Students who couldn’t find Friday’s edition of The Daily Utah Chronicle on the racks can rest assured: We’re still here.
The Chronicle is not immune to the pressure the economic recession is putting on individuals, businesses and campus programs. With difficulty, we have decided to temporarily suspend Friday’s print edition and focus on producing high-quality journalism on our Web site, www.dailyutahchronicle.com. The other option for cutting costs would have been to minimize the size of our staff, which would have made it difficult to sustain the same level of journalism.
Although the decision wasn’t easy, we would rather print online one day a week than lower the quality of the paper. Suspending Friday’s print edition ensures that, although the method of delivery is different, the quality is the same.
Besides financial concerns, there are several positive aspects to an online-only Friday edition. Weekends usually mark the paper’s lowest readership. About 7,000 people pick up Friday’s print edition, and the Web site receives an average of 2,000 online hits on Fridays and 900 on Saturdays.
This past weekend, The Chronicle”s Web site received about 7,000 hits Friday and 4,000 on Saturday, more than making up for the print edition’s absence. We appreciate those who support us online and encourage readers to take advantage of the Web site both during the weekend and during the week. Whether the stories are published on paper or online, sharing campus news with as many people as possible is our ultimate goal.
By shifting completely online every Friday, The Chronicle will also save approximately 8,000 unread papers (out of 15,000 printed papers) from becoming garbage. Because fewer people are on campus Friday, too many newspapers were going to waste. When we reinstate Friday’s print edition we should be able to better gauge a printing amount appropriate for weekend demand.
Finally, publishing only online one day a week is an indicator of the direction journalism is ultimately going. Students should be optimistic about the future of journalism. There will never be a time when journalists are extinct. Whether newspapers survive in print or transfer completely to the Internet, there will always be demand for those who report the news.