The Daily Trojan will no longer pay anyone on staff or its masthead, starting next semester. It will also break from its daily printing schedule for the first time in decades, reducing its schedule to three times a week.
USC Student Life, the division that oversees Student Publications – like the Daily Trojan and the yearbook El Rodeo – has held meetings with the paper for the last week. Student Life informed them that the university was decreasing the Daily Trojan’s budget, impacting its ability to pay its nearly 300 writers and editors, according to a Daily Trojan article. These cuts also extend to publishing power as the paper’s print schedule will be cut from five days to three. This funding cut comes on the heels of budget cuts across the university.
Annenberg Media is the newsroom run out of the USC Annenberg Media Center funded by the School of Journalism. It does not receive funding from Student Life; its dozens of student editors, television and radio producers are on the university payroll. The student-led newsroom maintains editorial independence from the school.
At the beginning of December, the Daily Trojan published an article in its last print issue of the Fall 2024 semester demanding more budget control and increased transparency from the university regarding how much funding they are allocated. It’s difficult to understand how much the budget has been reduced because the university has never disclosed how much the budget is to begin with.
This is not the first time that the Daily Trojan has experienced budgeting issues. Budget cuts at the start of the 2024-2025 school year led to the paper running at a deficit for this fall semester. Nearly all of the paper’s revenue comes through advertisements and funding from the university, according to Stefano Fendrich, the Daily Trojan’s incoming editor-in-chief for spring 2025.
In a post on their Instagram, the Daily Trojan cited that the decision was “made without consulting the Daily Trojan’s student leadership in any capacity. Student Life told us, despite our objections, that their decision was final. We are disappointed in Student Life’s lack of investment in independent student journalism.”
The Daily Trojan first published in 1912 and has spent more than a century as a central part of USC news and culture. The paper has a circulation of 5,000 daily between the University Park and the Health Sciences Campus. The new print schedule would see this number significantly decrease.
Newspapers remain integral to the news landscape, but the rise of digital media has contributed to more people viewing news online. A 2023 survey by Pew Research of the largest North American newspapers shows that weekday print circulation decreased by 13% and Sunday print circulation decreased by 16% from the previous year.
Joe Saltzman, a USC journalism professor and a 1961 editor for the Daily Trojan, called for help from the paper’s alumni in a Facebook post. He explained how the paper’s long-standing legacy as one of the best student newspapers in the country would be harmed by such drastic cuts and that it would be a significant loss to independent student journalism for the LA community.
In an email interview with Annenberg Media, Saltzman proposed solutions that could help the paper save money, including almost fully eliminating a daily print. Saltzman suggested instead publishing a news summary and opinions once per week, and moving to a daily digital model.
“The money saved in paper printing [and] publishing the new three-day-a-week schedule can be transferred to a student payment fund to pay for the lost compensation,” Saltzman said. “Since most of its constituents read the DT on their laptops and phones, the printed edition will not be missed.”
This proposed change for how the paper runs its day-to-day operations is similar to how other student-run publications around the country publish their news. The Daily Bruin publishes three times a week, the Daily Texan twice, and The Daily Tar Heel and The Daily Californian once a week.