Crib Sheet: Alternative Publications

Campus Progress’ crash course in starting, strengthening and promoting your progressive publication.

By Andrew Garib, Cornell University
Monday October 31, 2005

Progressive students around the country have been eager to receive support from Campus Progress in setting up or strengthening their progressive campus publications. In addition to providing financial support, policy briefings for student reporters, trainings and conferences, Campus Progress has created a quick primer on the bare bones of setting up a new publication or improving upon your existing beloved progressive rag.

If you are starting a new publication from scratch, at this point, you should have a small core of staffers – there should be at least two others who share your vision for a student publication. This article should help you to form a consensus about how to make your publication as effective and influential as possible on campus.

If you work on an existing publication, this primer should help to guide your routine conversations each year about the nature, mission and course of your publication. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to Spencer Roane in 1821, “Let the eye of vigilance never be closed.” Campus politics are dynamic and your publications should reflect this energy.

Who? – Why? – What/When? – Where/How?

WHO?

The first thing to consider is your audience: Who is your target audience? What are the interests of your audience? What does your audience read? If you’re an established activist on campus, you’ll have a good idea. If you’re new to campus activism and political writing, this is something you’re going to have to figure out through your activist friends, through reading on-campus publications and gauging their relative popularities, and through getting involved yourself. You should be able to judge how strong the Left and Right and their various factions are by the number and sizes of political groups on campus (usually you can find this information online; if not, visit your Student Activities office or equivalent), and the relative strengths of the Democratic, Republican, and other parties’ college chapters.

Think about the political demographics of your school. Is it a highly liberal, activist school? Is there a very traditionally conservative student body and/or administration, with little political discourse? Are you on a campus with a majority of students who would identify as liberal, but who are generally apathetic when it comes to getting involved? Does your campus have a strong and vocal new right-wing contingent, including libertarians and neoconservatives who are eager to get their word out?

Think about the existing publications on campus – including yours if it has already published. Which are vocal and effective at reaching and broadening their audiences? Which are influential in campus discourse, in that they are mentioned often in other publications and in casual conversations, and are well-represented at debates and other college events? You can learn a lot from the existing spread of campus publications – what works and what doesn’t in terms of content, promotions, staffing and publication websites on your campus.

Consider the organizations and issue campaigns you’ve seen on your campus. Consider the issues you think are important to your campus, but get little or no coverage in existing media. What about important issues in the larger community? How can you provide that missing voice?

The key here is to find a niche for your college publication (again, existing or brand new) where your news articles, opinion pieces and other content take a unique angle, setting you apart from other media on campus. Surely the existing spread of publications isn’t covering certain issues that are important to progressive students either adequately or at all. Perhaps there is coverage, but an important progressive angle is being left out of the discussion. Maybe certain issues – or even campus discourse overall – are being dominated by conservatives, with little or no reply from the Left. Despite the fact that most colleges are painted as liberal bastions, a progressive perspective is often poorly represented in the daily papers and quashed by well-funded conservative publications. What you’re setting out to do is uncover the truth in stories presented from conservative points of view.

Essentially, the ‘who’ aspect of building a publication, whether from scratch or from a solid (or not so solid) base passed down from editorial staffs of yore, is the first step in marketing your publication. You must ask yourself, your fellow staffers, and your base of readers (by literally asking them!) what news coverage and opinions are missing on campus. With that information, you need to consider how to build an effective publication and staff that will meet those needs and reflect the quality of production and intellect that will draw readers and quality contributors.

WHY?

Given the questions you’ve asked yourself above, you need to formulate the character of your publication for the coming year. Is this a publication that will rally the troops of an active Left, counter the vocal Right, or stir interest among apathetic liberals and moderates? Or perhaps your focus will be on hard-hitting investigative reporting on issues that are otherwise overlooked by campus media. Or maybe your publication will want to provide a forum for a variety of alternative perspectives, including a culture or arts section. Is your paper geared towards a cluster of goals like these? Even if your goals are numerous, you’ll be better off if they are clearly defined.

