Diamondback to End Century-plus Print Run, Take All-Digital Approach

After 110 years of hitting newsstands, the last print copies of The Diamondback will roll off the presses in March. That’s when, driven by economic forces battering newspapers nationwide, UMD’s independent student news source goes online-only.

Print circulation has declined for years, falling from over 20,000 daily copies in the 1990s, The Diamondback recently noted, to just 8,000 weekly copies. Meanwhile, the paper reaches eight times as many readers online, and costs were expected to exceed advertising revenue in the near future.

“We wanted to stay ahead of that,” Tom Madigan ‘07, board president of Maryland Media Inc., the newspaper’s parent company, said in announcing the change. “Rather than operate at a loss, we should take our resources and put them behind something that was going to have greater longevity and offers a lot more room for improvement and innovation.”

In place of paper and ink, the publication promises to cater to students’ current news needs with podcasts, a mobile app and more investigations.