IUSA brings national papers to students, faculty

Beginning Feb. 2, The New York Times, USA Today and The Indianapolis Star will be available to students at eight different campus locations.\nThe IU Student Association is sponsoring the pilot program, making all three papers available to students and staff five days a week. The trial will last until Feb. 27, when a committee of students, faculty and Indiana Daily Student representatives will discuss whether or not to allow the papers to have a permanent presence on campus.\nIU participated in a similar pilot with The New York Times alone last year.\n"We have been talking with the faculty and students, and students want to have more options on campus about what to read and where they want to get their news," IUSA Vice President Grant McFann said. "We feel like the faculty is interested in raising the level of academic discourse in classrooms."\nThe pilot program is being funded entirely by USA Today. But like the pilot, these funds are not permanent, and once the trial period ends, the committee will have to search elsewhere for funding. When the committee meets sometime in March, it will then decide how to fund the additional papers should it choose to make a permanent deal with the three newspapers. A possible venue for funding would be to request a portion of the activity fee from the Board of Trustees that would amount to roughly $2 per student.\nBut the three national papers would not benefit everyone, as the free papers would threaten the campus paper, the IDS. Currently, readership for the IDS is nearly 90 to 94 percent of the student population, which benefits the ad driven paper, said IDS Associate Publisher and General Manager Don Cross.\n"The IDS is funded by advertising -- that is how it is free," Cross said. "Advertisers pay for readership, so if numbers go down, then we may have to lower rates, which means we would have less money."\nAnother query many had concerning last year's pilot program with The New York Times was that most bins were empty by 9 a.m. With professors, staff and graduate students gathering up most of the free papers, undergraduate students were left out in the cold. Not to mention no surveys were taken to measure the responses from students.\nTo combat those problems, IUSA has increased the number of papers from last year's 400 papers per day to this year's total of 3,000. On the first and last days of the trial run, surveys will be placed with each paper to get some feedback from those who pick up the newspapers.\n"Last year no surveys were taken during that program, there wasn't anything that was really gained out of it, so this should be more productive," McFann said. "It is similar, just on a larger scale."\nThe papers will be made available in two locations in the Indiana Memorial Union, the Kelley School of Business, Ballantine Hall, Woodburn Hall, Gresham and Wright food courts and the Main Library.\n-- Contact senior writer Brian Janosch at bjanosch@indiana.edu.