The Student Senate will vote Wednesday on whether to participate in a four-week USA Today pilot program to promote current events literacy among college students.
For those of you who bothered to pick up this totally free newspaper today, surely you can see the humor—and desperation—in this program.
Newspapers are on their deathbeds. They are such goners, in fact, USA Today and its partners in this program, The News and Observer and The New York Times, are willing to give away newspapers, a la Technician, for four weeks in an attempt to hook universities on a program that almost assuredly doesn’t break even.
These aged medias are so fraught with a shrinking readership that they are willing to lose money in hopes of picking up a few younger readers.
It’s idiocy on their part. Most of you reading this aren’t going to pay for a newspaper subscription after college in an effort to stay tuned to the world around you. If you’re like a lot of our readers, you usually pick up this paper to work through the crossword or Sudoku. Having a few other crossword choices in the morning isn’t going to improve your literacy.
Simply, you don’t really care about the world outside your own bubble. And if you do happen to care about a particular issue or topic, you follow it on Twitter or through Google.
This generation doesn’t feel the need to get out of bed and walk to the end of the driveway to find out the score of last night’s game; that’s what the iPhone or Droid on the nightstand is for.
These are national and local newspapers with real cost, one of the reasons I cancelled my own subscriptions. But that doesn’t mean students are going to covet the savings and pick them up with an anxious desire to read about the events of the day. They will be pulled out because free stuff always finds a home on a college campus.
The sort of student who is actually excited about the news is the person already reading the New York Times on his or her smart phone or laptop. By the time that newspaper hits the stand, they’ll already have seen the story.
The real question then is not if Student Senate should sign us up for this free pilot program, it’s whether or not that should lead to adopting the full program with its $10 per year increase to student fees.
Based on the logic we just espoused—that college students are generally disinterested in paying for newspapers—it makes no sense for Student Government or the University in general to support a program that would hide that charge in already exorbitant student fees.
They’ve already been driven sky high by the University in recent years to pay for the public menace that is the new Talley Student Center. Raising fees even another $10 per year is totally unnecessary and would only serve to make a college education another $40—more realistically $50—more expensive.
Instead of senselessly rubber-stamping another fee increase, Student Senate could try something new and think this through to its logical conclusion.
We don’t need this. Do us a favor—no new fees.
