Texas A&M officials recently announced that the school will stop producing physical copies of the school’s 129-year-old newspaper, the Battalion. According to the Tribune’s report, Texas A&M President M. Katherine Banks ordered the paper to cease making paper copies after this coming spring semester.
Initially, Banks told the Battalion that they must stop printing immediately, but after student protests, the paper version of the Battalion will continue to be available through the next semester.
The public outcry comes in part because Texas A&M reportedly did not ask for student input before making the decision. The Battalion, and the classiness of the print version, had been a favorite of students and press alike.
It will now become a digital-only student paper as Texas A&M shifts towards a more virtual news platform.
Texas A&M has not had a formal journalism department since 2003, so the Battalion has been run mainly by students since then. Many students taking Texas’s A&M journalism class as a minor utilize the Battalion as experience, preparing them for post-university careers.
The dismantling of the paper copies caused confusion and disappointment among readers for this very reason. Under the announcement by the Battalion, the comments section was full of users voicing their support for the paper.
Myranda Campanella, the editor in chief of the Battalion, said, “People look forward to this paper every week. This is out of nowhere.” She noted that the paper is looking into the legality of Banks’ decision to cancel the physical Battalion copies.
The Battalion has been published routinely online since 1997, Campanella and associates state. “Every story that is in print goes online. So it’s not like our audiences are ever missing out,” Campanella said. “It just doesn’t make any sense. … There seems like a wider issue that they’re not telling us.”
Banks claims the change is solely due to Gen Z’s reliance on social media and online sources for their news. She maintains the viewpoint that media on campus should be free, stating, “I believe in the freedom of the press,” although some online users disagree.
Underneath the Battalion article, one comment reads, “How can the university protect The Batt’s right to publish content freely, while taking away its primary source of funding and rolling it into a different department…?”
The Battalion receives much of its funding from advertisements in the physical papers. Banks ended her statement, somewhat ironically, “I’m not a professor of journalism, I don’t understand exactly why [print media] is important to the field.”
