SGA is currently working on a resolution to bring the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today to campus as part of USA Today's collegiate readership program. If it passes, it would be one of the best things that SGA has done in my time at Vanderbilt.

I think making students into the type of people who are likely to read newspapers regularly should be one of the goals of any university, and making papers like the NYT available to students is a great way to achieve that end. SGA to my knowledge hasn't made the costs publicly available, but I think the program could get big bang for the buck.

I was a bit surprised to the that The Hustler editorial board is opposed to the resolution. It struck me a as a strange position for students who work on a newspaper as almost a full-time job to take. The thrust of the editorial's argument is that gains from bringing the papers to campus would be "minimal" since they're already free online. Apparently that means that almost all potential newspaper readers already are getting their news online. But if that's the case, then maybe Vanderbilt Student Communications should just move all of its print divisions (The Hustler, Orbis, The Slant, etc.) to a web-only platform and save a ton of money on printing expenses. After all, readership wouldn't drop.

One other concern is the cost, but I don't think that's a major issue. I don't know what the program would cost to implement, but consider the following. You can get home delivery of USA Today for 26 weeks (roughly the amount of time we're in school each year) for 67 cents per issue, but it's unlikely that we'd even be paying that much on average because of bulk rates and lower delivery costs. Not a bad deal. I realize that this is kind of a misleading analysis (after all, not everyone will read each paper every day), but I think the payoff would be well worth it if, say, 1000 more students read the paper every day.

And maybe I'm waxing a bit old fashioned here, but I think there's something to be said for sitting down and concentrating on reading a physical newspaper rather than just surfing through a few news sites in ten minutes.