By Caitlin Yoder
This semester, the University’s policies for paying ASUPS Media staff recently underwent some major changes. Specifically for writers on The Trail and photographers at ASUPS Photo Services, compensation had been managed through a piece-pay system where staff were paid for each article they write or event they shoot. The University has now transitioned to a stipend-based model for all media staff. This change has not affected leadership positions already using this model such as KUPS General Manager, Editor-in-Chief of The Trail, and other fixed roles.
Chief Financial Officer Kim Kvaal worked alongside the Office of Finance, Student Affairs, and ASUPS administration/leadership to implement these changes. These groups were consulted to help “assess the options and determine the best path forward. Their input helped us develop a model that supports student work while ensuring compliance,” Kvaal said. The new change is intended to “synchronize with other leadership positions to create a simpler and more consistent payment structure” for ASUPS media members, as well as “to ensure the payment structure aligns with University policies and external regulations for student leadership roles” Kvaal said. ASUPS Medias themselves were not consulted or alerted about the change prior to its implementation. Despite returning as General Manager for Photo Services, Nainoa Ohata (‘27) says he wasn’t informed until mid-September when the changes had already taken effect. “I couldn’t plan for it and I had to entirely reimagine how I was going to run Photo Services as a media,” Ohata said.
In the past, Photo Services would send a photographer to a requested event, collect the fee from the event organizer, and pay it directly to the photographer, without impacting the budget. Now he has to contract photographers under the assumption that they’ll do a certain amount of work. He must forecast all expenses in advance without any data to indicate how much income he can expect over the year, and a low budget means that he can’t cover all operations and pay his photographers fairly. “People are annoyed and I’m annoyed because I can’t guarantee how much I’m going to pay them for the year. Or if I’m going to keep all of them on as photographers for the full year,” Ohata said.
Ohata also has to adapt to a decrease in his already insufficient budget. “I requested $10,000 and I got $7,730 which is a decrease from the $8,500 we got last year.” Considering $4,500 is taken out of the budget to account for the General Manager’s stipend, a number set by ASUPS, that leaves $3,230 for Photo Services to work with: not nearly enough to function, let alone try to grow. Increasing publicity, awareness and outreach have long been a big concern for Photo Services, but these complications are only making it more difficult to achieve these goals.
The last couple of years have been a time of rebuilding for Photo Services, and these financial issues are only complicating that process. With all of the other photography resources on campus, Photo Services is currently a somewhat redundant campus body. KUPS and The Trail have some of their own photographers, as do Marketing and Communications, Athletic Communications, and Admissions. “There are other bodies on campus that are already doing the same things that we are, that are doing them with larger budgets than we have.” This redundancy is causing Photo Services to have a hard time getting requests for events, which would help them grow. “To the rest of the campus, to the other departments, we literally don’t exist. Nobody asks us for contributions or anything.” Yet, Photo Services provides an accessible way for students to book professional level photography for their events, as well as a way for student-photographers to build their portfolio.
Ohata has been working hard to rejuvenate Photo Services, at least as much as he can within the budget. “The number of people that go ‘Oh, Photo Services exists?’ has gone down this year from last year, but still we have so much more work to do.”