What if you had a news­pa­per with a guar­an­teed geo­graphic and social com­munity, no dis­tri­bu­tion costs, no staff costs, and only print­ing to pay for.

Could you keep it going without tak­ing it online? Try and solve the real-life busi­ness conun­drum below.

We think that hav­ing an inde­pend­ent press has made a dif­fer­ence to the uni­ver­sity — and print­ing the news and hand­ing it out out­side the uni­ver­sity means the voice of the stu­dents can no longer be ignored…

We had high hopes to sell more advert­ising over the sum­mer, but it is rap­idly becom­ing clear that advert­ising is now even harder to come by, mainly thanks to the ‘credit crunch’ and the eco­nomic downturn…

That’s why we’re ask­ing you to sup­port us — there’s simply no other way for us to keep on print­ing the newspaper.

Print­ing costs £500 a month, mak­ing a total of £2,500 for the five issues of the aca­demic year. This is lit­er­ally our only cost: the dozens of stu­dents who do everything from writ­ing the stor­ies to hand­ing out cop­ies out­side the uni­ver­sity at 8am in the middle of winter do it for noth­ing. But unless we can pay this one cost, the Inquirer can­not con­tinue to exist.

People have come up with many answers to this prob­lem, and we’ve thought hard about all of them.

• Scal­ing back the page count (24 at present) or num­ber of cop­ies dis­trib­uted (cur­rently 5,000) res­ults in nearly insig­ni­fic­ant sav­ings — sac­ri­fi­cing four pages or 1,000 cop­ies to claw back enough money back to buy a cof­fee would be madness.
• We could sell the paper for 20p a copy, but this would surely hit our cir­cu­la­tion drastic­ally, mak­ing the Inquirer less read and less influ­en­tial while still prob­ably not cov­er­ing print costs, and caus­ing us a major cash-handling headache.
• Some have sug­ges­ted abandon­ing the news­pa­per format and going back to A4 paper, but pho­to­copy­ing is expens­ive for large print runs: once you get past a few thou­sand cop­ies, news­print is cheaper (pho­to­copy­ing does remain our backup plan if we can’t raise the money, but again we would be forced to suf­fer a big drop in readership).
• Finally, we could go for that last resort of every failed pub­lic­a­tion: close the news­pa­per and keep the web­site going instead. But a web­site is not a sub­sti­tute for a news­pa­per: it seems unlikely that we would ever see 5,000 people read our stor­ies online, espe­cially with no budget to print leaf­lets or anything.

At the moment, once a month, our tanks are parked on City’s lawn, and the voice of the stu­dents can’t be ignored. A web­site… well, a web­site never scared any­body, and every pub­lic­a­tion that fol­lows this path dies away into obscurity.

Besides, you can’t read a web­site on the bus, or while you wait for a lec­ture to start…

The Inquirer is an unapo­lo­get­ic­ally polit­ical pro­ject. It is a news­pa­per that wants its read­ers to sit up, pay atten­tion, think about the big ques­tions and not take things lying down. It is an attempt, believe it or not, to rad­ic­al­ise City Uni­ver­sity — because in this age of stu­dent con­sumer­ism and enforced career­ism, we need to stand up and take back our uni­ver­sit­ies for what they’re sup­posed to be for: education…

You can donate at: http://www.cityinquirer.com/donate

Yours,

Tom Walker (out­go­ing editor 2007/8)
Gemma Pritchard (incom­ing editor 2008/9)