve been meeting with writers on Zoom or calling them [while] looking at their story and using Google Docs, so they still get that learning aspect, even when they’re not physically in the office with us.

I like my job [because] I get to see my writers every day and see them grow, so it’s been really nice for us to continue to maintain that connection. We’ve done some work that I think they can all really be proud of, like [a story on] how local recipients of WIC benefits are dealing with potential shortages at grocery stores. One of my writers did two really good features on essential workers, spotlighting firefighters and custodians at the school district and their fight for hazard pay and benefits.

You asked about the social aspect of it. We try to have social events a few times a semester. But the big thing we do is we always have a banquet where we all get dinner, we get superlatives, and we reminisce on the year. We had one Zoom, which was actually just as fun.

SH: What’s the plan if classes are online in the fall? How will the editorial priorities shift?

AP: My staff has a lot of questions about that that I wish I could give better answers to. What we decide to do will ultimately depend on what UNC decides to do. One of the big parts of my platform that I’ve been talking to the management team about is making that digital transition. We all wanted it to happen anyway, and if we’re online for the fall, it’ll just mean we have to make that a little bit faster.

Our plan right now is to use the summer to make as much progress as possible so that when we come back in the fall, no matter what, we can have news ready for people no matter where they are. I’m hoping that we can launch more podcasts, launch video series, and do more interactive journalism. If we are online in the fall, that presents a lot more questions that our readers are going to have that we can give the answers to. I don’t see the DTH going away at all. What we’re going to do will look a lot different than what we usually do, and that’s terrifying. But I couldn’t be more lucky to have a staff of editors that care about this paper as much as I do. I feel weirdly comfortable in the fact that we’re definitely going to make it out of here and be really proud of what we’ve done.

SH: How do you see the role of independent student papers in holding universities accountable during this time?

AP: One of the most exciting things about being independent is that you don’t have to worry about losing funding. You can feel free to ask any questions. There are a lot of questions that we feel comfortable now being able to ask UNC, such as: if the fall semester is online, are you going to charge full tuition? What happens to people who need university housing? What happens to grad students who are paid for being TAs? What happens to the workers at the dining hall?

In a broader way, especially with Chapel Hill, if we don’t ask these questions, I’m not sure if anyone else would — of our university and also of some of our town officials. Because we’re students. This is what we want to do for the rest of our lives. I think we see a lot of these things through a unique lens that maybe professional journalists wouldn’t, because we’re living it.

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