I deserve minimum wage


Daily Trojan newsroom, tired student journalists
(Emma Fong | Daily Trojan)

Do you want to know how much money I’m making by writing this article? Fifteen dollars. Max. And when I work as a deputy copy editor, I earn a mere five dollars for my entire shift, which lasts a minimum of three hours. We receive surprisingly little here at the Daily Trojan, though you might not know it from the vague claim on our website that “All staff members are paid per piece published in the Daily Trojan.”

Despite our lack of significant financial recognition, the staff at the Daily Trojan work incredibly hard to produce this newspaper every day to inform, question and support the USC community. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression puts it, “Student publications play a vital role in informing students about events and occurrences on campus, exposing wrongdoing, holding leadership accountable, and informing the larger community about relevant events.” With such an important role on campus, why aren’t members of USC’s student newspaper being compensated adequately?

At the Daily Trojan, contributors receive appreciation honorarium stipend payments funded by the Division of Student Affairs. It is important to note before discussing specifics that we at the Daily Trojan do not call our stipends “compensation,” “pay” or “wages.” We are not given enough in our honorarium stipends to constitute a working wage, and therefore classify our “compensation” as an “appreciation honorarium stipend.”

Staff members are divided into two groups for honorarium purposes: the masthead (managing and section editors, directors, etc.) and content contributors to the paper (writers, photographers, artists, etc.). But this has not always been the case: About ten years ago, honorarium practices were revised after research into student newspaper best practices throughout the United States.

Before this, the editor-in-chief was provided a lump sum to distribute to any staffers and that freedom was often abused through favoritism. Changing this practice ensured that content contributors would receive honorarium stipends for their work and stipulated that the editor-in-chief only had control over distributing the masthead honorariums in an effort to promote equity.

Masthead consists of 28 staff members who fill the positions of editor-in-chief, section editors, managing editors and directors of internal affairs. Their honorariums are distributed by the editor-in-chief out of a yearly budget which, this year, is $50,108. Individual honorariums have ranged from $350 to $1750 this semester, but change with each masthead and editor-in-chief.

The majority of the 350 staffers at the Daily Trojan are content contributors, who are given honorariums based on their published work. The budget for these content contributor honorariums currently consists of $33,000 per year and is distributed at set rates: $8 for photos, $10 for artwork, between $11 and $15 for articles, $8 for podcasts and videos and $5 per shift for copy editors.

With changes to the journalism industry at large, the Daily Trojan has had to take on more responsibilities and staff to keep up with the times. Pushes for mental health and wellness, diversity and inclusion and the addition of online and podcasting branches have added to the number of staff members that the Daily Trojan requires. With the addition of these staffers, the budgets allocated for the Daily Trojan are regularly split into more and more pieces with each getting smaller.

Further, these honorarium rates do not account for the drastic raise in inflation over the past decade, from 1.6% in January 2013 to 6.4% in January 2023. In fact, with the need for more staff to ensure accurate reporting despite budget constraints, copy editors are about to suffer a loss in stipend rates from $5 per shift to $4.

Writing for a student newspaper provides staffers with valuable professional skills, connections and the opportunity to explore their power as writers and reporters. These opportunities are essential for many students seeking careers in journalism, making the lack of meaningful compensation a massive barrier to entry in the field.

The Daily Trojan’s Fall 2022 Diversity Staff Report, whose survey had an 86.69% response rate, showed that over 30% of the staff relied on need-based financial aid. Furthermore, 59.3% of staff worked additional jobs outside of the newspaper to support themselves. Students who do not have to rely on a second job have more time to commit to the paper and therefore have an advantage in their success here and further in the industry.

This issue is not one constrained to the Daily Trojan. The former editor-in-chief of Georgetown’s The Hoya, Riley Rogerson, spoke of similar issues during her time there.

“The lack of compensation unfairly benefited students who did not need to work a paying job. The students who had the resources to commit time — sometimes up to 40 hours a week — to The Hoya were often able to more quickly gain leadership positions,” Rogerson said in a statement to the Daily Trojan.

