The ASWSU Senate heard an offer from the New York Times for a subscription service for the upcoming school year that would grant the student body access to the newspaper’s content.
Todd Halvorsen, a New York Times account executive, presented the senators with an offer of a subscription that would grant digital access to the New York Times to all WSU undergraduate and graduate students.
If the subscription was implemented, the service would cost around $1 per student for access to only news articles, and $1.50 per student for an all-access subscription based on the student body head count, Halvorsen said.
The news-only subscription would not include access to additional materials, such as games or cooking content, Halvorsen said. However, the all-access program would.
The all-access program would also grant students access to The Athletic, which is a subscription-based service that provides sports coverage, according to the New York Times’s website. This would allow students to read all sports content published by the New York Times.
“The difference between this and Sports Review or Sports Illustrated or some of those other magazines is that this is all original, in-depth reporting, just like the New York Times,” Halvorsen said. “There’s 450 journalists that are part of The Athletic.”
There are multiple journalists from The Athletic that are dedicated to coverage of certain sports teams, he said.
“We have two journalists in Washington just to follow collegiate sports,” Halvorsen said. “We have some dedicated embedded journalists in the area.”
Senators will be granted courtesy access to the New York Times subscription as they decide whether or not they would like to adopt the service, Halvorsen said.
If the senators were to move forward with the offer, incoming and returning students would need to register themselves under the school’s subscription on the New York Times’s website at the beginning of the fall semester, he said.
“Administratively, it’s really easy,” Halvorsen said. “We have a generic landing page at accessnyt.com, and then you simply select your school and it takes you to the registration page for the New York Times, which is your wsu.edu email address.”
Each student’s subscription would automatically renew up until their graduation year, Halvorsen said, given that the university’s partnership with the newspaper continues every year.
“Accessing it is that easy,” he said. “Really, the hard work is getting the word out and making sure the student body is aware. That’s the number one challenge, especially at a large institution.”
If the subscription was implemented, the cost would most likely need to be paid by students, Vice President Maccabee Werndorf said. It would most probably be paid through either a student fee or through S&A requests.
The senate will be holding a joint city council meeting with Pullman city council on Nov. 14 at 7 p.m, Werndorf said.
ASWSU meets at 5:30 p.m. every Wednesday in CUB 204.
