Mackenzie Kilb
Election fever has hit campus. Lectures, debates, movies and panels abound for students looking to support their candidate or trying to choose between the candidates. The faces of John McCain and Barack Obama are everywhere, but at the end of the day many students still turn to an old, reliable source for their information: the newspaper.
Sponsored and promoted by student government and USA Today, the Collegiate Readership Program, started at Notre Dame in 2005, gives students free, daily access to USA Today, The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times at six different locations across campus, including both dining halls, LaFortune Student Center, the parking lot of the Joyce Center and two new locations at Hesburgh Library and the Mendoza College of Business.
A North Dining Hall employee said she noticed an increase in the amount of students picking up the newspapers this year. “In election years, the numbers do spike,” Ryan Brellenthin, junior student government president of academic affairs, says. While the numbers were not yet in, Brellenthin suggested that an escalated interest in politics could certainly cause the levels of readership to go up.
“This year we did a bigger promotion of it,” said junior Student Body Vice President Grant Schmidt, citing another factor in the increase of readers. Schmidt said they promoted Collegiate Readership during the first week of school with T-shirts, pens, notepads and pins in order to make students aware of the program and also to ensure that everyone knew it was free.
The program is paid for by student government and is monitored by USA Today, whose database records the number of papers left in the newsstands at the end of each day. This allows student government to allocate their budget and to make future decisions about the number of papers in each location. Grant said over 1,000 papers are taken each day, with South Dining Hall receiving the most traffic.
The goal of the program is to give students “exposure to day-to-day news” and to help them “break free of the Notre Dame bubble,” Brellenthin says.
Schmidt said students often ask why some newspapers were chosen instead of others. Aside from providing their own newspaper, USA Today tries to offer universities access to both a national newspaper and a regional newspaper, which is why Notre Dame receives The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times and not papers like the often-requested The Wall Street Journal.
