Campus readership: a new direction

Last Wednesday, Duke Student Government canceled the existing undergraduate campus newspaper readership program. Started in 2000 by University President Nan Keohane and taken up in 2002 by DSG, the program sought to engage students with national and world affairs through print subscriptions of major newspapers like The New York Times and USA Today. After its cancellation, however, DSG now has plans to reboot the program to match the rapidly-evolving digital news media landscape that now defines the market among college readers.

While the old newspaper readership program may have been of great value to previous generations of undergraduates, low readership was symptomatic of the recent shift in news consumption. Current undergraduates are increasingly likely to consume news via online and mobile platforms, specifically through social media networks and headline notifications. A new readership program that takes that as a sign to allocate money towards more mobile and online platform access would correctly respond to student demand and attract more users.

Further, emphasizing online access over print distribution allows for closer regulation of who benefits from the program. The old readership program was often used by faculty, staff, administrators and graduate students despite the program being funded by undergraduate student activities fees. Requiring academic reading passes to go through Net IDs or other unique forms of identification would properly address this issue. That said, we also encourage these groups to begin funding readership programs of their own or to work with DSG to join the new program.

Increased online subscription, unfortunately, comes with a few drawbacks. Experiencing news in print form is still attractive to some, and DSG should consider retaining a small order of print copies for students to use. Ideally, students would be able to opt-in to a print subscription at the beginning of the year. Of course, we suggest that the issue of who picks up the papers be addressed perhaps with one centrally located new distribution box that limits access depending on what kind of Duke ID is swiped.

But beyond reorienting the readership program towards technology, we believe DSG should also strongly consider adding a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal to the program to expand the types of coverage and ideology provided by the program. You only have to compare the headlines and editorial columns of the two newspapers to see how having access to both would be a benefit for intellectual conversation. We further encourage DSG and the University to promote the other reading material available on campus. The subscriptions Duke has to The Economist, Foreign Affairs and other publications should be much more widely used by students, many of whom just are not aware of how easy they are to access.

In addition to a new, expanded undergraduate readership program, initiatives along the same lines by other University communities and the promotion of all our content subscriptions, our campus community should have no shortage of ability to stay in tune with the news cycle that we are otherwise fed through phone updates and the occasional social media link.

We therefore continue to recommend that the undergraduate community deepen its understanding of the ever-changing outside world while they concurrently live in the all-encompassing undergraduate experience at Duke. While some students will inevitably not take advantage of the new readership program, we hope that a new program will better enable those who are just an academic pass away from engaging with the content-rich world of current news and affairs to do so.