Why alumni magazines continue to be a standby of print journalism

During the pandemic, many colleges cut costs by taking their magazines entirely online. Since then, there's been a big shift back to print. 

College alumni magazines have long been a standby of print journalism. Their cheerful, picture-filled pages are meant to remind readers of what the old campus looks like, what old classmates are up to, and provide a poke to maybe give some money to keep it all going. But during the pandemic, lots of colleges cut costs by taking their magazines entirely online. Some decided that was the way of the future. But many ended up returning to print. 

One place that’s grappled with this is Scripps College in Claremont, California. It was founded in 1926, an all-women’s school with about 1,000 students on campus and 10,000 living alumni. All those students and graduates receive Scripps Magazine. The title font is meant to echo the campus itself: It’s based on the way the school’s name appears on a landmark gate onto the grounds. The magazine runs just under 50 pages. Matte paper, no ads. It comes out twice a year. 

But in 2020, after students were sent home, revenue for the college dropped, and the school made a 20% cut to all administrative budgets. It decided to save on printing and postage costs by taking Scripps Magazine fully online. 

“We definitely saw it as an experiment,” said Binti Harvey, vice president for external relations and institutional advancement at Scripps. 

The digital version still had features. A letter from the president. Class notes. But one thing it didn’t have was the envelope. In the print edition, there’d been one tucked in the pages that readers could send back with a check. 

“Sometimes we will get checks as large as $30,000,” said Harvey. “It definitely is a trigger or motivator for our readers to give.” 

But no envelope, no trigger. Gift revenue plummeted. And in fall 2021, Scripps decided to bring back the print edition. Harvey said it was also meant to signal that campus life was returning to normal. 

“That the college remained in a stable position and was really looking ahead to the future,” she said. 

In other words, that they were open for business.

At least half of all American colleges stopped printing their alumni magazines during the pandemic. That’s an estimate from alumni magazine consultant Erin Peterson, whose firm is called Capstone Communications. But since then, there’s been a big shift back to print. Peterson said colleges learned that many alumni like having the physical magazine.

“It is a social signal. If you’re really proud that you went to an institution, you want to put that on your coffee table,” said Peterson. “You can’t put a digital magazine on your coffee table.”

Some colleges did make compromises on their print editions. Fewer pages, less expensive paper stock. And some got pickier about whose coffee tables they were landing on: they didn’t send to all alums.

“There are some schools that have very sophisticated sort of engagement metrics that they can measure, like—have they volunteered with us? Have they given to us? And then they decide from that,” said Peterson.

One alumni magazine did go digital in 2020 and isn’t looking back: the Purdue Alumnus, from the public university in West Lafayette, Indiana. Matt Folk runs the Purdue for Life Foundation, which puts out the magazine. He said his audience is a fairly techy crowd, and now, he’s able to collect lots of data about what they’re reading.

“We can tell who looks at each and every article. We can look at how long they spend on the article,” said Folk.

Folk said going digital has saved just under $200,000 a year, and that donations have actually gone up since they’ve gone online. He does get complaints sometimes from older alums who miss the feel of the print magazine, and he admits that even he — a 1991 Purdue grad — does, too. But he said young alumni are all about it being on the internet.

“They can read it when they’re on a commute on a train. They can forward it to friends that may not even be alum that they want to show an article to, because they’re proud of the university,” said Folk.

Meanwhile, Scripps Magazine doesn’t currently have much of a digital presence. It has fully committed to print instead. Scripps’ Binti Harvey said she wishes she had the budget to do both well, and she does worry about staying in touch with recent grads.

“That we’ll reach a point where the print magazine will no longer be appealing to them,” said Harvey.

The challenge is, Harvey is trying to reach an audience of alums ranging from those who graduated 60 years to six months ago. Some of them want to flip a page, while others might rather click a link.