The Chronicle’s Annual Impact Report
July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023
Message from Board Chair Nina Gordon:
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Incredibly, this is also Volume 119 of The Chronicle. Through the efforts of prior years’ staffs, The Chronicle has fully transitioned to a digital-first format, with just a handful of special print editions each school year. Students can now contribute to The Chronicle through video/multimedia, design and social media in addition to reporting, writing, editing and photography. Volume 119 is off to a strong start, with important reporting on newsworthy matters impacting the University community and beyond.
We don’t want to forget the critical contributions of our students who support The Chronicle’s operations through ad sales, made all the more challenging because of significant variations in national advertising from year to year. Our ad sales staff members are amazing—enthusiastic and dedicated to The Chronicle’s mission. We would be so much worse off without the revenues they bring in.
And our Pitch Story Lab rocks! The Chronicle’s creative agency has substantially grown its client base since its inception in 2017, not only resulting in positive revenues for The Chronicle but also providing another outlet for students to participate in The Chronicle and develop skills in marketing strategy, content creation and marketing implementation. These skills are all important to success in today’s journalism. Another benefit is that we are able to incorporate Pitch’s expertise in video production into The Chronicle’s reporting. Do check out pitchstorylab.com to see some of the agency’s recent work.
Last, I want to brag about The Chronicle’s recognition by the Associated Collegiate Press. Volume 117 won the 2022 Online Pacemaker Award, which is considered the Pulitzer Prize of student journalism. This was the fourth year in a row The Chronicle has won the award—truly impressive.
I am so humbled to take over as chair of the DSPC Board this year. Our past chairs, Scott McCartney and Lindsey Rupp, have handed over the reins to a Board that is engaged and active in ensuring The Chronicle’s mission will continue. Scott and I have known each other since he was a superstar reporter in his freshman year; he’ll remain on the Board, thankfully, so I can continue to rely on his wisdom and experience. Scott remains involved with aspiring Duke journalists as an Adjunct Instructor of Journalism and Public Policy in Duke’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. I first got to know Lindsey when I joined the Board and have been dazzled by her energy and enthusiasm. Lindsey has graciously agreed to continue to be involved with special projects for us while she focuses on her role as a team leader of digital editors at Bloomberg.com.
Amrith Ramkumar ‘17, a climate finance reporter for The Wall Street Journal, will provide support to the Board as vice chair. We are also joined by two new Board members, Nicole Kyle ’13 and Georgia Parke ‘16. Nicole is a co-founder and managing director of CMP Research. Nicole has assisted with The Chronicle’s fundraising efforts for several years and brings to the Board her expertise in research and development of customer communications strategies. Georgia is a senior communications specialist for the Fairness Project, and brings to us her experience in communications and digital strategy as a member of Senator Bernie Sanders’ communications team. Leaving the Board this year are Thaddeus Herrick, Likhitha Butchireddygari, Leah Boyd and Lindsey; we thank you all so much for your hard work.
We have a busy year ahead of us. Duke has begun planning for its Centennial; we hope to be an active participant in the on-campus celebrations and are considering various ways to make use of our extensive archives. We also continue to think about ways we can support the staff, whether it be through additional specialized training, stipends for internships, or new video production space in Flowers. It’s so exciting to see the staff grow into excellent reporters and editors and succeed in internships and their post-Duke careers. We are here to support them each step of the way. We hope that you will continue to support our efforts — your donations to The Chronicle are critical to ensuring that independent journalism at Duke remains strong.
Thank you for your ongoing support!
Nina Gordon
Chair, Duke Student Publishing Company Board of Directors
Impact by the Numbers
28,000+
Daily Rundown email newsletter readers
155,000+
Twitter/X followers @DukeBasketball
300,000
dukechronicle.com monthly users
16
engaged board members helping us navigate big changes in our industry
8
print editions for special content
4
winner for four years in a row of the Online Pacemaker Award, for one of the best student news websites in the country
2
NEW video/audio studios to increase our digital storytelling skills and grow Pitch, our ad agency
600+
engaged alumni
3
alumni gatherings per year in NYC, DC and Durham
125+
students working on editorial staff: editors, reporters, photographers
20+
students on business staff
sales/agency/fundraising
3
Chronicle funded internship experiences @ Dallas Morning News, Tampa Bay Times and The News & Observer
Impact Stories: Your Gifts at Work
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We hosted The Daily Tar Heel leadership in our office for our final session with local media consultants Lizzy Hazeltine and Cierra Hinton in support of our DEI efforts; they train using the Anti-Racist Table Stakes principles. There are two big takeaways: Preetha worked so hard and results are big (see below) and, basketball junk talk aside, it’s clear our two programs would benefit from more interaction.
The staff is committed to continuing the progress made last year; seniors Milla and Anisha will lead the efforts this year. Here are just three accomplishments:
Make a tracker for all student demands that have been published — i.e., if demand A, B, C has been met, if administration has been working with them, if there's been no communication — then continuously update it on our website.
Every Sunday, The Chronicle will integrate DEI discussions into news meeting throughout the semester, particularly in pitching stories.
Distributed a survey to better understand what type of coverage readers look for and benefit from with an effort to provide more of what our readers want and care about.
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We are deeply appreciative of your ongoing generosity. Your support of The Chronicle is vital to our students’ success. Because of you, the 100+ students that powered The Chronicle last year had access to:
Six internships with papers and media companies such as The Tampa Bay Times, The Dallas Morning News, The News & Observer and Bloomberg.
An in-depth training session with Andrea Bruce, nationally renowned photojournalist.
Travel to cover both our women’s and men’s sports teams as they competed across the country.
Newly developed software to track our online readership, enabling us to better understand our readers’ habits and interests.
