We, at the Daily Egyptian, are newspaper people. We love the news and we feel there is no better way to become informed than by reading an in-depth newspaper article. We make every effort to bring this campus such news everyday.

Sometimes, as we are striving to get a deadline story written and on the page in time to run the presses in color, we forget that there are millions of other things happening in the world – and a few of them are probably way more important than what is breaking news in Carbondale.

But more often than not, we keep an open mind to the larger world by logging on to the Internet and reading national and international news there daily. It saves paper, litter and a lot of money.

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Now there is a proposal to make national newspapers even more readily available on campus for – sigh, another student fee – $5 per year.

Representatives from USA Today recently approached the Graduate and Professional Student Council to discuss the Collegiate Readership Program, which is designed to enhance the learning environment of college students by providing a collection of regional, national and/or local newspapers to campus each day.

At first glace, it appears this could be a wonderful addition to SIUC. But with examination of the experiences of other universities, we find this to not be the case.

Gerry Hamilton, general manager of The Daily Collegian at Penn State, said the university’s newspaper suffered greatly after Penn State conducted a pilot project in which The New York Times and the local paper, the Centre Daily Times, delivered their newspapers to campus each morning.

“The academic year 1997-98 was an exceptionally difficult one for The Daily Collegian,” Hamilton wrote for a special report. “We experienced unprecedented turnover of student leadership and key employees, the utter collapse of our advertising sales departments, a crushing financial crisis and a long list of other challenges.”

Throughout Hamilton’s 17-page report, he mentions various ways the Collegiate Readership Program hurt The Daily Collegian. Despite graphs, figures and detailed explanations of his reasoning, the administration at Penn State rejected the idea that the program was hurting its own campus newspaper and it continued.

We hope the administration and student governments will see through this program before it does the same here.

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The corporate newspapers certainly want to educate the public, and in this case, the students. But surely the bottom line is about money. They want to insure college students start reading their papers now, so they will continue to do so in the future. And after all, five bucks for a year’s worth of newspapers is about the best deal around – well, except for the Daily Egyptian. They want to increase their circulation so they can get more money from their advertisers – and the about $100,000 yearly gain from the SIUC student fees couldn’t hurt. But $100,000 could also be put to good use on this campus, instead of being sent off to pad the pockets of executives in New York or Washington, D.C.

The USA Today is proposing the students give them – and possibly the Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post Dispatch and/or the Southern Illinoisan – our money, so they can make more money. Right now, they are setting the fee at $5 per student per year, but according to the College Media Review, this starting fee has often moved upward of $10 once the program is in effect.

We think any of these newspapers would be a great addition to this campus, but they should not charge us through a student fee. If they want to come on campus, they should be free to the students, just like the Daily Egyptian.

The University does not pay for the Daily Egyptian in any way. We do not receive student fees, state money, tuition money or fees of any other kind. And we don’t want to because if we don’t take their money, they can’t tell us how to spend or what coverage they would prefer to see. We want to remain a vital – but separate – part of this University.

We put the DE out every day because of the advertising revenue our student advertising representatives sell. This keeps the Daily Egyptian in the black, well staffed and paid. We aren’t asking to be subsidized by student fees; we are just asking that major corporate moneymaking machines aren’t either.

Even if these newspapers were distributed on campus and subsidized by the students, we think it would be a long time, if ever, that the DE would fold. All the current staff members would be long gone and remain virtually unaffected by this program. But the University would not be so lucky.

Many of us came to Southern Illinois University because we wanted to work at the Daily Egyptian. For us, putting out a daily newspaper has been the most productive, hands-on learning environment possibly achieved on a college campus.

As Hamilton said in his report, “if competing with professionals was really a sound approach for student activities, Penn State’s football team would be competing in the National Football League.”

We are not the New York Times or USA Today. We are students who are putting out the best newspaper we can while learning what journalism is all about. We fear that if students are forced to compete for advertising dollars and content with the best professionals in the business, the future quality of the Daily Egyptian, SIUC’s award-winning newspaper, will be at risk.

If the DE was not able to produce at our current levels, promising journalism students and instructors may not be as likely to come to Carbondale. We are afraid this will cause the School of Journalism to suffer, resulting in a rippling effect into the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts and the University as a whole.