For student subscribers, no news is bad news

11/12/2009At the start of this semester, Kyna Doles signed up to have The New York Times delivered to her Emerson College dormitory.

Each morning at 10, the first-year journalism student would visit the newspaper racks in the lobby of Piano Row to pick up the daily.

But the paper was always missing, she said.

Doles brought the matter to the attention of four campus workers, including her resident assistant, but was repeatedly told that the issue was beyond the staff's control.

She has since found that she needs to get to the racks by 8:30 a.m., before her newspaper disappears.

Doles' predicament is similar to that of many other on-campus newspaper subscribers at Emerson who complain that their papers are frequently stolen.

In an informal survey, nine of 11 subscribing journalism students said that they have visited campus news racks only to discover that all the papers had already been taken. More than half said this happens every week.

And there are consequences: Seven of those 11 students said they have done poorly on current events quizzes because their papers were missing.

"It's very frustrating," Doles said.

Darian Harvin, a first-year broadcast journalism student, said that when the semester began, her paper was missing two or three times each week. It's now down to once a week, but it's still annoying.

"Today somebody took my paper," she said.

One sophomore journalism student admitted that, although one of her professors requires that she subscribe, she has decided against it-she has heard of too many cases of theft.

If the system for newspaper delivery were to improve, she said, she would enroll. "But in the meantime, if I'm not going to get the newspaper I pay for, I won't subscribe."

Harvin added, "I don't think [the thefts are] entirely Emerson's fault... I have more of a problem with people who steal newspapers."

One Securitas guard, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, recommended that students pick up their papers before 8 a.m.

"You can't go to class and come back and expect your paper to be there," he said. "There's just no way."

The guard explained that he receives the most complaints at the beginning of the school year. This semester, he personally received 10 to 15 reports in the first few weeks. Now the number of complaints he hears has dwindled down to about two per week.

However, the Department of Public Safety says that it has not been alerted to the problem of newspaper theft on campus, according to college spokeswoman Allison Teixeira.

"If the thefts are documented, and trends can be established that make it obvious that there is a problem, the college can work to resolve future problems," she said in an email on behalf Public Safety.

Marc Hamilton, director of Property Management at Emerson, said that he had not been made aware of the problem either. His office set up the newspaper racks in campus buildings.

While newspaper storage does not necessarily fall under the purview of his department, Hamilton said, if a need is demonstrated, "of course, we would try to be as helpful as we could be."

Doles, who works at the entrance to Piano Row swiping ID cards, said that on several occasions she has witnessed students taking newspapers under the mistaken assumption that they were free.

Of the total 41 journalism students surveyed, almost half reported that they had at one point thought the newspapers on the racks were complimentary.

Students are not the only ones affected by newspaper theft on campus. The Department of Journalism has three papers delivered on weekdays, and assistant Barry Thompson is responsible for picking them up on Mondays and Wednesdays.

When Thompson first started working in the department, he would only find one of the three papers in the morning, and it was a different one each time. At first, "I just assumed it was a mixed bag," he said.

In the past, Emerson had a different system for delivering students' newspapers, Teixeira said.

Newspapers were stored in a locked cabinet, much like the lockboxes used on sidewalks. Subscribing students were provided with keys to the cabinet, and others who wished to buy a paper could do so.

Eventually, however, the delivery company found that the cabinets did not bring in enough revenue, she said, so they were removed.

The company which delivers newspapers to Emerson could not be reached for comment.

Students may elect to have their newspapers sent to their local mailbox, according to Ryan Kapitz, lead specialist at Mail Services. But they would not be available for pickup until about 3 p.m. on a given day.

So far, only a small number of students receive newspapers by mail. But Emerson's post office might be overwhelmed if the roughly 100 other papers delivered to the campus came through the mail rooms every day, Kapitz said.