Your organization’s public mission statement will be an explicit version of the goal you set out for your publication. It may be a very specific goal, like “To counter the Right on this campus…”, or something more general, like the Dartmouth Free Press’ goal of “providing a forum for liberal, progressive and alternative voices on campus.” Your mission statement should be one to three sentences, but it certainly should not be the only way your audience understands your publication’s goals. Your paper’s tone, register, choice of coverage, variety of articles and layout should make it absolutely clear to your readers what you have set out to do on campus. Your publication is not a paper in a bubble – it is a set of ideas and actions with serious consequences in the context of political activism and discourse on your campus. In many ways, your publication is like any other student political organization: you have specific goals with respect to the political climate on campus, and a specific plan to achieve them.

Being too ambitious or too narrow in your perspective can make things more difficult. A publication solely focused on animal rights will have difficulty maintaining a solid base of readers and writers on campus. A publication with a scope resembling that of The New York Times might have a tough time with a staff comprised of unpaid full-time students. It’s better to focus on a niche that is small and manageable for your staff, but is also broad enough to hold an audience.

It’s important for existing and new papers alike to remember that a publication’s goals change: A campus publication that becomes a major player in campus political discourse, for example, will have different goals than a new publication trying to make its mark. The political conditions on campus may change too, and you may have to address these changes.

It’s also important to remind your staffers what the goals of your publication are. The angles your writers take in opinion and news pieces should reflect your publication’s goals generally. Of course, if your goal is “to scrutinize local, state, national and international policymaking through a brutally honest and sometimes irreverent voice” like The Colonel (a satirical paper at the University of Kentucky), it would make little sense to publish a humorless review on a local production of A Raisin In The Sun. More subtly, a local news-oriented publication like Vanderbilt’s Orbis would not be wise to publish a 3,000-word essay journalism piece, even if it is on women of color in the Greek system at Vandy.

WHAT & WHEN?

Your product should, of course, reflect your publication’s character, goals, and audience. Most publications pick bland names so that potential readers don’t recoil at the first sign of outlandishness, but other publications would rather pick more irreverent monikers, such as Ithaca College’s Buzzsaw Haircut. Whatever you choose, your name should at least make sense with the demographics you’ve identified on campus – that is, the people you want reading your publication. Don’t call your publication Worker’s Revolutionary Journal on a campus that won’t bother to pick it up but to make fun of it. (Now, if you’re even thinking of giving your paper that title, you may have other issues to deal with…)

Think about in which format you would like your publication. Would your paper be better as a tabloid (11” x 17”) on newsprint, like some publications that emphasize news and current affairs in shorter articles, or as a magazine with more cultural content, more long in-depth essay pieces, and interesting cover art? Maybe your publication is best suited for the online world – maybe as a blog, like the online version of The Princeton Progressive Nation.

Given your goals for the publication, think about what tone and style of writing you’ll take. Your writers should conform to some standard of style for your publication (especially for news pieces). Closely related is the tone of the publication, the voice with and perspective from which one writes. Will you write in a strong critical tone, like an opinion forum for oppositionist firebrands or muckrakers? Is it heavily journalistic, with an emphasis on telling stories through news and essay features? Is it satirical? Academic? A mix? What kind of mix? It is overly ambitious and perhaps confusing to readers to mix too many tones and styles in one publication.

The tone and style of a publication should be differentiated from the mix of news, opinion and features that you’ll employ to reflect them. Some publications emphasize news reporting, including in-depth reporting and more superficial coverage of local and campus. Nearly all publications will involve some sort of opinion section, whether it’s standard 750-word op-eds, regular columns, or longer articles such as essays.

All publications should include features – that is, non-standard pieces of varying length that are partially designed to draw in readers. They may focus on humor, special reports, guides to activism or orientation, event calendars – you name it. Cornell’s Turn Left has a regular feature based on David Letterman’s Top Ten lists. The good people at the Dartmouth Free Press produce a feature called Commonshare, summarizing wacky news from around the world in two or three witty paragraphs. Comics are also common features pieces.

