IDS Thursday, October 24, 2024
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PHOTOS: HOP ON THE HAUNTED TRAIN
IU allowed the Funding Board account to overdraft. Now student organizations are scrambling
By Samantha Camire and Gentry Keener news@idsnews.com
The IU Funding Board is unable to provide student organizations with adequate funding after IU allowed the account to overdraft, president of the board and IU senior Larry McDowell told the Indiana Daily Student. IU Funding Board is an organization run by students that provides money to student organizations on campus for events and general activities, according to its website. Last year, it allocated over $1.2 million to student organizations and supported over 400 events. However, McDowell said this year it will only be able to support about 100 events, providing a maximum $2,000 to each student organization. McDowell said IU Funding Board is a University Supported Organization, and as such its financial accounts are managed by the university. The student leaders of the Funding Board must ask their advisors to reach out to the Office of Finance in order to receive updates on the account. “At the beginning of the spring semester, and three more times throughout the
course of the spring semester, Funding Board leadership requested numbers on what was in our account and what we would be looking at for the duration of last semester, and that information was never given,” McDowell said. Unbeknownst to the students on Funding Board, McDowell said they had given out more money to student organizations than they held in their reserves. The account was overdrafted by $220,000 by the end of the spring semester. When asked why the Funding Board continued giving out money if they were unsure how much they had to give, McDowell explained they closed the application for funding midsemester. He says this was “unprecedented.” But the Board’s policy is to approve all applications as long as they follow the group’s bylaws, so they needed to process the applications they already had and get an update on the amount of money in their account before taking more. “The assumption was that we would not be anywhere near the end of the account because we would have been notified well before then (by the university),” McDowell said.
“I have asked my team to increase the level of communication with the Funding Board moving forward to avoid this situation reoccurring in the future,” Lamar Hylton, the Vice Provost for Student Life, said in a statement provided to the IDS. McDowell said he decided to spend some of the money allocated to the 2024-25 academic year in the spring to pay off the overdraft. Many of the organizations who had received those $220,000 in funds had already hosted their events and were relying on reimbursement from the Funding Board, so he felt it was unfair to withhold those funds. McDowell said the student body needs $1.1 million in funding this year to meet all of their needs. The Funding Board is simply unable to offer that support. “The university is the steward of our money,” McDowell said. “And poor stewardship will get you in these situations every single time.” "The pressure should be on the university” McDowell released a press release Sept. 18 explaining the situation to the student body. He said IU administration was “very
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
By David Tolchinsky
The U.S. lost 2.5 newspapers a week in 2023. The epidemic of vanishing newsrooms was documented in a report from Northwestern University. By year's end, our country will have two-thirds the newspapers it had in 2005. We’ve watched for 20 years what happens when news organizations don’t evolve. And we will not let that happen to IU student media. A year ago, the IDS's deficit was approaching $900,000. IUSTV and WIUX had limited revenue generation capabilities. And there were well-documented pleas from our students for a “comprehensive solution.” So we listened. A committee of faculty, staff, alumni and students (including leaders of the IDS) researched and presented recommendations for a sustainable future for student media. Media School staff reviewed them, incorporated as many as possible and operationalized them. On Oct. 8, we presented our plan to reimagine student media. We had planned to share the plan with student media leaders and faculty first, but when we learned the IDS had obtained a copy and was going to publish a
story, we felt it necessary to announce the plan early so our community could hear it directly from us. It was hard. It will continue to be hard. If it was easy, it would have already been done. This plan is thoughtful and creative. It required difficult decisions. Here’s one: the IDS’s top three expenditures are professional staff salaries, student pay and newsprint. When it came time to choose, we prioritized the people of the IDS. Because it is the people, more than the print, that makes this venerable publication. We acknowledge the loss the IDS community feels for its weekly print edition. "Journalist” is not just a job; it’s an identity. We hear you: Why can’t IU just give student media more money? Actually, that would be a lot easier than what we’re doing. But subsidizing a business model on campus that does not reflect the ecosystem off campus won’t adequately prepare students for the career landscape they’re entering. Remember those vanishing newsrooms? Someone has to do something about those. And our goal is to turn out creative and bold graduates equipped to solve that problem — and many more. You can do this. WE can do this. The Media School will always support student media. David Tolchinsky is dean of The Media School at Indiana University.
he said. “I could go in and stop by and say, ‘Hey can you get me on a schedule?’ And my meeting with them has been canceled four times in a row.” In an emailed statement, Hylton told the IDS, “My two initial meetings with Larry had to be rescheduled due to circumstances beyond my control. My staff and I have shared with Larry directly that we want (to) meet with him. The offer to meet still stands.” But McDowell says students on the Funding Board have been left to figure out
what to do. “It kinda gives me the perspective that it’s like ‘OK, we're not interested in solving this problem. We’re interested in ignoring it and putting it on the students to figure out,’” McDowell said. Less money from the Committee for Fee Review Adding to the problem, the IU Funding Board received less money from the Committee for Fee Review for this academic year, McDowell said. SEE FUNDING, PAGE 4
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
Media must evolve to survive.
