Every semester, the University charges students a fee to provide national newspapers on stands located throughout campus. This semester, LSU Student Government’s contract with those publications is up for renegotiation, allowing SG to bring new benefits to students at no extra cost.
With the upcoming change, every student, faculty and staff member will be able to have single-user access to online editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In addition, SG will also still offer print editions of those papers which will be located more strategically around campus.
“We knew that the program had some things we wanted to change about it,” SG director of policy Jacques Petit said.
Each semester, one dollar from every student’s fee bill is allocated to the SG Newspaper Initiative, which then goes toward the provision of the print newspapers available on campus such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal
Noting higher education’s dire budget situation, having wasteful pots of money was not an option, SG president Zack Faircloth said.
“We’re using the existing funds that we collect from the student fee,” Petit said. “Through our work and connection with LSU Libraries, we were able to get more funding from them and then … we were able to talk with the [Office of Academic Affairs] and gain even more funding from them.”
Because of the poor planning of the current locations of the newsstands, the $60,000 student fee is mostly on University faculty members as students who may read those papers do not frequent the areas the stands are located, Faircloth said.
With the renegotiation, SG figured students in colleges like the E.J. Ourso College of Business, Manship School of Mass Communication or the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College may want to pick up copies of the papers, but there weren’t any stands located anywhere near those buildings, Faircloth said.
“We realized, the best way to [provide these news outlets at a convenient location] was to offer online access to everybody,” Faircloth said. “What ended up happening is, we realized we could take the $60,000 … and allocate it to something that was meaningful to every student on campus, not just the 50 people who picked up the paper.”
The current locations of the newsstands are Tureaud Hall, Coates Hall, the Student Union, the 459 Commons and Middleton Library. The new locations of these newsstands will be in the Business Education Complex, Lockett Hall, Laville Hall and keep the one in front of Middleton Library.
“The [master plan] located the hotspots on campus where students travel, and so we’re utilizing that data to better place for students to grab the paper whenever they need to,” Petit said.
Current contracts with the news outlets are not up for renewal until April, meaning students will begin to see these services roll out at the end of the summer or beginning of the fall 2017 semester.
Modules for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal will also be integrated into the new LSU app, debuting March 30, as the news services launch.
“Some people would say that journalism is dying,” SG presidential press secretary Jayce Genco said. “The way news is consumed is constantly changing … and we’re bringing LSU students into the 21st century with no added fees.”
