Our newspaper’s very existence signifies that something is wrong with The Daily, the University of Washington’s official student newspaper. However, we have yet to fully dive into our qualms with The Daily. We decided to write this after multiple requests and hope it can stand in for a traditional ‘About’ section on our website, at least for the time being.

Below, we’ll outline the flaws and shortcomings of The Daily and the monopoly it has on UW journalism. We’ll end discussing what we can do as a community moving forward. This will be a long one so feel free to skip around a bit! For ease of accessibility, here is a short table of contents. Also note that unlike other Nightly articles, this is a working article and might be added over time.

• The Daily is State-Run Media: Austerity

• Lack of Horizontal Organization

• Labor Exploitation

• Monopoly on Student News

• The Daily is Going Farther Right

• How to Destroy The Daily

The Daily is State-Run Media: Austerity

While it is true that The Daily is not owned and operated directly by the state (in this case the university is acting as the state), it is heavily influenced, and to a fault, paralyzed by state control. This control is indirect and we are not exposing some kind of elaborate scheme where President Cauce herself exercises full editorial control over The Daily, though there is shockingly little to suggest that this is not the case. The Daily is instead controlled by funding and financial support from the university and its subsidiaries, this support comes with substantial drawbacks that may have come to limit student journalism at UW in the neoliberal area.

Financial support from the state, or in this case the university, is a two sided coin. The main drawback is austerity. Understanding austerity is a good step towards understanding neoliberalism and state control. In this sense, austerity is defined as a series of budget cuts or tax increases set towards decreasing government spending. It should be noted that the US’s federal debt is a logical fallacy created to excuse austerity and the stripping of resources from communities. At UW this looks like continually decreasing state funding and increasing tuition and fees to cover the bills. Under these pressures student programs and workers’ benefits are the first to go.

The Daily today finds itself stuck in the middle of the constant crisis of austerity. It, like all programs at the university, are subject to budget cuts at the whims of those with administrative power. And those with administrative power have surely found that this power can be wielded to influence and manipulate those who are dependent on them for their continued longevity.

To add an extra layer, a substantial amount of The Daily’s funding comes not directly from the university, but through student fees. These are said to be democratically controlled by the student government, however, we know better than to take that statement at face value. The reality is students have little control over how much money they are charged, and how that money is being used. The money is instead bestowed upon a quasi-bureaucracy: the student government. The student government is a highly-guided training ground for America’s future neoliberal bureaucrats. Therefore, of its free will it willingly concedes to the University and is unable to combat University administration with any real student power. The student government is also impacted by State and University financial policy, whose austerity ripple effects surely reach The Daily.

The Daily’s long reliance on external funding demonstrates a significant vulnerability to its prolonged ability to produce unbiased and objective reporting, especially in the age of neoliberalism. It hands the power and creative control of the organization directly to those The Daily should be most critical of.

Lack of Horizontal Organization

Another damning component of The Daily’s model of reporting is the hierarchical model and power structures it operates with. This model tends to favor the editorial control of a select few, often chosen for their agreeableness, agreeableness to the neoliberal system. This again, sets The Daily up for failure.

Proponents of a hierarchical system will explain this as a necessary measure to keep order within a large group of workers, contributors, and designers. This can create a hegemony of thought and process, in which fundamental disagreements are hidden away for the benefit of the continued status quo of the larger group. Asserting power or dominance over others only serves to prevent dialogue, discourse, and change, in this case. This is why we see the efforts of a few radical individuals within The Daily overshadowed by the neoliberal dominance of the institution.

Tangible change at The Daily can only begin after an elimination of their current hierarchical model. Adopting a horizontal structure where every writer, illustrator, website designer, and laborer make decisions together collectively and all Daily leadership positions are eliminated is a good place to start.

To the critique of a loss of order this might cause: instability and even fracturing into smaller ideologically consistent newspapers is acceptable especially when gaining increasing workplace democracy, the elimination of power structures, and better news. Successful liberatory efforts are those that invent and then reinvent themselves continuously. They need not fear dissolving because they know that starting again on healthier grounds is what is best.

The Daily is not a healthy institution, it has been taken over by neoliberal capitalism and exploits its writers everyday. This is all done to further the monopoly on student news and use it to perpetuate neoliberal propaganda.

Labor Exploitation

Due in large part to the aforementioned austerity and power structures, The Daily is set up to continuously host manipulative and exploitative conditions of employment for its writers year after year. Unlike leadership and editorial staff, Daily writers are paid on a “per-assignment basis.” This leaves writers without a regular source of income from the often full-time job they have to work.

The Daily 101 course also patronizes new writers, assuming they know nothing about journalism, and forces them to do a whole course on it. It also, more notably, forces free content from them in the form of three unpaid articles they have to submit while in the course. This industrially squeezes free labor out of writers. To add insult to injury, writers who take the course are not always guaranteed positions with The Daily, forcing many people to waste months of their lives and labor for the promise of pay they will never receive.