An important consideration is how frequently your publication will be published. Magazines that focus on longer, in-depth content are usually better off as monthlies, whereas current events-oriented publications usually come out more frequently in order to stay on top of the news. Of course, the abilities of your staff (staffers only have so much time, and you only have so many staffers) will inform how ambitious you can be when it comes to frequency. But do consider that the more frequently your publication is out on newsstands, the more it’s on the mind of students on campus.

WHERE & HOW?

Never forget that your campus publication is as much a student organization as the next, with specific goals and a plan to succeed. That means you’re going to need to build a staff in order to see your vision through. You’ll also need to find funding, and promote your publication.

Promotions

Promotions entails getting people to know your publication in order to attract new readers, new writers, and a higher profile on campus. Simple postering, tabling and flyering are absolutely fundamental to your promotional effort. Without them, you have almost nothing. They’ll reach the broadest audience and attract the most readers. Chalking is a good medium as well. Be sure to make your message concise and clear, include eye-catching word art and/or graphics, and have pertinent contact or meeting info clearly presented.

Having members representing your publication participate in or organize events such as debates, orientation fairs, or speaking events will certainly help increase the visibility of your group on campus. In a way, these events are as important to the visibility of your organization as the publication itself. Student or faculty debates, speakers, community service, town hall meetings, game tournaments, bake sales – the only factor limiting the event possibilities is your imagination. Yale’s Hippolytic drew an enormous crowd when its staff screened an independent documentary, and had the director participate in a Q & A session afterwards. Such popular events are bound to increase the popularity of your publication. Organizing or participating in events that include students of different political views, like debates, certainly increase your relevance and visibility among campus conservatives.

Remember to watch out for your university/college’s regulations regarding chalking, postering, and holding events. Sometimes there are restrictions to where and when you can post or chalk, and often universities and colleges require that you register your event and/or book the room or space you’ll be using prior to the event.

The important point to remember in promotions is that it must be relentless. The name of your campus paper should be on the minds and tongues of fellow students. If not, you’re going to have a hard time influencing the hearts and minds of your peers. Creating and maintaining a buzz on campus about your last debate, promotional event, web posting or controversial article is the currency of student independent publication success.

Websites have become absolute necessities for political publications. Websites can multiply your readership, and provide access to archives and to great content that you weren’t able to print. Most importantly, a website’s URL (or domain name, such as The Madison Observer’s www.madisonobserver.org) is a quick catch-all promotional hub which includes contact information, staff listings, and upcoming events. Be sure to include the URL on all your promotional materials and on your paper itself. And beware of cybersquatting! It might be smart to register several similar domain names (.org, .net, .com) to avoid this form of online vandalism.

Your publication itself is a source of its own promotion. Rich, colorful cover pages with large photos, graphics, and word art will get the most attention. (Remember that photos pulled from the Internet must be printed only under the conditions of fair use, and should be credited to the original photographers, or, failing that, to websites.) Distributing your publication in high-traffic areas and popular areas for relaxation on campus, in addition to the boxes and displays your school sets out for indy publications, will ensure that students will read it. You may think about creating back-page posters, or making your front page worthy of posting on bulletin boards across campus.

Staffing and Recruitment

All of your promotional efforts should emphasize, at least in part, recruitment. Like promotions, recruitment is a 24/7 job that doesn’t end at orientation. Many, if not most of your promotional campaigns will be entirely geared towards recruitment. The key is to use your entire promotions apparatus in order to remind students that they’re welcome to join your weekly meetings, write for your publication, or even join your core staff. Be sure to include your meeting times and location on all your flyers or quarter cards. Don’t be afraid to list the positions which you have a most dire need to fill.

Within your own publication, make sure you include house advertisements, ads put out by your staff as part of your recruiting project. Include pertinent contact information and meeting times. Like all of your promotions materials, make them as irreverent or as bland as you’d like – whatever works, go with it. It’s also a good idea to get your publication’s name into your school’s orientation material. Throwing an orientation event will do the trick, but there may be other ways. It’s best to do the research well ahead of time.

