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)