News junkies taking classes on campus this summer will be able to catch more headlines now that ASMSU is extending its newspaper readership program to newsstands in the summer semesters.
The USA Today Collegiate Readership Program, a partnership between USA Today and ASMSU, provides a variety of newspapers to students at a lower educational rate and will see an increase of distribution across campus in response to student demand, ASMSU Director of Media Relations Samantha Artley said.
ASMSU is MSU’s undergraduate student government.
MSU has the ninth largest newspaper readership program in the country, out of about 500 programs that are partnered with USA Today, having read more than 181,000 newspapers through the program since late August 2011, said Mary Ellen Couture, a regional marketing manager at USA Today.
Artley said ASMSU is renewing its contract with USA Today for the upcoming academic year — a total of about $108,000 — which includes some rollover funds from last year and the program’s pay-on-consumption distribution method.
The new summer readership program is included in this contract.
“With all the talks and what’s been presented, our distribution to students is actually going to increase,” she said.
Artley said newspapers will be available during the summer at open residence halls and major academic buildings and will continue to be offered in the future unless news consumption decreases.
Couture, who presented the information to ASMSU at a General Assembly meeting earlier this month, said a certain number of newspapers are placed in locations across campus based on an algorithm analyzing how many newspapers are picked up from each newsstand.
If one newsstand has stocked 20 newspapers but only 18 are picked up, for example, ASMSU would be charged only for the 18 newspapers and not the leftover newspapers, which are returned to the company, Couture said.
Of the newspapers ASMSU provides, The New York Times, Detroit Free Press and USA Today all operate under this system, although the Financial Times does not, she said.
ASMSU Vice Chair for Finance and Operations Chris Schotten also said at last week’s meeting that ASMSU is looking into finding a way to offer online subscriptions for The New York Times to students through the readership program.
Under this program, which is connected to the USA Today program but not subsidized by ASMSU’s readership program, faculty can incorporate reading The New York Times in classrooms to increase readership on campus, Artley said.
Special education freshman Myvonne Gil-Gallardo said she often is assigned to read The New York Times to study current events for one of her writing classes. She said increasing the
number of newspapers in a classroom setting might encourage people to read newspapers on their own time.
“Sometimes people don’t know what’s going on, which surprises me,” she said.
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