New Web Site for Academics Roils Education Journalism

The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising: "Scott Jaschik and Doug Lederman had covered higher education for years but on May 30, 2003, they found out that - in journalism - there's no such thing as tenure. On that day, both Mr. Jaschik and Mr. Lederman, the editor and managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, announced they were leaving the paper, where they had both worked for nearly 20 years. They did not explain why.

But now they are back on the beat, competing through a start-up with their former employer. Mr. Jaschik and Mr. Lederman, along with Kathlene Collins, who worked at The Chronicle for 20 years, introduced last month an online publication, insidehighered.com. In doing so, Mr. Jaschik and Mr. Lederman, who are both editors, and Ms. Collins, who is the publisher, are trying to become the first significant competition in higher education publishing since the intellectual-if-gossipy Lingua Franca folded in 2001.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has long been the giant in the field. Founded in 1966 by Corbin Gwaltney, a former editor at Johns Hopkins University who still owns the publication, it quickly established itself as a must-read for college administrators and faculty. The Chronicle now has a print circulation of just over 85,000 and its Web site gets more than 10 million page views per month.

Along the way, The Chronicle also earned a reputation for being stodgy and resistant to change. Jeffrey Kittay, the founder of Lingua Franca, now an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, says that The Chronicle regards itself as the paper of record in higher education, and that makes it an easy target.

According to an estimate in the September 2004 Advertising Age, The Chronicle grossed $33 million in advertising revenues and $7 million in circulation revenues in 2003, although its total number of advertising pages for the year, 3,169, was down 14 percent from 2002. Some of that ad revenue comes from recruitment advertising, and it is there that insidehighered.com and other well-established recruitment sites such as higheredjobs.com could pose a challenge to The Chronicle."