Letter from the Editor: Why do we still print?

DANIEL DASSOW Editor-in-Cheif

This job often takes me to journalism classes, where I stand at the front of the room and describe to students what The Daily Beacon can offer them.

Once last year, a student raised her hand to ask a question. She introduced herself as a fifth-year senior in the school of journalism and then said, “Where do you even get copies of the Beacon?”

When students ask this question, I descend into a familiar thought crisis about whether the Beacon should be printing physical papers at all.

Let me back up a few years. When I got to UT, I met Kylie Hubbard, then editor-in-chief of the Beacon, at a welcome week event and told her resolutely that I wasn’t going to work for the paper.

Student media was like improv, choir and theater – something stressful I subjected myself to in high school that I was now releasing myself from in the semi-retirement period they call college. I had served as editor of my high school paper, and my decision to move the paper fully online was unpopular and soured the experience for me. Kylie was nice though, so I said I might write for her. My first article was published a week later.

Here’s what I want to say about the paper edi- tions of the Beacon. I did not pick them up every week during the two years that I was a staff writer, but I can remember so clearly the first time I saw my story on the front page.

I had gone to Dunford Hall to interview a historian of medicine named Susan Lawrence, because I wanted to get her thoughts on what some people were saying could become a pandemic.

I was about the get on the elevator when I saw it. There, sitting low in a rack by the doors was my story, the first feature about COVID-19 published in the Beacon, printed on the front page. When you are a staff writer, you don’t know which stories will make it in the paper and where, so it was a great surprise.

This is why college papers have a period of mourning when they go out of print. Going out of print means losing most of your physical presence on campus and the chance to reach people in a tactile way. It means that all your work becomes a piece of analytic data on a screen, like numbers in a bank account.

So when I’m asked by a students where one can even find a copy of the Beacon and I’m tempted to ask myself why we print, I remember that we print because we are lucky to be able to print.

Many other editors-in-chief of the Beacon have written letters over the last 10 years announcing a reduction in print. I have not had to make any announcement like this in my time as editor, but I do not think the Beacon will always be in print.

The Beacon used to print 10,000 full-sized newspapers every day with the help of a large staff, ample advertising sales and wire services. Now, we print 2,700 copies a week, in a world where ad revenue is low and students get their news online. But the physical papers are very important to me, because they create powerful chances for connection. UT has changed a great deal. Dunford won’t be around much longer and the university is super sizing itself as if to assert that the pandemic couldn’t hold us back. But the papers printed and distributed every week have been a constant. As we publish this special edition on the state of the media, the only conclusion I can come to is that the world is changing rapidly and that the day is coming when the Beacon will print its final edition. And when that happens, there will be a marked absence on campus.