Newspapers, a thing of the past? Or just requiring a new distribution channels…

Recently, there has been much debate about whether the Acadia Students Union should reduce the number of issues of the beloved Athenaeum.

I personally love the The Athenaeum. It is one of my favorite things at Acadia and my way to stay in touch as I am on co-op nearby, but not on campus. I see lots of discussion around the issue around printing and cutting the number of issues back. I agree with the fact that hundreds of copies are unread and wasted, I see it every time I am on campus and in local businesses in town. Every newspaper organization and many magazine companies in the world are currently facing the fact that people just aren’t reading news/stuff on paper anymore.

At Acadia University, the argument, issue, debate, unproductive waste of time (kidding), whatever you want to call it,  should not be specifically around whether to reduce copies, but how to effectively reach more people. Hear me out. Currently, the Ath essentially comes through one media channel, the paper. Arguably the website, but when I googled it, I find two. The ancient one and the joomla based site (www.theasu.com/ath)-that is apparently very difficult to use. I heard of a possible other platform from the current EIC, but I am unsure whether that went through. Apologies, off topic again.

So there is currently one channel to reach Ath readers. It costs roughly $13 680.00 per year in printing costs. Alternatively you could create new website, RSS Feed through the right channels (not just iAcadia App, but also Facebook, Twitter, the Acadiau homepage, a widget on the ASU page etc.), and instructions for how to access an RSS feed (ie. on a Blackberry, iPhone, online). Now you have 6 channels instead of one. Look how engaged people are in the Facebook discussions around this topic, what would happen if other serious topics were debated in the same way on these online platforms?

From an operational standpoint, the argument from the Athenaeum point of view is infrastructure and training. Here’s my very rough suggestion. Hire a company or web developer to make a web page that looks nice and is functional. It will probably cost between $1500-4000 depending on the scope of the expectations. Spend roughly $1000-2000 or so on training every single Ath staff member to use the platform. Make sure they are comfortable with training others to write articles. There may be some marginal integration costs into Facebook and Twitter, but I am sure there are some students or Acadia staff/professors who wouldn’t mind helping out.

So maybe you still put out a few issues in print a year, but you now have content that everyone can access through multiple platforms, anywhere you are, and for under $6000.00. Keep in mind these are very rough costs, they could be less. The initial investment is big, the upkeep and maintenance is far less. Now, some may say that companies will not pay for web advertising or not as much.

Alternatively, or additionally, get the Student Representative Council (SRC) to pass a motion allocating the Ath project to one of the executive as a summer project (haha, I know I am going to hear about this…)

Want a model? Look at the Harvard Gazette, then scale down about 5 times.