For close to three decades, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was the only university in the nation with two independent daily student newspapers. Although campus papers have reduced their print production, they just got new company on campus.
Students founded The Badger Herald in 1969 in response to what they called “a monopoly” on student media and left-leaning coverage regarding the Vietnam War in The Daily Cardinal. Last week, conservative students launched The Madison Federalist to fill a “conservative student journalism” void.
In recent years, print journalism has shifted into the digital era, and a loss of revenue in the journalism industry has led to major layoffs and the collapse of local news ecosystems.
Both major campus publications, The Daily Cardinal and the Herald have shifted from daily print production a decade ago to biweekly and monthly respectively, while publishing daily news coverage online.
Other campus student media organizations including WSUM student radio and magazines, The Black Voice and Moda have continued despite downsizing in the professional journalism industry.
Former Cardinal Managing Editor and Politico California reporter Tyler Katzenberger called the shrinking journalism industry scary, but said “student journalism has done a good job of weathering the storm.”
“The obvious reason why is because student journalists cost a lot less to employ, or sometimes nothing, compared to regular journalists,” said Katzenberger. “The budgets are a lot thinner.”
Can UW sustain two student papers?
Kathleen Bartzen Culver, professor and director of the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, told the Cardinal people often ask her why UW-Madison has two competing student newspapers. Culver attributed it to UW-Madison’s “engaged student body.”
“People want to consume as much media as they can. I think that that's why Wisconsin had these two competing papers, and no other campus in the country did,” Culver said.
Culver said the Cardinal and Herald may be competitors in news reporting and view themselves as competition from an advertising standpoint, but that the advertising market has changed considerably.
“It used to be that everybody heading into history class would pick up a Herald and a Cardinal, and the advertisers could count on getting that message out to that audience,” Culver said. “Now these outlets are in competition with a completely different media environment than they used to be.”
Culver said advertising revenue for the Cardinal or Herald is now in competition with “TikTok, YouTube and cat videos” and the university itself for sponsorships in athletics and now the “long term financial viability” of the papers looks more precarious.
“Both of those two competing organizations have very strong identities, and I hope they have a path to a solid fiscal future,” Culver said.
Katzenberger said people have a “fantasy” idea that the Cardinal and Herald should “sing Kumbaya and join into one paper.” And although Katzenberger said it would be a solid paper, “those people miss the whole point of having two daily student newspapers.”
“The Daily Cardinal and Badger Herald are not one-for-one in their coverage — they don't all cover the same exact stories,” Katzenberger said.
Katzenberger said the Cardinal “does an excellent job of doing campus daily coverage of holding elected officials and campus officials accountable” while the Herald specializes in longer feature reporting. Merging the two could mean losing the Cardinal’s “adversarial reporting” or the Herald’s “long features.”
Former Badger Herald Managing Editor and Chair of the Badger Herald Board of Directors Cat Carroll echoed Katzenberger, telling the Cardinal both newspapers are now “ideologically equal.”
“UW-Madison students receive so many more opportunities to cover things just by having two newspapers,” Carroll said. “I also think it's a really awesome opportunity to have direct competition because that's not something many people will experience until they're in the real world.”
Last year the Cardinal made a small profit due to donations, and Carroll said the Herald is doing well enough financially to sustain themselves for at least the next few years. Tax records show both nonprofit organizations make considerably less than they did in the early 2010s but have reduced expenses at a similar rate.
Is there a conservative student media void?
The Federalist launched Wednesday with a splash. Their first article, from Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Rothove, detailed the temporary removal of a UW-Madison sex education module after a Federalist inquiry revealed a link to an adult film website without restrictions.
The Fund for American Studies is supporting the Federalist through a grant, according to Rothove. The fund supports at least 18 publications with grants of up to $15,000 per year.
UW-Madison did not respond to inquiries from the Cardinal on the timeline for restoring the module, if other complaints beyond Rothove’s were reported and if there were other changes to the module content.
Rothove attributed the formation of the Federalist in an interview with the Cardinal to the student media landscape with “two left-of-center publications and a giant vacuum on the right.”
“The university’s major student publications do good journalism, but they have occasionally failed to hold the school accountable for its left-wing excesses,” the Federalist’s founding statement said.
Katzenberger said he disagreed with the assertion that the Cardinal and Herald are left-leaning news sources.
“I understand why people would say that considering a student newspaper at the UW-Madison, you know, Berkeley of the Midwest, but I think that really undermines the amount of work that students put into making sure their journalism is ethical and is fair,” Katzenberger said.
But Katzenberger said as long as the Federalist’s coverage is “fair and ethical” it would be a “good addition to a news ecosystem to have another paper that brings a different perspective.”
Allison Sansone, author of "It Doesn’t End With Us,” a history of The Daily Cardinal, and editor-in-chief of the Cardinal in 1994, said she was apprehensive that newer student newspapers including the Federalist or The Messenger, another student newspaper attempting to launch since April, would continue after the original founders graduated.
“It doesn't matter how much money there is. They have to have people who are willing to continue, start and restart this thing and keep it going,” Sansone said. “It’s really super fun to start something up. It is really hard to keep it going, and people don't like to do it because it sucks.”
Cardinal dark ages marked by temporary shutdown
Financial stability for the Cardinal has not always come easy. Sansone said the loss of ad revenue partly because of competition between the Herald and the Cardinal led to a seven-month period in 1995 where the Cardinal temporarily ended publication.
Sansone attributed the early financial success of the Herald to professional support from budding conservative movements, including the Young Americans for Freedom and the John Birch Society and strong advertising support.
“The Herald at that point was just sort of this false front for all of these people,” Sansone said.
Sansone also said “dissatisfaction among the journalism faculty with the Cardinal’s editorial stance, advocacy for the end of the Vietnam War and the investigative journalism that the Cardinal was doing” led the UW-Madison SJMC to support the Herald. Sansone said the SJMC “wrote to those advertising brokers and said, ‘you need to begin directing your advertising to the Herald.’”
At the same time, Sansone said Cardinal editors and leadership did not take the financial moves of the Herald seriously enough.
After the seven-month shutdown, the Cardinal returned to print with a $13,000 loan from the UW-Madison student government, which they paid back two years later.
What makes student journalism unique
Katzenberger said the continued large size of campus newsrooms has made student journalism special while the professional news industry has lost 77 percent of their jobs in the last 20 years.
He said covering UW-Madison is like reporting on a mid-sized town. With over 50,000 students enrolled and approximately 20,000 staff members, UW-Madison staff and students alone are approximately the size of Wisconsin cities Eau Claire or Waukesha.
“Yes, the people on your staff are inexperienced, but you do have a lot of them, and so when it comes to something like covering election night or covering a campus protest like the encampment protests, you're able to send hordes of people out in the field to grab coverage and find depth that other newspapers can't do because they've lost staff,” Katzenberger said.
Katzenberger also said student journalists’ status as students themselves and members of the communities they are covering enables comprehensive coverage. He cited in the May 2024 Students for Justice in Palestine encampment as an example of the type of reporting college reporters excel at.
“You got to hear from everyone, because student journalism was on the ground, and they didn't leave when everybody else did,” Katzenberger said.
Culver said student media organizations should be “accountable to the publics that they serve” and “open to critique.”
“Student newspapers are as vital to the life of our campus community as journalism is to the life of our democracy, and we need young people to learn how to do this, so that they can go on and continue to serve us in what I would say is really a noble field,” Culver said.
From 1971 to 1973, Black students on UW-Madison’s campus published the Black Voice, a newspaper devoted to the experience of Black students on UW-Madison’s campus. In 2015, the newspaper reemerged.
Now, James Whitelow and Kamyia Denson, co-editors of the Black Voice, are looking to grow the newspaper’s staff.
“The one thing that we always implement in the Black Voice is to make sure that student voices, but particularly Black student voices are heard on campus,” Whitelow told the Cardinal. “We want to not only be able to uplift our community, but also have our community express any concerns, anything that revolves around trying to raise awareness and advocacy when it comes down to Blackness on campus.”
Whitelow said because Black students only make up 3% of students at UW-Madison, the Black Voice showcases the contributions of the Black community to not only social issues on campus but artistically.
At universities around the country over the last year, student journalists around the country have made significant impacts. University of Florida reporters broke major stories on former president Ben Sasse and student journalists at Columbia University, UCLA and Dartmoth faced university-sanctioned repression or arrest while covering pro-Palestine encampments at their respective universities.
At the same time, Indiana University-Bloomington Media School announced the Indiana Daily Student would cut weekly print production, and Penn State removed — and later returned — Daily Collegian news stands because of political ads on the racks that violated policy.
Student journalism has also been floated as a possible solution to local news deserts at the University of Vermont. The Center for Community News has provided grants and deployed student journalists in communities with a college or university but without a local paper.
Noe Goldhaber is the college news editor and former copy chief for The Daily Cardinal. She is a Statistics and Journalism major and has specialized on a wide range of campus topics including protests, campus labor, student housing, free speech and campus administration. She has done data analysis and visualization for the Cardinal on a number of stories. Follow her on Twitter at @noegoldhaber.
