From the Editor-in-Chief | Cutting back

    You may notice that there's no Married to the Sea in today's paper.
    Yeah. About that.
    Unfortunately, you're going to notice a lot of small changes made to the Daily in the coming days and weeks. We have all witnessed the effects of the nation's economic downturn, and those effects have now begun to trickle down to us. Our advertisers are finding themselves with less disposable funding to buy space in our pages, our printers are raising their rates in order to stay afloat and the era in which we live is forcing more and more readers to turn to online media outlets for their news rather than the tried-and-true print sources. I'll be frank — all of these factors are hurting us. The Daily has seen better days.
    This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that's been keeping an eye on the mainstream media. Newspapers are dying across the world. Whether they will ever go completely extinct remains to be seen, but there is certainly a possibility that our grandchildren — or maybe even our children — will come of age without the experience of opening their daily papers on the newsprint we grew up on.
    Of course, the Daily is not immune. We have always prided ourselves in our financial independence — Tufts is still the smallest university in the nation with an independent daily student newspaper, and the fact that we stay afloat without direct funding from the administration or the Tufts Community Union Senate only makes our lives tougher. We enjoy our independence and we value the luxury afforded to us by our journalistic freedom, but we fear that maintaining our current ways of operation will cease to be financially viable.
    So what happens now? In a nutshell, the answer is that we're not going anywhere, but we are going to have to make some small temporary changes. Some of those changes are on the comics page — you'll notice a lack of both our usual strips and the jumble. We're doing everything we can to fit advertisements into our pages (and if instead of unscrambling five-letter words, you decide to put the paper down and pay attention in your 9:30 lecture this morning, then hey — that's an added plus). We're cutting the little things here and there — a comic strip today, a sports article tomorrow and so on — to make ends meet. I'm writing this now to be up front with you — it's our duty as a campus newspaper to be honest with our readers.
    Physically, the newspaper you pick up at breakfast or in class each morning will be getting thinner as we cut costs however possible. But journalistically, we're still the same dedicated staff you expect us to be, and we will continue working hard to bring you the news on the issues, on and off this campus, that matter to you. And with the decline in our print issue will come a rise in our online presence — every article that we can't afford to publish on newsprint is another blog post that will enhance the still-growing TuftsDaily.com.
    That's something we're proud of, actually — we're moving portions of our content from print to online not out of obligation, but because the Internet is the way of the future in journalism, and we are working to bring that movement to the Tufts media community.
    So bear with us. Newspapers may be struggling, but we're still alive and kicking. Keep reading, and we'll keep bringing you the news you've come to expect from us.
    And we'll keep the Sudoku. That much I can promise you.

Sincerely,
Evans R. Clinchy
Editor-in-Chief