For the third year in a row, we reigned as champions of the Rivalry Challenge, raising over $49,000 in our fundraising contest with UNC’s student paper, The Daily Tar Heel. Centered around the Duke-UNC basketball game in February 2023, it was rewarding to see high participation rates for both schools during the friendly competition to raise money for student journalism. We are happy to continue to hold the bragging rights!
Thank you to our Chronicle Experience Fund Committee, chaired by Nina Gordon and Bart Pachino. These dedicated Chronicle alumni support our fundraising efforts and, together with Board member Claire Ballentine, guide our alumni events.
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The Chronicle saw another strong year in advertising sales. We had record sales for our email products (10% growth from the previous year) and expect this trend to continue. Our housing site nearDuke.com also had a record number of advertisers (120+) and users continue to climb. Listings that advertise on nearDuke.com are now being rented within weeks, if not days, during the peak season. We also had print success this year with our seven issues, especially our annual Visitor’s Guide. We moved the publication date from June to April and we were able to sell 55% more because our full staff could sell this product instead of our smaller summer staff.
We were challenged by a significant drop in national digital advertising especially during election season. It's hard to make up for these dollars on a campus or local level but we continued to chip away at it.
One of our big goals for the 2022-23 school year is to sell out every email edition including the Daily Rundown, The Dirt and Overtime and explore additional email opportunities. We had three seniors graduate from ad staff last year and are welcoming four new account executives to the team.
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We also hosted an amazing photographer - Andrea Bruce - for a photo staff training session in March. We had about 20 students who were fully engaged, asked a ton of good questions and stayed late. The staff asked to have her back to campus to do a hands-on workshop this fall (she’s currently living in NC). Here’s a bit more about Andrea:
Andrea Bruce is an award winning documentary photographer whose work focuses on people living in the aftermath of war. She concentrates on the social issues that are sometimes ignored and often ignited in war's wake. Her clients include National Geographic and The New York Times as well as many publications around the globe. Andrea was a 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University where she studied political theory and democracy.
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The Volume 118 staff sought to document a campus in flux, one that was emerging out of the pandemic, adopting a new residential structure and, in turn, formulating a new campus culture. Our work charted the immediate effects of such a moment in student life — the loss of the Baldwin Scholars’ all-female section, the ban on selective living groups, an increase in food prices across campus, and the effect of the pandemic’s labor shortage on Duke workers. But we also analyzed the slower, more obscure cultural change happening at Duke — a data dive into the decline of students who join Greek life and selective living groups, a piece that looks at similar residential colleges to answer the question of whether Duke will be able to manufacture a new campus culture. Some of our reporting resulted in quick action. Administrators promised Baldwin Scholars that their section would return to being all-female. A story on rollout delays of Duke’s Center for Gender Violence Prevention and Intervention prompted Student Affairs to include resources at the bottom of their emails. Others garnered national attention, like our reporting on the similarities between Duke’s student commencement speech and a past Harvard one, as well as our coverage of Jon Scheyer and Mike Elko’s first years as coaches.
But more often, and just as importantly, we heard from members of the Duke community that they saw their realities reflected in our reporting. We heard from students and staff when we released a piece on the spike of Student Affairs turnover since the pandemic, when we documented the graduate student unionization efforts, when we wrote about what the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture meant to students after it flooded. We heard from students who read our newsletter daily, who made The Chronicle a part of their lives at Duke, who told us it helped them understand this community they lived in more each day.
Our staff brought students from diverse corners of campus together. They were eager to try something new, open to learning, and committed to the truth. Many are now in leadership positions at The Chronicle or studying journalism.
Internally, we invested more resources towards department-specific and leadership trainings, as well as social events, to increase in-person professional opportunities, staff morale and community-building after the pandemic. We also committed ourselves to laying a foundation for a set of institutional DEI goals that we will pursue in the next five years, with the hope that it integrates DEI into every area in our reporting, audience engagement, and community outreach process. Most recently, we launched our public demands tracker, a living document of student demands in the last few decades and Duke’s progress to fulfill them.
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Pitch Story Lab produced videos, captured photos, recorded audio stories, provided copywriting, offered marketing consultation, and delivered graphic design for dozens of clients including Duke Admissions, Pediatric Cardiology, Vascular Surgery, the School of Medicine, and many more. While we served our clients well, achieved our revenue target, and are proud of the creative solutions that we provided, we feel that the biggest win of the year was the unique experience gained by our students. Below are a few reflections from our students that show the importance of this opportunity:
“Pitch Story Lab has been the highlight of my Duke career and it will absolutely define the early steps of my career.” Mason Berger ’23
“Pitch has always felt like a safe space and a home. I actually feel celebrated for my work (which, ironically, is something that’s more rare at Duke than one might expect). Pitch is really the place where I feel the strongest community at Duke.” Victoria Wang ’23
“Pitch Story Lab has been the perfect place for me to both exercise my creativity and strengthen my leadership skills. Working with real clients has given me great confidence in my communication and account management skills which I take with me to every corner of Duke I interact with and speak about in all of my job interviews.” Nicole Park ’23
“Working at Pitch gave me so much essential knowledge on how an agency functions; without Pitch, I wouldn't have had the foundational knowledge needed to succeed, so thank you…” Helen Xiao ‘23
Five-Year Financial Trends
In the last five years, our revenue mix has dramatically changed and our overall revenue has stabilized due to strong digital ad sales by our student team, a commitment to grow digital products and the launch and growth of Pitch, our student ad agency.
The Chronicle achieved a break-even budget every year since 2010.
2018-2019
2020-2021
2022-2023
Donors
We would like to thank our current donors for making the work of The Chronicle possible.