Staff Editorial
In the Aug. 29 edition of The Bona Venture, the opinion page ran a piece titled “Cuts create reading painbow.”
The piece detailed Student Government Association’s decision to cut the funding for the College Readership Program to allocate more money to struggling clubs and organizations. While the author understood the move, she stated the school should find some other, less expensive way to get newspapers to students.
About two weeks ago, an Olean Times Herald dispenser appeared in the lobby in the Reilly Center. In the news stand next to it sits a dozen or more Buffalo News issues per day available for free.
While this doesn’t compare to the stacks of USA Today, New York Times and Buffalo News that appeared on news racks all over campus, those who are responsible deserve commendation.
The office of finance and administration approved the Olean Times Herald dispenser, which has issues available for $1 and $2.50 on Sunday. While nothing beats free, students are able to keep apprised of local happenings for a modest price.
It’s not clear, however, who deserves credit for the free Buffalo News issues. According to the office of marketing and communication, the issues are courtesy of an anonymous donor.
Whoever the generous and faceless hero is, he deserves credit for a program that wasn’t meant to die just yet.
Sure, students don’t have access to dozens of issues or national papers like they did in the past; but most of those papers sat unused on the rack anyway. There was no sense in spending so much money (upwards of $20,000 some years) on a program that few students were taking advantage of.
With the two newspapers now available, students can keep up with news from the surrounding area, news that likely affects their everyday lives.
St. Bonaventure’s largest recruiting area is Buffalo. In fact, Olean is in the Buffalo News’ circulation area. Students who get the paper at home may want to keep reading after leaving for school. Meanwhile, students from other areas might want to learn more about the area they’ve chosen to go to school in. It’s for these reasons that the amount of newspapers available on campus should expand next year, not decline.
Bringing back the College Readership Program likely isn’t feasible or worth it. But, if enough money opens up in the SGA budget, it would be wise to get at least a few issues of national newspapers available to students.
It’s no secret that newspapers aren’t as vital or prominent as they once were. No one’s asking for thousands of dollars’ worth of unused newspapers to be strewn across campus.
It’d just be nice to have a dozen or so issues available each day of one local and one national newspaper for the admittedly-small group of students that still refuse to click through slideshows.
This editorial represents the views of The Bona Venture staff.
