As recently as fall 2006, Northeastern students could grab free copies of the Boston Globe or the Boston Herald as they entered academic buildings across campus. A bundle of The New York Times was dropped on the ground floor of the Curry Student Center each morning. Students could pick up the paper, or papers, of their choice each morning on the way to class. Some may have just grabbed it for the Sudoku or crossword puzzles, but those papers had another use, too.
They made the student body smarter. Every issue gave input into what was going on in the city, state, nation and world. As students waited for their class to start, tried to get through a boring lecture or sat down for coffee, they had a chance to absorb some information about the world around them – free of charge.
Earlier last year, the piles dwindled. Then they started to disappear. The Times and Heralds were the first to go, followed soon by the Globes. USA Today showed up for a month this semester, but that too may go the way of broadsheets before it as the program’s four-week trial period ended last month.
Today, no major publications are given away on campus. And it’s affecting individual reading habits, as well as established teaching practices in some classes – especially in the School of Journalism.
Northeastern provides its students with high speed Internet and a premium cable package, but it can’t find a way to work free newspapers into the budget? The university has provided papers before; it could do it again.
The newspaper industry too has a stake in keeping newspapers on college campuses: providing free newspapers makes reading the paper a habit, and then students will continue to read the paper even when they’re no longer on campus. If newspapers become an important part of a reader’s life, they may, later in life, shell out the 75 cents for The Globe, 50 cents for The Herald or $1.25 for The Times.
With the growth of web journalism, newspapers have had to alter some longstanding practices, not least because of a sharp decline in circulation. In some ways newspapers are antiquated, a relic from the days before CNN, Fox News and Google News. But newspapers are still the dominant newsgathering organizations in the United States. Just look at the Catholic Church scandal a few years back: it was the Boston Globe that broke the story – under the reins of a Northeastern professor at that. Newspapers still have the resources to break news and provide analysis, despite major changes in the industry.
As readership continues to fall, especially in younger demographics, newspapers need to find a way to keep people hooked. Giving something away for free develops a habit and after five years of free papers, a Northeastern student may be hard-pressed to go without one.