There are other ways to get more people involved. Ask sympathetic professors, especially in the Political Science, Economics, English, Journalism, and other salient departments, to announce your first meeting at the beginning of class. Ask staffers to announce meetings and other events just before class starts as students are getting seated.

Don’t hesitate to ask faculty, staff, and non-college community members to get involved. They can be great assets, and hey, they’re part of your community, too! In that vein, you might want to do some recruitment in the community surrounding your college.

The most important community you need to tap into is the on-campus progressive community. You should begin to create or to reinforce relationships between your publication and other liberal-progressive organizations on campus. Let these groups know that you welcome and encourage their contributing articles based on their events, activities, and issues. It’s free promotion for them, and solid, community-based content for your publication. Try and gain contacts in key progressive organizations (your progressive student union, environmental groups, women’s rights groups, the Democrats, LGBT groups) so that they may be the mouthpiece for your publication at these organizations’ meetings.

All your recruitment materials are a lead to get potential staffers to come to your meetings. You might as well not invite them if your meetings drive recruits away. Nearly every general body (“G-body”) meeting you’ll have will really be a recruitment event, focused on keeping members’ interest in your organization through fun activities, announcements for great events, and delegation of responsibilities so that everyone has a stake in the success of your publication. Perhaps your “all business” meetings should be reserved for executive meeting time rather than G-body meeting time. Boring your meeting attendees to death will wreak havoc on your retention of staffers.

Staffing your organization is a tad more complicated, especially if you’re a new organization. A fully-staffed print publication can have as many as 13 executive staffers. On the editorial side, the managing editor is the editor in chief’s right hand person, the opinion, news and features editors are in charge of their respective departments, a layout editor/artist and copy editors are essential for print publications (but not web publications), and artists and cartoonists are often integral to your staff. On the business side, your production manager should handle all finance and logistical issues (including printing), a webmaster and a promotions chair are essential, and having an outreach chair is a great asset.

A web editor (someone who manages online content) and a news editor dedicated to local coverage (or perhaps national and international coverage) can be invaluable as well. The editor in chief, of course, oversees all operations of the publication, focusing on content and production. She or he’s got the last say on just about everything, depending on how you structure your staff.

Don’t have 13 people to draw from? Don’t panic – most successful student organizations can barely scratch together five committed executives. A skeleton crew consisting of an editor in chief, a production manager, a layout artist and a web designer are usually enough to get your publication off the ground for the semester; but of course, if you have higher ambitions than simply “getting off the ground,” you’ll have to ratchet up your recruitment efforts. The more good people you have, the more you can do.

Identifying leaders is crucial to building a staff. Keep an eye out for students who show up to meetings regularly, who keep in e-mail contact with executives, who offer help frequently and write often, and those who have lots of suggestions for improvement. Those who show initiative and ability are the ones to whom you want to give responsibility and encourage to run for executive positions.

Your thoughts about recruitment and staffing need to be long term. An editor in chief should always have a second in command who is the visible heir to the publication throne. While it may not always work out that this person becomes EiC (i.e., you may elect your executives) the important point to take away is that there should always be an elite selection of executives (perhaps one or two) who the organization trusts to lead.

In the short term, one of your most acute staffing needs is your layout artist. Layout is a difficult and time-consuming job that should be given to a dedicated staffer. Finding a layout artist (or editor, if she or he prefers that title) should be one of your first priorities. Tap into your college’s journalism, art, or graphic design departments to catch the most capable layout artist. Even if your candidate has little experience in desktop publishing, the software most students use (Quark XPress, Adobe Pagemaker and InDesign) is simple enough to pick up in only a few days.

Raising Money

Web publications are much less finance-intensive than print publications, for obvious reasons. But all kinds of independent publications need to raise money one way or another, at least for web services such as hosting, domain name registration, and domain name forwarding, as well as promotions and events costs like posters, flyers, chalk, honoraria for speakers, room reservation fees, etc.

