"Everything we have, they can now get to," Wirt said, explaining that the Tribune can now view a Daily advertising contract and then offer the advertiser a lower rate.

Michael C. Hiestand, an attorney at the Student Press Law Center--a Washington, D.C. legal non-profit that tried to informally mediate the dispute--said that the open records decision might actually benefit college newspapers. While in this case allowing access to public records may hurt the paper, the right to view government documents is generally of great benefit to reporters, he said.

"We've always been of the position that the student newspaper was on the wrong side of [the open records] issue, that they should be accountable like any other branch [of the university]," Hiestand said. "We don't want exemptions that would allow universities not to turn over public information."

But Daily Pennsylvanian Managing Editor Mike Madden said that newspapers should be considered "mostly independent" of their public institutions.

"That the Tribune is using the sunshine law to get into the records of [the Daily's] paper struck me as a dangerous precedent," Madden said, adding that he brought the case to an editorial board vote before he signed onto the petition.

"I think it could extend beyond financial records," Madden said. "If the precedent is set, it could have disastrous effects within the world of college reporting."

Financial Fights

Gartner said that the Daily's growing revenue under an increasingly professionalized staff forced the Tribune to seek legal action.

The Daily has a budget of more than a million dollars, according to Managing Editor Rhaason K. Mitchell. Of that budget, almost all is raised through advertising, not counting the $75,000 the paper receives in student fees, which goes mainly to pay for the free paper.

"[Subscription fees] are going into a slush fund to fight me," Gartner said, noting that the fees made up a large portion of the $115,000 in surplus the Daily has earned on average over each of the last five years.

The Daily's business staff includes nine professionals, who are paid a total of $193,000. The Daily was losing money earlier in the decade during the recession and has rebounded significantly since 1992, increasing its advertisement revenues from $600,000 five years ago to $1 million last year. This resurgence was led in part by a new general manager--who was hired from the Tribune--and an advertising director.

Gartner, who is a journalism professor at Iowa State, says that the encroachment of the Daily into the Tribune's advertising base has cost him "at least a million dollars."

"We have a good relationship with the student journalists, our dispute is with these paid non-academic professionals," said Gartner, who notes that he has hired the past four editors of the Daily.

But Mitchell questioned Gartner's sincerity.

"Some of the editors are in his class, but in the two years I've been here he has never been in the Daily office," Mitchell said. "It's kind of like having smoke blown up your butt--he says one thing and does another."