The Penn State Alumni Association honored Collegian Alumni Bob Buday and Bill Guthlein with the 2025 Philip Philip Mitchell Alumni Service Award.
The award recognizes those who have performed significant public service by sharing or volunteering their talent, time and resources on behalf of Penn State. The Alumni Association awarded this prize to Bob and Bill for their work to secure the future of The Daily Collegian after the university eliminated all funding for the student news organization.
They began in 2023 by assembling a team of 12 volunteer researchers, including three who were current or former Collegian AIG board members, to research best practices of college news organizations across the country.
Bob and Bill, both Collegian sports writers in the 1970s, are business experts who performed this research and analysis pro bono for The Collegian and The Collegian AIG. Bob is a business book author and CEO at Buday Thought Leadership Partners. Bill is a Certified Public Accountant, Chartered Financial Analyst, and principal at WJG Associates.
Bob, Bill and the research team contributed literally hundreds of hours of research and analysis, and planned how best to ensure the recommendations from the study can be implemented. The value of this volunteered time is inestimable, and there is no way the Collegian or the Collegian AIG could have afforded to pay for it.
Also incalculable is its importance to preserving The Daily Collegian as a valuable learning experience for Penn State business and journalism students as well as a vital news source for Penn State students, staff, and community members.
That team initially analyzed 863 college news organizations (CNOs). They narrowed that group to 93 by selecting those that had received recognition such as the Hearst Awards, had been identified by U.S. News as among the best large campus outlets, or were located at the best journalism schools.
Finally, the researchers winnowed that group down to 31 by selecting only those that were non-profit organizations, independent from their universities, like The Collegian. In addition, like The Collegian, these 31 all serve large campuses with NCAA sports teams.
The team gathered data from 15 years’ worth of 990 tax filings, which are public documents, from the 31 CNOs.
The team then interviewed the editors-in-chief, business managers, and board chairs of more than 20 CNOs to identify CNO best practices to gain larger audiences, increase revenue, raise contributions and grants, and increase investment income and other non-program service revenue.
They produced a 72-page, 20,000-word report titled “Whither the College News Organization?” and shared the results of the research in the spring of 2024 with Collegian leadership and every college news organization that participated in the interview process. Bob and Bill also presented the results to The Collegian staff and PSU alumni during We Are Weekend on campus in June of 2024.
In October, Editor and Publisher published an extensive story about the study.
Now, Bob and Bill have added information from another 16 nonprofit CNOs’ 990 tax forms to the original set of 33. Unfortunately, that additional 7,800 pieces of data didn’t change the results found previously, which is that total revenue, and particularly advertising revenue, for CNOs declined precipitously since 2000, and most CNOs have little to no reserves.
In March, Bob and Bill presented their findings at the Long Beach, Calif., annual conference of the Associated Collegiate Press organization. They spoke at five, 50-minute sessions at the invitation of the National College Media organization.
Last month, The Collegian selected Bob and Bill to receive the 2025 Daily Collegian Distinguished Alumni Award. Before the award ceremony at The Collegian’s 138th Birthday Bash, Bob and Bill met with Collegian staff and leaders, the new Collegian general manager and Bellisario College of Communications officials to help ensure recommendations in their report are implemented and to assure Collegian students that they continue to be available to them to consult whenever the students feel they need help.
Members of the research team are Pulitzer Prize winner Drex Heikes, who was editor-in-chief of The Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon; Mo Boyce, a 2019 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with B.S. degrees in astronomy and physics, and Dan McCool, who worked for Onward State, the chief competitor to The Collegian, from 2010 to 2014. In addition, these Collegian alumni served on the team: Matt Martell, Dave Morris, Jerry Schwartz, Michael Tsao, Sheila Young, Rich Heidorn Jr., Curt Harler, Caroline Crasnick and Cathy Buday.
Bill Guthlein, left, and Bob Buday, right, chat at a Daily Collegian event.
