By Harrison Leone
Editor-in-Chief
In an effort to improve our online presence, The BV is rebooting a long-dormant feature of our website: the editor’s blog. Each week, readers of this blog will be offered in-depth access to the life of a Bona Venture editor. The BV is full of talented and dedicated people, and this space will give our editor’s a chance to share their true feelings with our readers. These feelings may not always be good, and they could trend towards annoyance at times, but for anyone interested in St. Bonaventure’s student-run newspaper, they will be enjoyable.
The first edition of the editor’s blog will cover a topic little known to even some of the Bona Venture staff: distribution. Prior to this year, getting the papers to our faithful readers had been a paid position and had been handled by associate editors Kyle Zamaria and Sean Corey (previously Elizabeth Grady and Sam Berkhead as well). Due to budget constraints, The BV is no longer able to make this a paid job, meaning the responsibilities of distribution fall to upper management, or anyone at the paper with a car.
The first step of the distribution process involves getting to the Olean Times Herald to pick up the copies of the paper at 8 on Friday morning. There seems to be a grand metrological conspiracy to snow every Friday between 7:30 and 8:30 am, and this stretch of the journey from campus to Highway 16 becomes occasionally perilous.
The papers, which are bundled in four hulking stacks of two hundred and fifty copies, are then brought to our off-campus locations, which are the Clubhouse Restaurant, the Motherhouse, the Alleghany Library and, of course, the Burton.
After these copies are delivered, the on-campus portion of distribution begins, and The BV is dropped off at points around St. Bonaventure too numerous to mention here; the places that receive our largest number of issues each week are the RC, Plassmann Hall and Café La Verna. We are currently in the process of rethinking the on-campus phase of our distribution, and we would gladly take any input that would help us reach the campus community more effectively. Once the papers are distributed on and off campus, issues are mailed out to our subscribers, a process that was interrupted last semester as a result of the switch to bi-weekly and is now rebooting. Any subscribers who have not been receiving their papers are encouraged to contact us, and we will try to get your subscription back online.
Distribution is not the most glamorous part of putting The BV together, which is saying something, since there is not much glamour in running down reluctant interviews, swearing at computer screens for hours or scrambling to meet deadlines. It is the last link in the weekly chain of production, as well as one of the most important. The next time you’re around campus and see a stack of papers on a table in Rob or the newsstand outside the entrance of La Verna, even if you don’t grab a copy, think of the BV editors who slogged over snow, ice and delayed delivery trucks to get them there.
