As of a vote by our board of directors last week, The Peak has decided to leave the Canadian University Press (CUP) opting, instead, to join the National University Wire (NUW).
If you haven’t been paying attention to the Canadian student newspaper world lately, let me tell you, things have been going on.
The Canadian University Press (CUP) is a non-profit, member owned and operated organization of Canadian student newspapers, and the oldest student newswire service in the world. In this capacity, CUP has provided services and support such as conferences and a national newswire to its members, including The Peak. All sounds good, right?
Right now, not so good. Currently, CUP is facing a financial crisis so bad that on Feb. 28 they launched a $50,000 Indiegogo fundraising campaign in an effort to keep themselves afloat, after facing their third consecutive deficit year. As of press time, they’ve raised a little over $7,000.
Over the past two years, we have repeatedly voiced our concerns, and CUP has not made serious moves to respond.
How did things get to this point, you ask? CUP depends on membership fees — calculated by the available finances of the individual paper — to operate. It’s a fine balance of providing services valuable to larger papers with plentiful resources, and to those with much less.
Unfortunately, a year ago, member papers started leaving, deciding that in the changing financial landscape of press that CUP fees were no longer worth the services they were receiving. CUP suddenly had a lot less money to keep up their national staff and expensive wire service.
The tensions arising from this financial state culminated in a plenary meeting at this year’s national conference in Edmonton, when a coalition of current and former members, including The Peak, tried to pass a new fee structure and online article plan to replace the current newswire. The proposal was rejected, with softer fee cuts chosen instead.
Over the past two years, The Peak has repeatedly voiced concerns about relevant services, asking for a more productive newswire service or an RSS feed that would allow papers to push content quickly and effectively, providing more diversity and choice for republishing. CUP has not made any serious moves to respond to these requests.
At this point, the mismanagement of the organization, the lack of response to our needs, and the resistance to decisive change have moved us to do something we have been discussing since I started at The Peak over two years ago: leave CUP.
If you need us, you can find us over at the National University Wire (NUW), which launched last Monday. NUW was founded out of collaboration between two former CUPpies, Geoff Lister of UBC’s The Ubyssey and Joshua Oliver of U of T’s The Varsity, in an effort to address the need that CUP has actively ignored. It’s the collaborative, user-generated feed we’ve always wanted.
And the company’s not bad either. Along with The Peak, members of NUW are student newspaper heavyweights, including The Gateway, The Ubyssey, The Martlet, and six others, all of which can be found on the site.
We are proud to be a part of a wire that is working towards creating a strong, collaborative, unified student press, which is the most valuable thing we could ever receive from an organization.
We hope CUP will be able to provide that again one day. But for now, we’re trying something NUW.
