A new student newspaper is available to the DU community starting this week, but the Pioneer Business Review fills a different niche than DU’s 113-year-old student paper, the Clarion.
As the name suggests, the Pioneer Business Review has a business focus and is produced with support from the Undergraduate Business Student Association (UBSA) at the Daniels College of Business.
Spencer Arnold (BSBA finance ’11), a former vice president of UBSA, thought of the idea over a beer with friends during his senior year. He says he wanted to create a tangible product that would engage and inspire DU business students and provide them with a unifying voice.
“I just kept seeing these students doing awesome things like starting companies and getting jobs [that were] out of the ordinary, and I thought we should talk about them,” Arnold says.
Arnold recruited several friends to help execute his idea, and together they produced two trial issues of the Pioneer Business Review, which yielded positive feedback from faculty and students. After Arnold graduated in November, juniors Jillian Halterman — an international business and marketing major — and finance major Samson Eberhart became co-editors-in-chief of the publication.
“[Spencer] really wanted to create a voice for the students — something that would not only report straight news, but was going to have some opinion, ignite some controversy and have a critical eye,” Halterman says.
From the initial meetings in early 2011, the project has grown to a staff of about 40 students comprising five tactical teams, including writing, design, advertising, promotions and photography. This means DU students manage every facet of the paper’s production except for the printing.
The Pioneer Business Review will be published twice a quarter, during weeks three and seven of spring, fall and winter quarters. It will be printed in a traditional newspaper format and will be distributed to news racks throughout the DU campus and possibly to nearby businesses. The newspaper also will have an online presence.
Although the publication has the word “business” in its title, involvement isn’t limited to Daniels majors. Current staff members include students from a variety of disciplines, including international studies and journalism.
“That’s been a really cool thing because you end up with a lot of perspectives and you don’t get pigeonholed into one outlook,” Halterman says. “We are trying to be a really open forum and let it be a student voice.”
The only criterion writers have is that their stories must contain information about business. That could include articles about business trends, new product reviews or students’ entrepreneurial activities.
“The way we put it to writers is, ‘you can write about any topic that inspires you that you think students need to hear — if there’s some sort of business cash flow in it, then it’s acceptable,’” Halterman says. “We’re trying to give students another perspective outside of the classroom to supplement learning, but with a business focus.”
The Pioneer Business Review is financed through a combination of advertising revenues and funds from the UBSA, but Halterman hopes the newspaper eventually will become financially independent.
“I think if you spend time with Samson and me, you find out how passionate we are about it,” Halterman says. “It’s something we really care about, so when we did reach out to the community and got such a great response, it just confirmed to us that there is this need for this voice. It’s making us work that much harder for it because we are so excited about getting it into the community.”
For more information or to get involved with the publication, email PioneerBR@gmail.com or visit their blog or Facebook page.