For the staff of The Racquet Press, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s student newspaper, the surprise firing of former Chancellor Joe Gow in December for a pornographic OnlyFans channel put a pause on winter break and marked a return to reporting.
The paper’s management group chat was “blowing up” when staffers heard about the news through a tip off, Executive Editor Isabel Piarulli said. Piarulli was at a Chicago restaurant when the news dropped.
“I was at dinner, on my phone editing [a writer’s] article and then taking interviews with Fox and NBC,” Piarulli told The Daily Cardinal.
The resulting stories constituted a pivotal moment in The Racquet Press’ work over the last year and another instance when student journalists across the UW System brought new perspectives to major news events, like protests around the Israel-Hamas war or university budget cuts.
“If something big is going on — if neo-Nazis are on campus — how do you highlight what's going on?” Parker Olsen, managing editor of UW-Whitewater’s Royal Purple, told the Cardinal. “[How do you] make sure people understand what the campus is doing to react to that?”
Student newspapers have the job of contextualizing campus events for fellow students and community members, Maddie Kasper, editor-in-chief of UW-Eau Claire’s The Spectator, said. And because many student reporters live on campus, their immersion in university life “leads to better coverage of what's actually happening on that campus,” she noted.
Many balance multiple jobs and packed course loads while facing chronic staffing shortages. But across the UW System, student journalists spoke highly of where their work could take a struggling journalism industry in the future.
“At the end of the day, we're 20 and we're trying to basically take on what feels like the entire world,” Anya Kelley, editor-in-chief of UW-Oshkosh’s The Advance-Titan, said. “Student media is pioneering the next big thing for journalism. You can't really quantify how important it is.”
Tough stories over past year
Student journalists have drawn high acclaim in 2024: the Pulitzer Prize Board, the organization which bestows the highest honors in journalism, recognized “the tireless efforts of student journalists” in May for their coverage of campus protests surrounding Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
Lexi Janzer and Jack Schindler Van Hoof, assistant editor and editor of UW-River Falls' Student Voice, covered a string of difficult stories in the fall semester: four student suicides, which they reported on while grappling with the death of their faculty advisor, Andris Straumanis, in September.
“It was a very, very difficult story to write because of the emotional weight that's obviously going to be a part of a situation like this,” Van Hoof said.
Emotionally charged situations came up for other reporters as well. Royal Purple Editor-in-Chief Dauntae Green was relaxing in his dorm when his mom texted him to ask if he was OK — she had heard news neo-Nazis had arrived on campus and projected a swastika on an academic building.
Green and Olsen got to work. Royal Purple reporters kept up with responses to the neo-Nazis: after an initial story, they continued with follow-up coverage on a campus town hall in the coming days.
Dauntae Green (left) and Parker Olsen (right), editor-in-chief and managing editor of UW-Whitewater's Royal Purple, photographed Feb. 28.
For Kelley, Kelly Hueckman, Josh Lehner and Jacob Link — editor-in-chief, managing editor, news editor and assistant news editor of UW-Oshkosh’s The Advance-Titan — the 2023-24 year of coverage meant staying motivated and fair, even as professors and fellow students expressed hopelessness due to severe university budget cuts.
“It's really hard to come with an objective point of view when the university is burning around you,” Lehner said. “You don't want to be happy about that, but at the same time you are required to if you're writing for news.”
Kelley said the institution’s cuts made it the “golden child” for UW System school financial troubles. That’s been good for impactful coverage — Hueckman noted that the paper followed the UW-Oshkosh Fond du Lac campus closure from “start to end” — but tough for morale. Friendships inside and outside the newsroom kept The Advance-Titan’s staff motivated.
“We feel closer together and know that each one of us is going to finish our story,” Link said. “It could be eight in the morning or four, but we're still gonna put out something.”
Staffing issues provide challenges, but revivals are possible
Preparing for a years-in-the-making shift back to print hung over the staff of UW-La Crosse’s The Racquet Press when the Cardinal spoke to them in February.
“We are, like, jumping for joy over here,” Easton Moberg, The Racquet Press’ multimedia editor, said. The Racquet Press last printed in 2015.
Jenasea Hameister, The Racquet Press’ managing editor, grabbed other print issue publications for layout inspiration. She and the rest of The Racquet Press’ staff lay out pages as they have done all the other work of their newspaper: without a formal education in journalism. UW-La Crosse doesn’t have a journalism major, something Hameister said the three editors take into consideration when working with The Racquet Press’ eight writers.
“Our staff has no experience and reporting other than at The Racquet Press,” Hameister said. “We have to be a little bit careful, and that's typically why the editors will take on the role of writing about more contentious issues.”
Balancing life, work and reporting expectations is another hurdle, The Racquet Press’ Piarulli said. During the Gow controversy, she wondered how she’d ask editors usually paid for their work to stop their holiday or Christmas vacation to do unpaid reporting, especially those who also work jobs outside the newspaper.
“I think all of the editing team works at least one other job,” Moberg said. “I put journalism first maybe more than I should sometimes.”
Burnout is a concern for The Advance-Titan, whose editors also write a majority of the stories in the paper due to a lack of staff writers, Hueckman said.
“Cranking out four stories a week [is difficult] when they're also taking 16 credits and they're working almost full time at a job,” Hueckman said.
UW-Milwaukee’s UWM Post, like many of the papers the Cardinal spoke with, continually worked to overcome staffing hurdles, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic started.
“It's been hard to kind of get people to or get our writers to step into [news coverage],” Anna Gipple, editor-in-chief of the UWM Post, said. “I think that changed a lot after the pandemic.”
