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Alumni donations allowed our student journalists to continue doing exceptional work — watchdog reporting and documenting life on the Hill — in a year of unprecedented challenges.
To our Student Publications family and friends:
I don’t know that we’ve ever faced a year quite as challenging and complex as 2024-25 turned out to be for WKU Student Publications. Certainly not in my 13 years as director, and certainly not as many and varied challenges as we fielded this year.
But you, our Student Pubs family and friends, got us through an enormously difficult year. And as we look ahead to 2025-26, the path forward is looking brighter.
Our students’ work
First, let’s talk about what our students accomplished in this, our Centennial year for the Talisman and the College Heights Herald:
- Reporting in the College Heights Herald revealed that engineers had determined that WKU’s showcase residence hall, Hilltopper Hall, opened in 2018 at a cost of $40 million, was riddled with design flaws and poor construction and workmanship. The university closed the building in February 2024 but released no information on what the situation was. Reporter Cameron Shaw dove deep into public records and found a forensic engineering report commissioned by the WKU Student Life Foundation that unveiled the flaws. His story published in September was the only way the WKU community was told about the problems. Only the Herald reported that information. In May, WKU and the Student Life Foundation announced that Hilltopper Hall was so flawed it must be torn down and that two other dorms, which opened in 2021 at a cost of $48 million and were designed by the same engineering and architecture firms, will be closed for the coming year for structural and safety code repairs.
- In addition to the type of feature stories the Talisman has been known for — including event coverage, profiles and restaurant reviews — this year the Talisman staff also put forth a concerted effort to cover big issues with Talisman-style stories with in-depth reporting, including stories about flooding in Bowling Green, the impact of federal budget changes at Mammoth Cave National Park, the Muslim Student Association’s search for places to pray on campus, and the possible impacts on campus of a state bill regarding diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
- For a second year in a row, WKU overspent its revenues and budget by millions of dollars. WKU announced an $11 million overspend in the 2022-23 budget, but the administration was silent on whether another overspend occurred in 2023-24. Price Wilborn, the Herald’s editor-in-chief for 2024-25, persistently sought records. He filed multiple records requests starting in September and was initially told the numbers weren’t final yet. Then he was told the university had moved on to the current year and had no time to discuss what had happened in 2023-24. Wilborn filed more records requests and pushed for information that ought to be public. Ultimately, he told officials he would write one of two stories — what the numbers actually said or the lengths the university was going to prevent that information from being made public. His reporting told the WKU community for the first time that WKU had overspent its revenues by $3.9 million in 2023-24.
- A small but mighty Student Publications Advertising staff led by Keelin Davis generated our best revenue results since 2016-17, bringing in about $166,000 in revenues for 2024-25, an 8% increase over the previous year.
- In a February report, the Herald brought reality and context together, showing that WKU had experienced a decline in enrollment for the Fall 2024 semester, and that enrollment had fallen 22.8% from its peak in 2012, and was down 19.6% since the 2017-18 academic year. Using public records from the state’s seven other public universities and data from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, the Herald showed that WKU was an outlier – the only public university in Kentucky to see its enrollment go down for Fall 2024 and showing the sharpest decline statewide since 2012.
- Cherry Creative continued to shine as an incredibly bright part of Student Pubs, producing special sections, sponsored content, special events and video storytelling for clients. The branded content studio staged our most successful WKU Housing Fair to date, hosted a fun and profitable Best of the Hill Festival and produced Grad Guides for the fall and spring commencement ceremonies that set records for revenue.
- On the multimedia front, the Talisman produced several strong videos, including one on a student who is a musical mermaid and another giving a rarely-seen look at the making of a Homecoming float. Several photographers collaborated to cover ROTC training at Fort Knox, which required communicating with the Army’s public affairs office, an experience that made an impact on each of them. And the co-executive editors created and hosted the Talisman’s first opinion podcast, Tali Takes.
As a student media group, journalism is at the very heart of our mission. The sampling of work above shows journalism matters. As professional newsrooms devote fewer resources to covering WKU, student journalism from the Talisman and the Herald is essential.
Money: Grim, generosity and some good news
On the money side, 2024-25 started as grim as we’ve seen.
