By Rachel Konieczny
Assistant news editor
St. Bonaventure University hosted a presentation workshop on Tuesday, Feb. 3 to encourage students to subscribe to free digital access and further explore The New York Times website.
Laura Reino, an education specialist from The New York Times, presented on ways to use the publication for academic work, how to navigate The New York Times site and how particular sections of the site operate. Reino began the workshop by teaching students and faculty how to authenticate their accounts when registering for the free access. She said students can authenticate an account at https://myaccount.nytimes.com/verification/edupass by using their school email address.
Once Reino logged on, she showed students and faculty the supplemental resources available, such as the Topics, Chronicle, Compendium and Upshot sections found on the homepage.
The workshop was the result of ongoing conversations between Ann Tenglund, associate library director, the Student Government Association (SGA) and The New York Times since a partnership was formed with The New York Times last December. According to Alexander Noguerola, executive president of SGA, The New York Times reached out to Bonaventure after the on-campus readership program was cancelled.
“We just started this partnership with The New York Times in December, so Alex [Noguerola], the SGA, and the library [and faculty] and I have been working together to bring this about,” Tenglund said. “Laura’s the one that suggested that she could come to campus and give a personal introduction to what The New York Times has, so the idea was to make sure that people had an idea of the richness of the content and how it could be used.”
According to Noguerola, the cost of the partnership is approximately $3000, which SGA and the library paid. Every student who registers will have digital access to The New York Times for the remainder of his or her academic career at Bonaventure.
Noguerola said the purpose of the presentation was for students to recognize the benefits of the online access.
“We are grateful in SGA that the library wanted to join in the efforts to make The New York Times available to the students and Ann [Tenglund] has been extremely helpful in making sure it was able to return to Bona’s,” Noguerola said. “We want students to recognize all the amazing features they have access to online now. It is a lot different than a paper copy in what a student (and faculty) have access to.”
Junior Whitney Downard attended the presentation and shared her thoughts on the new digital access.
“I love reading The New York Times, but I can’t afford to spend the money and subscribe, so I always end up going over the ten-article-a-month limit,” Downard said. “I was excited to learn about an opportunity to read more New York Times articles and have access to all the other sites and databases offered.”
Downard said she is excited to explore additional sections of the site on her own time, specifically the Chronicle, to view word usage over the length of the Times’ publication. As a journalism and mass communication and Spanish double major, she is interested in how language and its usage changes over time.
Tenglund said she hopes students take advantage of the opportunity to have access to a top-notch newspaper. For additional questions, Tenglund can be reached at ateng@sbu.edu.
Tenglund said, “We’re hoping we get a lot of people to sign up with The New York Times and we’re also hoping that people start to explore the other aspects of it and use it for their academic work as well as their personal reading pleasure.”
