The Daily Lobo, UNM’s student-run news organization, will focus primarily on its website and social media accounts to report news on campus and the surrounding area, and rely less on its printed product. No longer a daily newspaper, the Lobo will publish in print only twice a week: on Mondays and Thursdays.
The news outlet announced the move Monday.
Daily Lobo Editor-in-Chief Jyllian Roach said editorial staffs in recent years have discussed a move to a digital-first mentality, but the rigors of a daily printed product hampered that transition. By cutting down on print days, Roach said the Lobo will have more time available to keep a web-based approach in the forefront.
“This gives us an opportunity to really start focusing on web-first and looking at more content that is appropriate for a web base rather than a print base, such as podcasts, videos, photo galleries — all of the fun things we really want to get into, but haven’t because we’ve been so print-focused for so long,” Roach said.
The Student Publications Board, which oversees the Daily Lobo, approved the shift during a June 19 meeting by a near-unanimous decision. One board member, Bob Trapp, voted for the news organization to print only once weekly; other board members opted for twice a week.
Though print publications will be reduced, Daily Lobo officials say the outlet will continue to report on a daily basis. The only change will be the medium in which daily news appears: the Internet.
The move mirrors the shift seen at newspapers across the nation — student or otherwise — where the Internet has been gaining ground over print. Most consumers of news now rely on digital platforms for information, and most outlets use the immediacy of the web to relay news to readers sooner.
“It’s driven by technology for sure, but a lot of the legacy businesses have been disrupted to the point that news delivery has to be done in a different way,” said Jim Fisher, business manager for Student Publications.
In order to make its stories more web-oriented, Roach said the staff is examining how the stories will be presented. Many traditional journalistic fundamentals, like accuracy and fairness, will remain, while other newspaper-style guidelines will fall by the wayside, such as a rule ordering writers to never use contractions in stories. The goal, Roach said, is to make stories more friendly and approachable.
Roach also said that she wants the staff to have more fun when producing news content, in hopes that the increased interest of writers, photographers and layout designers in their stories will translate to more enjoyable content for readers.
“Some of the guidelines we follow and structures that we use will always be invaluable to journalism, but I don’t think all of those things will always be the case, and I don’t think all of those are the case now,” she said. “It’s time to take a really hard look at that and make those decisions.”
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Going digital-first does bring some advertising challenges, said advertising coordinator Daven Quelle. To help facilitate the change, the Daily Lobo will look to increase the size of its sales staff. The Daily Lobo remains to focus on local advertisers, she said.
Social media will be a key component for the Lobo’s model, Quelle said.
“If we have to position ourselves as reaching students, then we need to reach students in the ways students are also changing and evolving,” she said. “That’s where we need to be.”
UNM’s two student-government organizations — the Associated Students of UNM and the Graduate and Professional Student Association — support the move. Both groups have representation on the Student Publications Board, and ASUNM fees provide Student Publications with 8.5 percent of its operating budget, as per the ASUNM constitution.
ASUNM President Jenna Hagengruber, an avid Daily Lobo reader, said she will miss her daily Sudoku puzzles in the Lobo, but sees the move to digital as a positive for the outlet. Hagengruber attended the board meeting at which the decision was made.
“When we look at the spectrum of our University and just nationwide, we do see a trend of more newspapers being online, with the fact there is less in print,” Hagengruber said. “More things are moving to online in general, whether it’s books or magazines or newspapers. I’m not completely surprised that this happened.”
In a prepared statement, GPSA officials said the association “supports the board’s decision for fiscal responsibility and self-sustainability, adaptation to cultural changes in the way students receive their news, and continued historical documentation of the student body through the New Mexico Daily Lobo newspaper, magazine and digital publishing.”
J.R. Oppenheim is the managing editor for the Daily Lobo. Contact him at managingeditor@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @JROppenheim.