It is easy to see the similarities between The Hoya’s situation and our own — as someone who does not need the financial support of a second job, I can commit myself more fully to the Daily Trojan and have been able to take on multiple roles as both an opinion writer and deputy copy editor.

“Pursuing staff compensation at a school newspaper was an uphill battle, but a vitally important one to break down barriers to entry in student journalism and the journalism industry at large,” Rogerson said. “Unfortunately, during my tenure at The Hoya, those efforts were ultimately fruitless.”

Mona Cravens, the Director of Student Publications at USC, has held her position since 1976 and personally attested to the importance of student newspapers.

“[The Daily Trojan’s] most paramount purpose is to serve as the collective voice of our students,” Cravens said. “Here, we have the forum of our paper who can question anything that goes on, and not just question but applaud things.”

The University itself acknowledges the newspaper’s importance in its Statement of Policy for the Operation of the University of Southern California Daily Trojan: “[USC] recognizes the Daily Trojan as a valuable aid in establishing and maintaining an atmosphere of free and responsible discussion and of intellectual exploration of the campus. It is recognized as one of the principal means of bringing student concerns to the attention of the faculty and the administra­tion and of formulating student opinion on various issues on the campus and in the world at large.”

Cravens added that USC, like many other universities, does not define contributions to the student newspaper as a part time work. This is mainly because staff at student newspapers are not technically employed by the school, and so, legally, they do not have to be paid. That distinction prevents financial issues for the University like the residential assistant strike in 2021 or the movement for graduate student workers to unionize in late 2022, in which students’ presence on payroll allowed them the grounds to fight for fair pay.

But that distinction also benefits the newspaper: In order to maintain journalistic independence and operate without University oversight, the Daily Trojan cannot be equated with other part time student jobs. For similar reasons, we cannot constitute a recognized student organization either, which is the category under which most clubs on campus fall.

Instead, as Cravens put it, the Daily Trojan is operated as “a volunteer learning experience.” While it is certainly an invaluable learning opportunity, I would call anything with shifts, production deadlines and “compensation” — albeit minimal and in the form of honorariums — a job.

We aren’t the only student group that receives honorarium stipends for our work: the Undergraduate Student Government receives stipends for their contributions to our student community as well. In 2018, the USG president reported working 20-30 hours per week which is very comparable to the Daily Trojan’s masthead work hours — the difference being that the USG president is provided a whopping $9,000 stipend compared to the meager $350 to $1,750 range at the Daily Trojan. Those on masthead estimate that they spend an average of 20 hours per week here at the Daily Trojan — with some reporting typical weeks of up to 45 hours of work — which certainly constitutes the commitment of a part time job.

Some student newspapers have found their way around the issue of maintaining editorial independence while still receiving compensation: Staff at the Montana Kaimin of the University of Montana are compensated through a $7 student fee collected each year. The University of Iowa’s The Daily Iowan is funded through a combination of student fees, advertisements and even donations. Some of these student fees have been branded as “mass subscriptions” to the student newspaper.

Countless hours of work go into producing our newspaper every day. One article goes through at least seven people’s hands before being printed, not to mention the time and energy writers spend on the pieces, or the photos, artwork and layout teams who labor for hours getting everything ready for print five nights a week. 

We deserve better, and we won’t sacrifice our journalistic independence and integrity to do so. However, there exists a solution that maintains staff independence and gives them a bit more for their time. I propose that we add an annual student fee of $1 to $5 to be collected as funding for the Daily Trojan, acting essentially as a subscription. Although we as students are already struggling with tuition increases, the Daily Trojan is essential to our campus and community, and by adding only $2 to student costs, we could increase the funding for honorarium stipends by $98,000. That would more than double the current budget for student honorariums, which totals $83,108.


In the corner of our newsroom, peering over the news desk during each 10-hour production day, there hangs a whiteboard littered with colors, names and numbers. For as far back as anyone can remember, it’s been dedicated to keeping track of the earliest or latest the last person in the office or in a section leaves on a production night. These times currently range from 6:03 p.m. (for only the copy editing section) to 3:16 a.m. (for the entire production team, a record set while printing this semester’s USG election guide) — pretty late to get off from a job that doesn’t even pay minimum wage.