Last April, The Chronicle e- mailed a survey to all U students. We conducted the survey to see if changes we made after a June 2001 survey were effective, as well as to see what new changes we should make to satisfy you, our readers. The Chronicle is, after all, the U’s “independent student voice” and the main source for campus news and information.
Of the 28,000 surveys sent out, 1,700 of you responded. Thank you for the great feedback, particularly to the open-ended question, “How could The Daily Utah Chronicle better serve students?”
I’d like to highlight a few of the changes we’ve made in response to your feedback. Because I’m responsible for the business side of The Chronicle, I’ll mention only business changes and clarifications.
The majority of business complaints regarded distribution. The comments in that category fell into five categories: the paper was frequently late last year; we shouldn’t print so many copies; we print too few copies; we need more drop off spots; and some racks are always empty and others are always too full.
We’ve made some big changes to fix the distribution problem. The biggest change is switching printers. The new printer allows us to submit the paper electronically, has faster presses, greater color capabilities and a stricter deadline. All that means the printer will finish the paper by 4 a.m. each day, which means it will be on campus before classes start.
By consistently having the paper delivered before 7:30 a.m., we can better track the number of papers picked up per location each morning.
The nicest requests seemed to come from readers wanting a crossword puzzle. Because they asked so nicely, we’re giving them The New York Times crossword. Look for it daily, starting with this issue.
Many people requested we run more event advertisements. While we would gladly accept more event ads, the number run is dependent on individual departments and companies, based on how much money they have or want to spend on marketing those events.
However, we are beefing up our events listing on page two. We used to list free, on-campus events only, but now are listing paid events as well.
We knew our Classifieds page is widely read, but we didn’t realize how many students use it to find jobs and internships. Respondents asked that we have more job listings, so we have teamed with Career Services in an effort to encourage more employers who place listings with them to place listings in our classifieds page as well.
The second-biggest business complaint was students not wanting to fund The Chronicle with their tuition and student fees. That tells me there might be a misunderstanding about how The Chronicle is funded.
First, no tuition money goes to The Chronicle. Each student pays $3.34 a semester in student fees (the only fee lower than that is the fine- arts fee). Half of that goes to The Chronicle. That means each student is paying 2 cents an issue this semester to keep informed.
Obviously, The Chronicle cannot survive on that money alone. Student fees are a small part of The Chronicle’s income. The rest of the money comes from advertising revenue. And nearly all advertising revenue comes from print ads, which explains why we can’t move to a Web-only publication, as some of you had suggested.
As for The Chronicle online, we had some readers not know it was online or e-mailed, some who wanted us to drive more readers online and others who question why we have readers register for it.
We have made a concentrated effort to get readers online the past two years. We’ve had house ads in nearly every issue mentioning our Web site. We require online readers to register so we can e-mail each issue to them, of which they can opt out. Of our 12,000 current registered readers, 6,000 have The Chronicle sent to their inboxes each morning.
Along with printing changes allowing us to distribute the paper earlier each morning, some technology changes we made assure all stories will be posted online by 7:30 each morning also. And new online this semester are PDF files of the actual newspaper pages that can be viewed by Adobe Acrobat Reader. That way, anyone can view the print ads online.
We hope these changes work well for you. If not, let us know. We welcome feedback.
Oh, and whoever complained about the “provocative Blue Boutique” ads we run: Sorry, but I think you’ve confused us with City Weekly-we haven’t run any.