After a long and eventful summer, upperclassmen have once again returned to campus. Though the New York City skyline has been abruptly and brutally altered, the view on the Green remains unchanged. Eternal Dartmouth, one might say, the picture postcard that never goes out of date.
Yet, careful observation would reveal a subtle change that has occurred. Shining new white and green newsstands have been placed around campus. The Dartmouth is now free --for students. (Presumably, local residents and faculty abide by the Honor Principle and pay for their copy.) Any student who wants "The D" can get one free unless, God forbid, it runs out.
"The D" has gone "new" economy. Apparently, even as the now decidedly dated "new" economy limps along on life support, "The D" has decided that it would be a viable business strategy to boost circulation by giving out papers for free and relying on advertising revenue for income. A natural step to take, I guess, given that the online edition of "The D" has been in existence for a long time, and seems to me to have posed a direct challenge to the sales of the paper edition. I, for one, never bothered to buy a copy.
Astute business decisions aside, this move has serious repercussions on the rest of the campus. Repercussions that go beyond a need to compost/recycle the additional newsprint in circulation or clear the additional copies of "The D" laying around in Food Court. By altering its business strategy, "The D" had abandoned one of its previous functions -- the dorm delivery of national newspapers, like the NYT, to students.
The delivery of external newspapers was never a function of "The D." It was a natural progression, when "The D" still operated on a subscription basis, to provide these services. Its delivery network was in place, and these additional subscriptions presumably supplemented revenue from subscriptions of "The D." It was not some kind of community service project on the sideline.
However, these services yield positive benefits that goes beyond whatever commercial incentives "The D" receives. They provide, for those students who treasure up-to-date information, an affordable way to receive major national newspapers at their dorms every morning. Everyone speaks of the Dartmouth Bubble, that mysterious shield that surrounds the campus like the mountains around us. It would be too easy to blame our location for what seems to be general apathy to the world outside. We are not passive receptors of information. Information does not float through the air like oxygen. To be in the know, there must be an active step to get in. And I was one of those who paid money to have information delivered to our doors every morning -- with a travel supplement on Sundays.
The alternatives now look grim. One could rely on "The D" for world news and current affairs, all two pages of it. Undoubtedly, it does credit to the editors of "The D" to be able to summarize the events of the previous day into two full tabloid-sized sheets, but they are only appetizers to the main meal. One could pay the full newsstand price everyday, but that would come up to nearly two or three times the subscription price. One could also scavenge in Food Court, not for scraps, but for newspapers left behind, if one does not think of that as degrading behavior. Of course there is that new economy way: to read the NYT online. There is a reason why news comes on paper -- it is the best medium for print. Anyone who has tried to read the NYT or a journal article on a computer screen will know how incredibly cumbersome and tiring that is.
The last resort: the library. Free and complete editions of the NYT available everyday. But only retired people can spare the time to go to the library everyday to read the papers. That's the whole point of dorm delivery, the ability to read the papers at a time and place of your choosing. To be able to digest the news on the throne of thought while your stomach does its own digestion.
Looking to the future, the campus suffers for the business decisions of "The D." Despite the many alternatives, it would require additional costs and more effort to acquire information now as compared to before. In econospeak, there were some kind of positive externalities arising from "The D's" delivery network. Now that has been lost. It would be an exaggeration to say that Dartmouth has entered the dark ages, but compared to other institutions, the impossibility of students here being able to have newspapers delivered to their dorms does cast a shadow on the intellectual climate of the College.