The paper maintains steady interest in its arts and culture coverage, but doing the same for news has taken continual guidance. Haley Wichman, the UWM Post’s managing editor, said the paper has been making a strong effort, as such, to find “good stories that are interesting to pitch to [writers].”
And experience isn’t guaranteed with newcomers.
“Everyone comes in with almost zero knowledge with this paper,” said Natalie Downie, editor-in-chief of UW-Platteville’s Exponent. “We teach them as best as we can throughout the semester.”
Student interest has been a boon for The Fourth Estate, a UW-Green Bay student newspaper experiencing a “revival” period, according to faculty advisor and UW-Green Bay communications professor Joseph Yoo. The paper currently takes the form of a repeatable three-credit course, though its organizers hope to gain financial independence in the future.
The learned experience of Joshua Buntin and Lauren Knisbeck, two students who had been with the paper in the spring semester, led them to take up the management role. With a rapidly growing staff, the editors had time to focus on defining the paper’s identity.
The Fourth Estate currently focuses on longform magazine-style pieces, particularly investigations or campus profiles that go more in-depth than what many of UW-Green Bay’s journalism classes offer, Knisbeck said. In-depth articles have made writers focus more on the pitching process and finding stories that could fill out a longer investigation, she said.
Buntin and Knisbeck highlighted a story The Fourth Estate wrote about a revived UW-Green Bay student radio station as one of their favorites.
“I thought it was really interesting, especially because with The Fourth Estate work, we're another revival on campus,” Knisbeck said. “It’s like, ‘okay, what's going on with the media revival, and what's the history here?’”
Student journalists shine and fill coverage gaps
As local news outlets decline in prevalence, many student newspapers have come in to fill the void. Some publications have invested directly in local papers, while others provide coverage that serves their broader communities.
Many student journalists the Cardinal spoke with said informing their local community is a key goal of their publication. Drew Kerner, the editor-in-chief of UW-Superior’s the Promethean, noted that UW-Superior, at 3,000 undergraduates, is the smallest UW System school. The Promethean helps fill coverage gaps in a northern media environment dominated by Minnesota outlets, he said.
“A mile away from our campus is this big city — well, big in quotes — Duluth,” Kerner said. “Superior, they only have a singular newspaper that's run, owned and operated out of Duluth, not even Superior.”
Still, Kerner said traveling to off-campus stories can be tough for students with busy schedules and coursework to do: “Our little problem that we face at the moment is the little challenge of getting more out into the community.”
UW-Platteville’s Exponent mails out copies of its paper throughout Platteville and Wisconsin. Downie said she has received emails with compliments on less-covered stories.
“I’ve gotten emails from the City of Platteville appreciating our stories on one of our buildings being torn down, because nobody else talked about it,” Downie said. “Those are topics that maybe not everyone gets to see in their local newspaper, those more niche stories that would apply more to the university than just city news.”
More than 220 miles northwest in River Falls, Schindler Van Hoof and Janzer said bridging connections between students, administrators and the River Falls community is a goal of the Student Voice.
“I think it's important with the news deserts going on,” Janzer said, noting that the River Falls Journal consolidated with two other local papers in 2019. “We're providing that information and that news to the River Falls community.”
Student journalists skeptical but hopeful for the future of student journalism
There are persistent challenges in reporting: numerous publications said getting student sources to talk to them was an issue — “like pulling teeth,” Hueckman, The Advance-Titan managing editor, said — and bridging ideological divides can be tough. Both The Fourth Estate and The Racquet Press outlined issues contacting conservative sources due to a lack of communication or closures from their school’s College Republicans chapters.
Though many of the journalists said their university administrators have been approachable about facilitating interviews or media access, that wasn’t universally the case.
Kelley made headlines for an op-ed she wrote criticizing a lack of media access to UW-Oshkosh’s chancellor, Andrew Leavitt, since the school’s recent budget struggles. A UW-Oshkosh spokesperson told the Oshkosh Northwestern the school “disagrees” with the editorial’s depiction of Leavitt’s communication.
During her interview with the Cardinal, which occurred prior to the publication of her op-ed, Kelley said being student reporters often makes interactions with university administrators tougher.
“There's this idea that since we're student media, student reporters, [university administrators] can kind of just do whatever they want, and we aren't going to try to stand up for ourselves,” Kelley said.
But numerous journalists said the community they found keeps them pushing through frustration with sources. Many said their experiences with writing have them planning on pursuing future careers in journalism, even if the industry’s outlook remains uncertain.
“I know my experience that I've been getting in journalism is going to be beneficial moving forward,” Kerner, the Promethean editor-in-chief, said. “I'm just overall hoping to just keep telling stories.”
And a number of student journalists emphasized this real-world experience has educated them about new people, communities and ideas. Olsen, Royal Purple’s managing editor, said student journalism “raises the next generation of professional journalists.”
“It is real experience,” Olsen said. “It's not like sitting in Dr. Cases’ class with a sheet saying, ‘something happened in Podunk and you gotta write about this car crash.’ It's real.”
Editor’s Note: Beran is a former staff writer for The Spectator and The Advance-Titan. Representatives for UW-Stevens Point’s The Pointer and UW-Stout’s Stoutonia were not immediately available for comment. UW-Parkside’s The Ranger News is out of publication at this time. Interviews spanned from February to April, so some positions may have changed by the time of publication.
Liam Beran is the former campus news editor for The Daily Cardinal and a third-year English major. He has written in-depth on higher-education issues and covered state news. He is a now a summer LGBTQ+ news fellow with The Nation. Follow him on Twitter at @liampberan.