The first place to look for funding is at your student government office. While there are some unfortunate schools that forbid funding to “political” organizations and their kin, most colleges will shell out good money for publications registered as student organizations. Make sure by mid-August you know the procedures for applying and the various conditions for accepting student government funds. Sometimes, even college departments or other academic centers at your college may offer some funding, depending on the nature of your publication’s content. You might as well try some out.

For many publications, the most important source of funding is in advertising revenues. Create a standard letter for businesses that you’d like to advertise. Personalize the letters and deliver them in person; follow up with a phone call or another visit. Often you can start with businesses that are clearly friendly to your cause (a fair trade goods joint, for example), but branch out. You never know who’ll catch on. Make sure you have a rate card (a piece of literature listing prices for different sizes and configurations of ads) available to all potential advertisers. Be sure to keep a copy online, and, of course, include the contact information of your production or finance department.

Fundraising is always a good source of income on a college campus, especially when you can coordinate the fundraising campaign with a special event your publication is holding on campus. Sell paraphernalia like t-shirts, bumper stickers, baked goods, dates with attractive progressives – whatever you think will generate sales. Two bad things to sell for cash: controlled substances and your publication. Keep your paper free, and your audience will be as wide as possible. Charge money, and hardly anyone will pick it up. It might also be a good idea to ask for donations from your alumni, professors, or even students. If you are able to register your publication as a non-profit organization, those donations may be tax-deductible.

There are organizations outside the little world of your college and its surrounding community which might be interested in providing funding for your publication. Ohio State University’s new publication, The Pragmatist, recently received a grant from MTVu, MTV’s college-oriented brand. Although it’s not usually a problem, beware of potential funders who demand too much editorial control in exchange for money.

Accounting and bank accounts are difficult to manage without help from your school or student government. Business accounts aren’t something the average independent student publication can afford. The most important thing is to keep track of all money, and have a trustworthy person dedicated to caring for your publication’s finances.

Printing

Without a doubt, a good printing company can be found in your community. Sometimes, your local paper (for example, The Ithaca Journal) will have a commercial printing department. Standalone printing houses are usually not hard to find. If you’re lucky, your college may have its own printer accessible to student organizations. Regardless, if you know what’s good for you, photocopying an 8.5” x 11” publication won’t be on your agenda.

Print runs will vary in size depending on the size of your school and potential readership. For most schools, printing around 2000 or 3000 copies will be enough. In that case, printing will usually cost around $500.

Be sure to get quotes for printing different sizes and formats (tabloid, magazine, 12 pages, 20 pages) before scheduling a printing. Schedule printing sessions with your printer weeks ahead of time. Sometimes you can schedule all your printing for the coming months. That’ll give you and your staff solid deadlines to work with.

Finally, talk to your printer about the file format they would like each issue to be delivered in. Today, all publishing is done through software like Adobe InDesign, and your printer will work off of a computer file, such as a .PDF, in order to print. You’ll need to discuss with your staff whether or not you’ll buy your own desktop publishing software (usually several hundred dollars) or use the software installed in your college library’s computers.

WHY SHOULD I DO ALL THIS?

Your focus cannot simply be to publish content. The printed word can’t take care of itself. Successful publications require a well-organized staff driven by an organizational culture focused on quality work and conscientious advocacy and activism. You’re not just putting out a product: you’re building an institution, an organization with stability, influence and reputation.

Your publication, like all other student groups on your campus, is an organization with a goal whose fruition requires medium- and long-term strategy and planning and knowledge of the political and administrative conditions on campus. What’s more, student publications have difficult staff turnovers given the short amount of time students remain on campus. A well-oiled campus institution will have a much easier time maintaining staff levels and quality over the years.

The tips above will help you not only publish a quality product, but build an institution that can outlast conservative offerings and shame them into boosting their own quality. Your campus won’t be wrong to thank you for your efforts in the long run.

Check out our network of progressive publications. The experienced student journalists at Orbis, the Madison Observer, Buzzsaw Haircut, Boiling Point, Turn Left and The Colonel provide great examples of student independent publications and their websites.