Why Aren’t Student Journalists Paid a Living Wage?

Student newspapers produce professional-level journalism, but require long, unpaid hours that replicate the industry’s exclusions.

A weeknight at a university newsroom looks a lot like one at a traditional newspaper. Groups of journalists are huddled at computers, looking over edits for a breaking news piece; a reporter will rush in  from a city council meeting and start frantically typing out a story scheduled to run in two hours. When I stepped into the office of New York University’s Washington Square News as a nervous freshman, I had no idea that being a student journalist actually meant being a journalist — that WSN held its staffers to the same high standards as professionals. 

Every day, my peers would be in the newspaper’s office from 5 PM  to 10 PM, writing and editing stories. On Sundays, the day our weekly print edition went out, senior staff would be there until the early morning hours finalizing the layout. They would return the next day after classes and start on Tuesday’s online stories. 

All of this labor — which has produced stories that became national headlines, like this WSN article on a COVID-19 outbreak in one dorm on NYU’s campus — is done without any expectation of payment for the newspaper’s staff. 

College newspapers feel like a constant in the ever-changing media industry: they’re often the first step that young journalists take on their path towards a career in media. As local news erodes, many student publications have expanded to providing essential coverage of their cities and towns. Yet most student journalists are not paid for their work. This lack of pay — coupled with the expectation that 18-year-olds can do professional-level journalism while balancing a full load of classes and being away from home for the first time — make college newspapers a uniquely challenging environment for their workers. 

Some student-run publications have been able to pay higher-level staff members by using revenue from advertisements in print and online editions of the newspaper, but these stipends tend to be small, and have shrunk during the pandemic. Despite the importance of the reporting done on college campuses throughout the United States, the inability of college papers to pay reporters can exclude people who can’t afford to work for free — who are disproportionately Black, Latinx, and first-generation students — from participating. 

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As local newspapers shutter at an alarming rate, college newsrooms have expanded their coverage to include the communities in which they are situated, and in some areas, have even taken on the responsibilities of a local paper while still covering campus life. Juan Miranda, a sophomore at El Camino Community College and the Managing Editor of the El Camino College Union, told me that the newspaper covers everything from the college’s board of trustee elections to the homeless community in Torrance, California.

The ECC Union was nominated for four of the Associated Collegiate Press Pacemaker awards in four different categories for their coverage on these topics, and have continued to report on Torrance-area issues from their homes during this period of remote learning. Since March, Miranda feels like he hasn’t stopped working. “It’s been so demanding lately,” Miranda said. “I’ve been working from home, and it’s been eight to ten hours [of newspaper work] a day.” 

In order to join either of El Camino Community College’s student publications, students are required to take at least one journalism course at the college, meaning that people who don’t have the time or the funds to take an extra class cannot participate. Miranda told me that he finds the work worthwhile just the same. “Finding out that we don’t get paid didn’t really bother me,” Miranda said. “Of course we’d like to, but I think it’s necessary to be a part of a college newspaper because it’s such a valuable experience.” 

After six months of working at WSN as a deputy news editor, I remember being pleasantly surprised to find out that small stipends were paid to senior staff members at the end of the semester. One Sunday afternoon, I watched two senior editors calculate what their hourly wage would be based on their stipend for that semester, which was around $250. The figure came out to about 75 cents.  

Much of this comes down to the economics of running a student newspaper. Independent student publications have to generate their own revenue to cover printing costs and equipment fees, and stipends come after. While some universities subsidize student newspapers, most regard the publications just like any other club on campus and don’t provide adequate funding to pay their staff. Even if a university is willing to pay for a student newspaper, reliance on university funding can make it harder for student journalists to hold these institutions accountable. Last year, for example, The Washington Post published a column about how articles published by Liberty University’s newsroom have been sanitized by the administration, which maintains editorial and financial control of the paper.

The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, is the rare independent newspaper that pays student journalists a stipend on a bi-weekly basis. The paper boasts a staff of over 300, and several years ago, the publication was able to make enough money via advertisements, fundraisers, and alumni donations that they could pay every single writer, photographer, and editor on staff. Now, the paper can only provide their senior staff members bi-weekly stipends, which range from $200 to $15.

Sarah Harris, the current editor-in-chief of the Daily Cal, explained to me that the pandemic hasn’t made paying their senior staff any easier. “Berkeley is full of local businesses, and we would reach out to them to advertise in our print newspaper,” Harris said. “Now, a lot of the businesses we relied on are struggling themselves, and we’ve had to reduce the amount everybody gets paid so that everybody gets paid a little bit rather than nobody getting paid at all.” 

The paper has also had to cut back production of the print edition of their newspaper from four times a week to once a week. With these changes, senior members of staff make up to $400 per month.

UC Berkeley does not offer an undergraduate journalism major, so Harris describes the paper as “a major training ground” for students who are interested in pursuing journalism. This means that students who cannot cannot afford to work without pay when they first start out have few alternatives to hone their skills. Harris has been trying to address this inequity issue at the Daily Californian by providing an option where applicants can specify if they’d like to take on a reduced workload for any reason, but she admits that students who are able to spend the most time working without pay on the newspaper often end up getting paid positions later.

“It’s been a concern for some people who want to move up the ladder, but don’t have the time to dedicate because they have to work other jobs,” Harris said. “In an ideal world, we would have enough money to pay everybody, and we wouldn’t have to constantly worry about the budget.” 

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When I worked at Washington Square News, the long hours and stress used to alarm some of my friends. They asked me why I was still part of the newspaper, even after I had gotten my first internship as a sophomore. Now that I’ve moved on from my college newspaper to making minimum wage as an intern, I couldn’t help asking everyone I interviewed the same question. 

“I just wanted to tell these stories,” Miranda said. “And I feel like I’ve done that.” 

Like Miranda, I wanted to tell stories about my community, and I also remember how quickly being a student journalist became part of my identity. The windowless, basement office of WSN was the first place that felt familiar in New York City, and I’ll never regret the amount of time I spent working there. I know that the skills I learned at WSN have directly translated to my success as a freelancer. And, like Miranda, I thought that this was the price of an entry into journalism: The door could only be pushed open if you had the time, grit, and the financial security to endure long hours working at your college paper. 

But if participation in journalism continues to be exclusionary from the beginning, the industry will continue to replicate those exclusions further down the line. Only those who are able to “pay their dues” while not getting paid will have experience that makes employers call back.

Omar Rashad, a junior at California Polytechnic San Luis Obispo and the former editor-in-chief of the ECC Union, agrees. “This industry has a way of locking people out with the least amount of privilege,” he said. “If you don’t have a roof over your head, if you don’t have stable family income, if you don’t have support from other people, financially, doing journalism is very difficult.”

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