By Peter Wright

Syracuse UniversityIt’s a fairly well known fact that newspapers in America are struggling. Just look to the “Pioneer Press,” which recently announced major cutbacks of both personnel and printed information, and disappeared from the Campus Center. Papers are in a technological transition that’s moving more and more to the internet (see “MinnPost”), and for those who still like to have a printed version of the news, don’t put too much faith in the next generation, at least not the students at Syracuse University in New York.

Syracuse’s independent newspaper, oddly named “The Daily Orange,” is cutting back to save money. The paper produced a new issue every five days last year, but now that’s down to four. Stephen Dockery, editor in chief for the newspaper told insidehighered.com that the paper is cutting its Friday issue because of low readership. He said that the paper wasn’t generating much interest among advertisers because Friday had the lowest readership of any day, due in part to regularly low attendance on that day.

The financial problems at “The Daily Orange” are being felt by several other independent college dailies, like the paper at the University of California at Berkley, which has also reduced its circulation by a day. The Orange is part of a group of daily papers that do not receive funding from the college, so they’re at a particular disadvantage when the economy turns sour, Logan Aimone, president of the Associated Collegiate Press, told insidehighered.com.

The literally millions of Syrcause football fans shouldn’t fret, though. For those who rely on independent college newspapers for your dose of football analysis, “The Daily Orange” may just be the right paper for you. Dockery said that the paper will continue to run special pre-game issues every Friday before a football game. They ran their first special issue on September 5, packing analysis and those hard to find ads into 12-pages. How big is the entire Mac Weekly again? