A Howard University policy board decided that the print edition of the student newspaper will not be published for the rest of the school year, but the paper will continue publishing online as the staff tries to dig itself out of a financial crisis.
“There’s not enough money that would allow them to print a daily between now and the end of the year,” University spokesperson Ron Harris told Black College Wire late Wednesday, March 26.
Drew Costley, Hilltop editorThe division of student affairs has agreed to pay for a special print graduation issue in May and will pay the salaries of the staff publishing online for the rest of the school year, Harris said.
Last week, the top editor of the Hilltop, Drew Costley, said the paper owed its printer, the Washington Times, $48,000 for past printing bills.
Since news broke about the situation, more than $20,000 has been raised for the paper by various campus departments, faculty, staff and alumni, Harris said. But the board determined it was not enough.
In addition to the overdue printing bills, the ? has had to deal with missing funds and unpaid advertising. In a March 21 interview, Costley said that the business office had not sent out invoices and tearsheets to advertisers for a month and a half during the fall, resulting in $40,000 to $45,000 in lost revenue.
Business manager speaks outBut on March 27, the Hilltop’s business manager, Ashley Marshall, said the lost revenue, which was discussed at the latest policy board meeting, only amounted to about $10,000. Marshall, a junior majoring in legal communications, said a member of the business staff had been logging the invoices but did not physically mail them out to advertisers and was fired in part because of that.
Marshall said the real issue is not the amount of lost revenue.
“We just didn’t get enough revenue altogether,” she said. According to Marshall, fall advertising revenue for the paper has been falling steadily since 2005, the first year the paper went daily. In fall 2005, over $149,000 worth of ads were sold. In fall, 2006 the amount was a little over $122,000. This past fall, only $86,000 worth of ads were sold, she said. These figures show a 42 percent drop in ad revenue in just two years.
Marshall attributes the drop to a nationwide struggle for print publications to secure advertising and inadequate training and time for her and her staff to do ad campaigns. She said she applied for the business manager position in spring 2007 but was not hired.
In mid-August, two weeks before the start of the school year, the business manager who had been hired quit, and Marshall stepped in as an interim business manager before officially being hired in September.
The office was not ready for the start of the school year, she said, explaining that during the summer, the business manager is paid to stay and collect revenue from the previous school year and create ad campaigns for the upcoming year, but none of that got done for this year, she said.
Staff needs more training, support“The real issue with the Hilltop is that there’s not enough support for the financial matters of the Hilltop. When the Hilltop went daily, knowing that it was going to be a lot more fiscally strenuous on the paper, there should have been more advisers put on the board for financial purposes,” Marshall said.
Harris said there are 17 members on the policy board, including students, faculty and staff.
Recently, Costley said in January, $20,000 was missing from the paper’s account and no one seemed to know where it had gone. On March 26, Harris said that as the result of an “accounting error,” some money had been missing from the paper’s account, but he did not know when or how much.
“Some money was inadvertently transferred to a different account and as soon as that mistake was discovered that money was transferred back,” he said.
Marshall said the error related to the payroll system and they knew where the money was.
For now, Harris said the university has created a subcommittee within the policy board to determine what systemic issues contributed to the current financial crisis and how to avoid a similar situation in the future.
“The ideal solution is for the Hilltop to be printing daily as it was before,” Harris said.