Courtesy Anatoly Belonozhko/Nikolaev Novitsky
By Crow’s Nest Staff
When journalism graduate student John Gogick became adviser to The Crow’s Nest in the fall of 1993, he helped plan and publish the newspaper’s first tabloid edition on newsprint.
He also helped referee what may have been the first of many disputes between Student Government and student editors.
SG leaders had agreed to allocate some of the revenue from student fees to cover Gogick’s salary and the cost of paper and printing for the new biweekly tabloid.
But they didn’t like some of the news coverage and editorial commentary that followed.
“Never, ever mention the good that is done,” said Student Government president Bob Miller in an angry letter to the editor on Nov. 17. “… instead, highlight the bad, nitpick the inconsequential and theorize about what we do not understand without bothering to find out the whole story.”
“They wanted happy and fluffy” stories about Student Government, not the skeptical, irreverent stories and commentary they were sometimes reading, said Gogick, who is now executive editor of the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle. “They wanted to pull the plug.”
SG eventually backed off, but the pattern was set.
“Every year, we had to go through getting our funding,” said professor emeritus G. Michael Killenberg, who founded the journalism department and helped advise the paper in the years that followed. “Student Government wanted it to be their newspaper … We had to literally beg for money.”
Now, on the eve of consolidation, funding of The Crow’s Nest becomes an even more pressing issue.
The annual uncertainty seems likely to increase if the student governments on the three campuses are merged into one, as envisioned by the administration of USF system President Steve Currall.
Under a proposed constitution that has been ratified by the student governments on all three campuses, the job of allocating student fee revenue might fall to a student senate that is based in Tampa and dominated by Tampa-based senators.
Moreover, the administration has floated the idea of merging The Crow’s Nest and The Oracle, the student paper in Tampa, in an online-only format once consolidation takes root in a few years.
What kind of student newspaper would remain? What kind of coverage would the St. Petersburg campus receive?
From time to time over the years, there has been talk of having The Crow’s Nest financed by the administration or overseen by the faculty of the journalism department, or both.
But that would put the newspaper under the same university administrators who are sometimes riled by the paper’s coverage.
Recent editors have sharply criticized Student Government for cutting the paper’s budget, and they have opposed the suggestion that The Crow’s Nest and The Oracle be merged.
“More than ever, this is a time when the St. Petersburg campus needs a newspaper that covers the issues that are important here,” said editor-in-chief Emily Wunderlich.
“It doesn’t need some mashed-together paper that is full of irrelevant Tampa news, and it should not have to worry every year that Student Government might gut the budget again.”
For now, the yearly worries will continue.
Twice in the last three years, SG has made big cuts in the newspaper’s budget, which is $40,256 this year – a 23 percent drop from $52,516 in 2018-2019.
In 2010-2011, the cut was far deeper. The paper reported that Student Government allocated $22,855 for The Crow’s Nest – half of what it had received the year before.
That prompted this observation from editor-in-chief Ren LaForme in February 2013.
“Whether it was coincidence that this came after the 2009-2010 editor published a photo of the SG president’s police mug shot is not for me to say,” he wrote, “though my gut certainly has an answer.”
