Diamondback to End Century-plus Print Run, Take All-Digital Approach
After 110 years of hitting newsstands, the last print copies of The Diamondback will roll off the presses in March. That’s when, driven by economic forces battering newspapers nationwide, UMD’s independent student news source goes online-only.
Print circulation has declined for years, falling from over 20,000 daily copies in the 1990s, The Diamondback recently noted, to just 8,000 weekly copies. Meanwhile, the paper reaches eight times as many readers online, and costs were expected to exceed advertising revenue in the near future.
“We wanted to stay ahead of that,” Tom Madigan ‘07, board president of Maryland Media Inc., the newspaper’s parent company, said in announcing the change. “Rather than operate at a loss, we should take our resources and put them behind something that was going to have greater longevity and offers a lot more room for improvement and innovation.”
In place of paper and ink, the publication promises to cater to students’ current news needs with podcasts, a mobile app and more investigations.
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Bonnie Feldesman Lefkowitz
The written and printed copy of the Diamondback will be sorely missed by people like me who like to see and hold what they are reading. As Editor in Chief (1959-1960) I thought there was nothing like the satisfaction of bringing the next day's pages back to campus after an evening of proofreading at our printer in Rockville. But of course then, as now, the important thing was what we had to say and what our readers thought about it.