With the pandemic, UNC’s failed reopening and the 2020 election, demand for The Daily Tar Heel's journalism hit all-time highs in fall 2020. Despite all the challenges that came with the pandemic, we gave you news through print, texts, social media, emails and even TikTok.
The pandemic exacerbated the decline of print advertising, an ongoing trend for our newsroom and the industry, but people kept coming to our news because it helped them, brought some joy or added necessary information to an important conversation.
Thanks to support from our donors and a bevy of political advertising before the 2020 election, we sustained our three-day-a-week printing schedule during the fall semester when many college newspapers across the country couldn’t.
But faced with another mostly virtual semester and a struggling local economy, we had to make a difficult choice as we prepared for the spring:
The Daily Tar Heel is moving to weekly print production.
This is the right decision for our newsroom and for our audience. We recognize that you still want to be able to hold a print paper for milestones, like historic news or even the day after we beat Duke. But the majority of the UNC community won’t be walking through campus this semester, so by shifting our focus away from print, we can concentrate more resources to make our digital news even more relevant and helpful.
We started doing that last year with our University news podcast, Heel Talk, our “What Just Happened” series on Instagram and DTH Weekly, a newsletter that goes out to every undergraduate student each week.
Being in the boxes less often does not mean we’re giving you less news.
People still picked up our paper last semester, and we’re not going to leave them behind. We are still committed to bringing you the news you need, in whatever form best suits your needs.
