Due to financial difficulties, The Eagle will be published only once a week, most Tuesdays, for the 2010-2011 school year.
While the change is generally unpleasant for The Eagle staff, we hope that printing only once a week will present new opportunities for The Eagle to improve. Among these opportunities are:
• Better content. Publishing twice a week made it extremely difficult for The Eagle to publish as much quality content as we would have liked. More frequent deadlines prevented in-depth reporting and encouraged superficial reporting. The rush to simply produce enough content each week was difficult, time consuming and ultimately wasteful. Printing fewer stories weekly will allow articles to be more thorough, better reported and more carefully fact-checked.
• A better online presence. Instead of focusing most of The Eagle staff’s efforts on filling newsprint, we can now focus on doing our primary task — informing the AU community. This year, The Eagle’s website will be updated more consistently with breaking and general news stories. We hope that each day The Eagle’s website will have new, unique and interesting content.
• A new design. Our old format (broadsheet) was not conducive to our new mission of being more than just a twice-weekly newspaper. Our new format (known as tabloid) will allow more creative designs and more interesting features. For instance, in this issue you’ll find a full-color Metro map to help you navigate the city. In later issues we hope to keep exploring the new opportunities tabloid format presents. Fully redesigning a newspaper is a difficult task usually done by large staffs armed with data, cash and time. We have none of these luxuries. We ask for your patience as we shape and change the newspaper over the semester until we get it just right.
Is The Eagle independent?
No, and yes.
The Eagle is fully editorially independent and does not have any administrator or University official review our content before publication. We are not, however, financially independent from the University. Previously we have been extended a $100,000 loan from Student Activities to cover printing costs, stipends and other costs. The Eagle would then pay this loan back using ad revenue generated from our Business Office. Last year our Business Office — which is staffed by students — fell short of this goal by approximately $50,000. In order to ensure the University we would not lose money in the future, we had to cut our budget from $100,000 to about $50,000.
Reducing the number of newspapers we publish saves much of this. Stipend cuts between 50 and 100 percent accounted for another chunk. We will also save a whopping $10,000 by having Eagle staff distribute newspapers Tuesday mornings, rather than relying on an outside service.
We will be working throughout the year to permanently fix our financial problems. Furthermore, The Eagle will be working to fix any systemic flaws that led to these problems.
In the process we will make this newspaper — and by extension this community — better.
Sincerely, Charlie Szold Editor in Chief
