This article is the first in a four-part series on the challenges and opportunities faced by Princeton’s student publications throughout the COVID pandemic.
Walking into Roma dining hall on a rainy April evening last semester, I passed through the common room and by the table where student groups would leave their various announcements and advertisements for everyone to see. Like most students, I typically pay little attention to the many dance group flyers, lecture series posters, and student publication broadsheets strewn across this table, but on that particular day I happened to glance down and notice a small stack of the Daily Princetonian whose headline, “Break Up the Prince”, was striking and unexpected enough to interrupt my razor-sharp focus on getting to dinner. I stopped and read the front-page editorial, which argued that the Prince had ballooned to such proportions, and become so monolithic and ubiquitous on campus, that it constituted a monopoly and thus ought to be busted like the trusts of old.
Of course, it was immediately apparent that the editorial, along with the entire issue, was a satire; aside from the unlikely content of the article itself, the date of the edition was April 1st and the next article was a piece detailing the introduction of Frist Early Meal as yet another means to satiate this student body’s endless hunger. In fact, I would later come to find out that the paper wasn’t the Prince at all, but rather an edition of TigerMag called the “Prince Parody”, which runs only once every four years.
Despite the fact that the piece was a satire, I found myself thinking seriously about the points it raised over dinner that night. After all, another article by Danielle Jenkins in that same parody edition of TigerMag asserts that satire “exists at the intersection of truth and lie” and depends on a set of “acknowledged truths between the jokester and the recipient.” If a piece on satire in a satire magazine can be trusted as at least somewhat authoritative, one must admit that the acknowledged truths which “Break Up the Prince” relies on are quite remarkable. In recent years, the Daily Princetonian has undergone astonishing growth in terms of both the size and the breadth of the publication; from the 2018-19 school year to the end of 2021, the Prince fully doubled in size from approximately 200 staffers to more than 400, which amounts to around 1/13 of Princeton’s total undergraduate population. Over the same period, the Prince saw the creation of two new sections, Puzzles and Satire, and four new podcasts, as well as the makeovers of the Prospect section and the Daybreak podcast. To say, as TigerMag has, that the Prince has “swollen” thus seems to be a bit of an understatement.
While the question which TigerMag’s satire piece attempts to engage with—that of whether the Daily Princetonian’s growth should be regarded as a positive or negative force on campus—is an important one to consider, that night I found myself thinking of another question entirely. How could it be that the Prince had seen such success and expansion in the same time that many other student publications, and student groups more broadly, had taken a large hit in terms of membership and interest due to COVID-19?
It’s no secret that COVID-19 has had a dramatic effect on campus life ever since the first Princeton student was tested and put into isolation on March 11, 2020. Aside from perhaps the invention and development of the internet, there has been no other event in the history of modern education that has so drastically altered the lives of students, as well as the very form and structure of education and extracurriculars, as the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects of the pandemic on student groups specifically are well-recognized among most students, many of whom have witnessed COVID’s consequences firsthand as they have attempted to navigate membership in or leadership of a student group during a period of near-constantly shifting CDC guidelines, university policies, and local health risk levels. For instance, Sullivan Meyer ’24—current President of the College Democrats—summarized the general impact of COVID on student groups during a recent interview with the PROG, saying: “across the board, maybe save dance groups and the Prince, participation in extracurriculars is down, and that’s definitely true for us. It’s harder to get people excited about doing what is, really, work.”
This is especially true of student publications, where participation (writing, editing, and design) can often resemble the experience of a first-year Writing Seminar instead of something ordinary people might do for fun. Student publications have truly struggled over the past five semesters to retain interest among members and readers alike, with one glaring exception: the Daily Princetonian. Why has this been the case?
Pursuing the answer to that question has led to the creation of this four-part article series on the experiences of Princeton’s student publications throughout the COVID pandemic. The series will examine the challenges and opportunities that the PROG, TigerMag, and the Daily Princetonian have each faced from Spring 2020 up until the present day in adapting and reacting to the various circumstances they have found themselves in. The adjustments that each of these publications have undertaken in response to the pandemic have changed them immensely and permanently, for better and for worse, though there is a striking amount of continuity hidden in that change as well.
In telling the stories of these student publications, there is no better way to illustrate the reality of their struggle and the extent of the changes they made than to tell their stories through the eyes of those who personally lived and navigated through them. That is why each article in this series will focus on the personal experience of one of these publications’ previous or current leaders—spotlighting those who have direct frames of reference for what their publications were like both before and during the pandemic and who took active parts in shaping the trajectory of their publications through it. Part Two will showcase the journey of Mary Alice Jouve ’23, who joined the PROG as a staff writer at the beginning of the Fall 2019 semester, was made its Managing Editor at the start of 2021, and has served as its Editor-in-Chief for all of 2022. Part Three will present the story of Amanda Vera ’22, who started as a writer for TigerMag in Fall 2018, rose to the positions of both Editor-in-Chief and Chairwoman just as the pandemic broke out in Spring 2020, and remained as Chairwoman until just before her graduation in Spring 2022. Finally, Part Four will highlight the rise of Emma Treadway ’22 through the ranks of the Daily Princetonian, from a first-year opinion columnist who began writing for the Prince in Fall 2018, to an assistant opinion editor in Spring 2020, and then to Editor-in-Chief for the whole of 2021.
The combined personal experience of each of these leaders will be used throughout this series as a lens to understand the broader trajectory of campus publications over the past three years. In depicting that trajectory, I hope to give accurate testament to the struggles and opportunities that these student groups, and others like them, have faced in adapting to and recovering from a global pandemic which has taken so much from so many, but which has also given much to those who had the vision to see what could be. While I would have greatly preferred that such testimony had never been needed, COVID has irreversibly changed us as people and as publications—and it is time that we acknowledge how and why, exactly, that change took place so that we can understand what it means for us as writers, editors, and readers alike going into the future.
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