It’s our responsibility to teach media students how
JACOB SPUDICH | IDS
angry” that he decided to release a statement at all. “They (IU administration) have the capacity and the ability to resolve this problem,” McDowell said. “The pressure should be on the university at this point in time to reallocate their own money to ensure that the student body is thriving.” McDowell said he has tried to meet with Hylton to discuss possible solutions but all attempts to do so have been unsuccessful. “This is someone that in the past, I could get a meeting with at the drop of a hat,”
Newsrooms don’t ‘vanish.’ They are gutted Editor’s note: This letter is a response to a Letter to the Editor written by Media School Dean David Tolchinsky. As student journalists, we are no strangers to the idea of vanishing newsrooms. New technologies and apps have changed the way businesses advertise. People consume the news in a variety of mediums. These economic pressures are real, but they are not the only way a newspaper dies. Take Northwestern’s 2023 report, which Media School Dean David Tolchinsky cites in his Letter to the Editor on Oct. 21. Corporate consolidation of local news has been a major driver of these “vanishing newsrooms” according to the report, with Gannett eliminating 97 newspapers across the country between 2022 and 2023. Another report confirms the trend — Gannett sloughed off another 126 local papers between 2020 and 2022. In other words, these newspapers aren’t “vanishing” — they’re being killed. The weapons these corporations use will sound familiar — reduced staff, reduced print and such a focus on generating clicks that they lose the trust of the community they originally promised to serve. This was the driving point of the April committee report from students, faculty, staff and alumni, which argues in its first paragraph the university must commit to supporting student media to help fulfill the IU 2030 plan’s focus
on “experiential and careerrelated” education. “For many years, the economic realities of IU’s nationally-recognized student newsrooms have been characterized as issues of profit and deficit,” the report’s second paragraph reads. “This is misguided framing.” The IDS’ history of excellence continues to attract numerous students into The Media School, yet IU is measuring success based on whether the IDS brings in a profit. The Media School is prioritizing financial gains at the expense of the quality of our craft. Still, The Media School finds itself promoting that same craft that has won countless Associated Collegiate Press and Society of Professional Journalists awards. The dean does not lie when it says it incorporated many of the ideas in the April report. But each idea was contingent on university support. In 2005, the IDS had nearly $1 million in reserves. But its expenses at the time — $2 million — were more than double what they are now at around $900,000. Over the past few decades, the IDS has evolved to keep up with new technologies, creating podcasts, videos and a strong social media presence. Despite that, these new platforms are still a financial blow — we cannot currently make as much from Instagram ads as we made in print in 2005. Each financial dip became a reason to cut our expenses. When professional
staff members left or retired, The Media School prohibited us from replacing them. Remaining staff members took on more work. With diminished staff came a reduced ability to seek out new advertisements, so our revenue decreased. We found ourselves in a spiral of falling revenue, which initiated cut after cut, which further reduced our revenue. The Media School’s plan is just more of the same. Media School leaders claim their decision to cut rather than invest will teach us the economic realities of the industry we’re entering. We expect to face a similarly flawed thinking if we end up working for a corporation, but we had hoped that Indiana University, as a public college funded by our tuition dollars and Hoosier taxpayers, would want to be a pioneer in changing this tired approach rather than repeating what has already failed. By refusing to charge mandatory fees for student media, which provides free multi-platform news for the campus and wider community, IU is indicating it believes student media is not worth even a dollar per student per year. Yet, it requires each IU student to pay over $80 a semester to fund the Student Recreational Sports Center, which many of IU's 48,000 students do not use on a daily basis. Beyond just providing the news, the IDS provides students across campus with jobs including marketing, design, photography and web development. IDS
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educates future professionals and gives voice to student organizations and leaders who will learn valuable skills regarding dealing with the press. It’s hard to feel like Media School leaders value what we do when they believe “subsidizing a business model on campus,” in their own words, would not adequately prepare us for a future career in journalism. Unfortunately, cutting the weekly print edition ensures we are not adequately prepared for jobs with some of the largest newspaper employers that do have a print edition, like Gannett, the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal — all places that have IDS alumni working there today. If IU and the Media School do not want to invest in student media like they do in the SRSC, a new $43 million property in D.C., the Kinetic Imagery and Extended Reality Lab or even their $104,929 contract with Mapt Solutions to develop a strategic plan, that’s their decision to make. But they cannot in the same breath pretend they are prioritizing journalism.
Marissa Meador CO-EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Jacob Spudich CO-EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
SOURCE: THE WEATHER CHANNEL GRAPHICS BY: ALAYNA WILKENING
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