Do you remember your college newspaper? Where its pages often filled with thought provoking articles by serious student journalists and in-depth analysis pieces on community goings-on or cultural values, social standards, sexual mores, etc?

Or were the pages of your college newspaper (or other college papers you’ve seen) filled with the banal, the bestial, and the belligerent rantings of students training for careers in punditry rather than provocative, remarkable careers?

The Daily Collegian at Penn State University is published by a non-profit parent corporation, Collegian, Inc. The company’s annual costs are approximately $1.5 million, which includes use of a large physical plant, printing press, full-time staff of about 12, paper and ink costs, and student stipends.

There is a serious void in terms of non-profit and philanthropic aid on state and national levels for the development of the next generation of compelling, technologically advanced and thoughtful campus news media.

Proposal
New or existing philanthropies or business ventures should target major campuses across the nation and/or those campuses which represent thought leaders amongst their higher education peers and invest annually to establish independent weekly print newspapers with a web and multimedia component updated daily.

Using only minimal wire content to satisfy national news coverage, these media groups would focus on the emerging trend of so-called hyperlocal journalism by recruiting local professors, thinkers, workers, farmers, businessmen, students etc. in each community to generate original, compelling content worth saving and worth talking about in addition to student news reporting.

Too few newspapers and student-led media sources effectively engage in serious coverage or debate on issues relevant to their community beyond basic reporting of raw information. By empowering thoughtful leaders in their respective towns and communities, these 21st century college news sources could spur a high-impact, deep-thought publication.

This philanthropy funded network, which would cost between $500,000 to $1 million annually per school, could aggregate the content from its collegiate publications, offering that content for sale for reprint, as well as through the Amazon Kindle, similar e-book readers, and smartphones.

This would represent enough cash to rent space, furnish equipment, provide for full time and stipend-based professional and student staff, and fund the cost of high-quality journalism.

By starting with a core group of 6, 12 or 18 campuses and ultimately expanding to a presence in each state, this project would uniquely fill the void in thoughtful college-level news and media by empowering “niche” voices and thinkers on big issues to broadcast messages through a commonly available print product and heavily promoted web resource.

Thus, the “narrowcast” nature of blogging can be avoided, and the aspect of the newspaper as community-uniter can be preserved for new generations, helping maintain that “social glue” necessary to maintain a healthy, diverse population.

Students deserve to be exposed to thoughtfulness in their college newspapers, and this is one way in which those interested in preserving the values of quality journalism and analysis could attempt to transmit those values to a new generation.