As of Oct. 4, U-Wire — the college news syndicator that supplied its 850 member colleges and universities with access to one another’s institutional newspaper content — has been “indefinitely suspended,” according to a recent report in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Web requests for U-Wire.com return a “connection timed out” error.

“U-Wire has temporarily suspended its print wire operations,” U-Wire’s General Manager Tom Orr stated in an e-mail. “The company is in the process of trying to get the wire re-launched as quickly as possible and when more information is available it will be made public. We are sorry for the service disruption and for any inconvenience this has caused our members.”

When U-Wire was in full operation, U-Wire’s 850 member newspapers — including The Sun — were granted access to a repository of articles from one another’s school papers. Editors could then select pieces to reprint in their own newspaper. Additionally, the service provided professional media outlets such as CBS and CNN with articles written by student journalists. The site facilitated the dispersion of campus news to college and university students nationwide, granting student journalists a larger readership.

Employees of U-Wire scanned its members’ papers daily, pulling content for the site. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, U-Wire has yet to pay its former student employees for their most recent work.

“On Oct. 4, all student editors received an e-mail alerting us that U-Wire operations had been suspended indefinitely,” wrote Juana Summers, a senior at the Missouri School of Journalism and former student editor for U-Wire, in a Nov. 4 blog post. “It took a frank, e-mailed conversation with the other student editors to discover we’d been stiffed: None of us had been paid for our work. … Since U-Wire cut ties with the student journalists it previously employed, we’ve tried to be resourceful and work together. However, we’ve gotten few hopeful responses that we’ll ever be paid for our time.”

On Dec. 31, 2008 U-Wire was purchased from CBS by Palestra.net, “the college network” that provides student journalists from roughly 100 schools the opportunity to get paid to write for their peers. Tom Orr is also the Executive Producer of Palestra.

An attorney for Palestra.net could not be reached for comment.

In a March 2009 interview with College Media Matters, a site which aims to “tell the story of the modern college media,” CEO of Palestra.net Joe Weasel hinted that changes may be forthcoming as a result of U-Wire’s sale to Palestra.

“You are going to see the U-Wire site maybe improved a little bit,” Weasel stated. “We’re going to launch a number of education initiatives in the fall of ’09.”