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Arizona State UniversitySTUDENT MEDIA AT-A-GLANCEArtwork by Mike Ritter ©1997 |
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The mission of ASU Student Media is to provide the University with a daily newspaper and other creative publications. The department also strives to offer excellent instruction and an educational environment where students can gain on-the-job training and experience in writing, editing, photography, computer-based production work, publishing and advertising sales.
We have been working on it for more than a century.
The university's first student newspaper, The Normal Echo, debuted on Oct. 18, 1890, as a one-page supplement to what is now the Tempe Daily News Tribune. Resembling a literary magazine more than a newspaper of today, it hoped to "unite more closely the student body and alumni," featuring short stories, human interest articles and short editorials to the students at Tempe Normal School.
A series of name changes for the normal school translated into new names for the publication as well. In 1906 the Echo became the Tempe Normal Student, a four-page tabloid distributed on campus each Friday for five cents per copy. The school became Tempe College in 1925, prompting the newspaper to change its name to the Tempe Collegian. The name was shortened to the Collegian in 1930. Two years later, the college began teaching its first journalism courses, and the paper fell under the umbrella of the new department.
By 1925 the name of the normal school had been changed to Tempe State Teachers College. In 1936, when the newspaper became the Arizona State Press, the school was known as Arizona State Teachers College at Tempe. It became Arizona State College at Tempe in 1945 and Arizona State University in 1958. The newspaper's name was shortened to State Press in the 1960s.
In the mid-1970s, amidst a nationwide movement to make campus dailies independent of academic departments and direct faculty supervision, the State Press gained a hotly contested divorce from the mass communications department. John Schwada, then-president of ASU, placed the paper under the authority of a Board of Student Media. The first board resigned within a month because of a disagreement with the Arizona Board of Regents regarding its role in the newspaper's affairs.
Bruce Itule became the third adviser to the independent State Press in 1985. By then, the paper had added a Monday edition and was a five-day-a-week daily. Itule's job as director of student media was to build a program that included various self-supporting publications that could give students experience in all phases of publishing.
Today, we support eight media:
Student Publications also offers prepress services to the campus. The department is broken up into six units: advertising, production, accounting, editorial, multimedia and the literary magazine. Within these six units, we employ 19 full-time staff, about 80 paid student employees and dozens of student volunteers and free-lancers.
We participate in activities with our peer institutions through organizations such as College Media Advisers. Arizona Newspaper Association and the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. Our strongest involvement is in the Western Association of University Publications Managers, an organization made up of 25 of the largest student publications programs in the country.
If awards and recognitions are a strong sign of how well we are doing, indeed we have achieved much in the 1990s. In 1991 the Gannett Center Journal named the State Press one of the top 15 college newspapers in the country. The newspaper and our other publications also consistently win state and regional awards.
Some examples:
Description: Official campus daily newspaper (M-F), averaging 24 pages per day. The publication includes the weekly State Press Magazine and a bi-annual shopping/student campus guide, The Shopper.
Audience: General ASU community with a focus toward students.
Message: Present important local, national and international news; offer advertising space for local vendors, campus members and national corporations; provide editorial space for campus members to voice opinions; and include daily announcements for campus departments and organizations.
Production process: All photos, stories, art and most ads are produced digitally in-house. Ads are built a day in advance on Macintosh G3s with QuarkXPress, Illustrator, PhotoShop and Freehand. Page layouts are given to the student editor by 8 a.m. each morning. By noon, student reporters and photographers begin to cover stories on campus. At 3 p.m., editors hold a budget meeting to decide how the paper will be designed, what stories take precedence and what problems may occur in coverage. By 5 p.m., editors are designing pages on paper, copy editors are proofreading stories, photographers are scanning prints and editors are submitting the page elements electronically to production along with a paper sketch (dummy) of the page designs. By 7 p.m., the student production staff begins to import page elements (stories, photos, cutlines, headlines, ads) in QuarkXPress. The pages are then sent to the imagesetter digitally for negative output. All four-color separations are done in-house and printed on-screen with the negatives. If the newspaper is under 32 pages and does not have four-color photography or inserts, the negatives are picked up by an InterMountain Color representative at 1 a.m. If the newspaper is larger than 32 pages, has four-color or includes inserts, the negatives are picked up at 11 p.m. The newspaper is ready for circulation by 5:30 a.m. Our circulation staff picks up the newspapers at the printing plant. Newspapers are on campus at all distribution sites by 7:30 a.m. Then the cycle begins again.
Photography: Student employees photograph, develop film and scan photos electronically.
Quantity/time period: We print 20,000 newspapers per day for 29 weeks during fall and spring, and nine weeks in the summer (summer publications are once a week).
Distribution method: We distribute the State Press to 44 on-campus sites and 67 sites off-campus and to outlying dorm areas. We have two student employees who drive the distribution routes at about 6 a.m. every day.
Description: Coupon book, two-color, 20-32 pages, produced five times a year.
Audience: ASU student community.
Message: Offers a low-priced means by which local vendors can reach students with their products.
Production process: Advertising is sold by both student and professional staff. All advertising design is produced by full-time staff on QuarkXPress and printed to negative on an Scitex Dolev Imagesetter.
Quantity/time period: We print 20,000 each issue, five times a year.
Description: National literary and art magazine. 6"x9" perfect-bound, approximately 128 pages; published twice per year.
Audience: National audience of writers and readers of poetry and fiction.
Message: HFR publishes work from well-known and emerging writers and artists, providing its readership with quality literary art.
Production process: Student editorial board selects the fiction, poetry and art. Text is either scanned in or submitted in disk form, converted to MS Word, then dropped onto QuarkXPress pages and run to negative in an Imagesetter 9550 at the State Press. The negatives are submitted to the printer. We receive a blue line for the text and a four-color proof for the cover.
Photography: Usually 8 black & white photos and one color cover image, submitted by national artists and selected by student editorial board.
Quantity/time period: We print 1,050 copies, twice a year. Production for each publication is 12 months.
Cost: Cost to reader: $5 per copy.
Distribution method: Locally distributed in-house to independent bookstores; sold on campus and through subscriptions. National distribution is handled by Ingram Periodicals.
Description: Twice-a-semester newspaper that showcases the best in student in-depth writing.
Audience: ASU community, although the Cronkite School of Journalism also mails the newspaper to editors and educators.
Message: The newspaper provides an opportunity for lengthy stories to be published, along with photography and other visuals, on pages without advertising.
Production process: Stories, photos and art are produced by students. Page layouts are produced by students using QuarkXPress. The newspaper is printed by an off-campus printer and inserted into the State Press.
Photography: As with the stories, all photography is produced by students.
Quantity/time period: 20,000 newspapers are printed to insert into the State Press. If the Bulldog is inserted into a summer newspaper, 10,000 are printed. The newspaper generally is published near the beginning and end of the fall and spring semesters.
(c)1998 Student Media, Arizona State University