The year started with our two budgets funded by the university – Student Publications, which primarily pays the salary and benefits for the pro staff, and Talisman – both taking substantial cuts. Those cuts largely eliminated any university funds for our basic operations, shifting most of those costs to the revenue-dependent College Heights Herald budget and leaving nothing for emergencies.
On top of that, WKU kept money left in the Herald’s account at the end of 2023-24, bringing the amount WKU has taken from the Herald to $148,518.51 since 2018. Fortunately, we had left less than $1,000 in that account at the end of last year – but it was still taken.
On the revenue side, our students and pro staff did an exceptional job, as noted above. Good thing, since we needed every penny, plus money from your donations, to cover all those expenses that had been shifted onto the Herald.
The university also initially announced it was taxing revenue-dependent accounts by 10%, but the outcry across the university stalled that move for 2024-25. We argued that Student Publications and the Herald revenue account were not like other units of the university in that we generate our revenue for a specific purpose, provide our own tech support, handle all the billings and processing of payments ourselves, and do our own collections on the rare occasions when accounts go delinquent. When the budget for 2025-26 came out, that tax had grown to 13% — a number we could not sustain.
But then things changed. Whew!
On June 5, Provost Bud Fischer told me that the university’s leadership agreed that Student Publications was not typical of most WKU revenue-dependent operations and that the College Heights Herald account would be exempt from the 13% “overhead surcharge.”
And our first glimpse at the university budget for 2025-26 confirmed that a portion of the funds that had been cut a year earlier would be restored – representing a reinvestment of about one-fourth of the funds WKU saved from our office associate, Tracy Newton, accepting WKU’s Voluntary Separation Incentive Program for an early retirement, eliminating her position.
Bright spots
The brightest spots of the year made all the hard work worth it.
First, our alumni, friends, supporters and partners came through for us, and in huge numbers. During the year (July 1, 2024-June 26, 2025), you:
- Gave $48,889.64 to the Student Publications Legacy Fund, money we can use for our most immediate needs. And use it we did. It allowed us to send students to conferences for training, to buy the occasional pizzas for late production nights and, our largest expense, to replace a busted large-format printer that allows us to generate about $20,000 a year in revenue from posters in our campus distribution kiosks. We spent frugally, allowing us to grow the Legacy Fund nest egg by about $15,000.
- Invested $34,200 in our Student Publications Fellowships program, allowing us to place five students in professional settings for the summer and pay for one fellow and another reporter covering news on campus during the summer and a designer putting together our View of the Hill magazine for incoming freshmen and our media kit for the coming year.
- Donated $23,690 in cash to the Student Publications Endowed Fund, which I hope to build to at least $3 million donated or committed before I retire in a few years. We’re currently at about $1.3 million committed. At $3 million, the Endowed Fund would generate about $120,000 a year and would largely secure the future for our student media group.
Those funds are, by the way, housed in the College Heights Foundation and cannot be used by anyone other than Student Publications.
Most of us journalists are not great at math. But even the most basic calculation shows that those numbers represent an overall investment of more than $106,000 from our alumni, friends, supporters and partners.
We have an amazing group of people out there who support Student Publications.
The other even brighter note is how well our students did.
Their journalism shined light on important matters and delivered facts that no one else was making available to the WKU community. They used public records and open meetings laws to dive into challenges facing the university and its students. For these, they won the Jon Fleischaker Freedom of Information Award from The Associated Press and the Kentucky Press Association — for the third time in four years.
Our students’ work captured the flavor of the Hill and reflected the diversity of the university and the larger Bowling Green community.
And, importantly, they had fun. Our entire building returned to the boisterous atmosphere that had been too subdued in the years immediately following the pandemic.
Closing
Even though we fought through a tough, tough year in 2024-25, our students performed admirably, doing some of the best work in all of collegiate journalism. And as 2025-26 dawns, along with our second century, the horizon looks a bit brighter than it did one year ago.
Thanks to your generosity, we are stable at the moment — although, as we have learned, in the university environment that could quickly change. Our students stand on a strong foundation of excellent journalism and sound business practices. Our professional staff, though changing, is innovative and nurturing.
Thank you for joining us in navigating this challenging year. Thanks to you, we emerge stronger and ready to face whatever lies ahead.
For more information, contact me at 270-745-4206 or [email protected].
With much gratitude,
Chuck Clark, director