Our Pro-Bono Work

Leading a Pioneering Study on the Need for an Economic Revival of College Newspapers

College newspapers are dear to the hearts of both Buday TLP’s CEO, Robert Buday, and his wife, editor in chief Cathy Buday. In the mid-1970s, we met at Penn State’s Daily Collegian student paper, became best friends and married two decades later. (That’s a story for another day.)

We’ve loved college newspapers ever since our undergraduate days in State College, Pa. And we showed more of that love in 2023 and 2024 in helping lead a massive pro bono study on the financial state of U.S. college newspapers.

What prompted the research was the declining financial state of our beloved Daily Collegian. In 2023, Penn State University announced it would reduce its $500,000 annual funding of the paper to zero by 2025. An alumni interest group run by former Collegian staffers (of which we are a part) asked for help.

Bob Buday and long-time friend Bill Guthlein (also a Collegian staff member in the 1970s) told the Daily Collegian Alumni Interest Group that they would spearhead an extensive best-practice research study on the financial state of similar college newspapers across the U.S., looking for commonalities among the college papers that had maintained both financial stability and editorial excellence.

In essence, this was a massive thought leadership study – the same type of qualitative and quantitative that Bob has led more than two dozen times for such companies as CSC Index, Deloitte, Tata Consultancy Services, Unisys and Jones Lang LaSalle. Those studies – just like the study on college newspapers – could be categorized under the same general theme: how businesses and industries are being reshaped by digital technology. Buday has led studies since the late 1980s on business reengineering, business model innovation, IT management and other issues.

With a staff of 12, Buday and Guthlein designed the research on college newspapers to gather both quantitative and qualitative best-practice data. The research team manually collected more than 7,000 pieces of financial data going back to the year 2000 on 49 independent, non-profit college news organizations (including the Daily Collegian). All are 501-c-3 non-profit organizations that must file financial reports annually with the Internal Revenue Service. The research team also conducted interviews with 21 college news organizations, often with multiple people at each one (the general manager, student editor in chief, student business manager, and board chair).

For their work, Buday and Guthlein received a Penn State alumni award in 2025. In addition, they were asked by two college media associations (the Associated Collegiate Press and the College Media Association) to present the findings at their annual conferences in 2025.

You can read about the study here:

• A Buday TLP press release that summarizes the research.
• An article in the leading newspaper industry trade publication, Editor & Publisher, in its October 2024 edition.
• The research report itself.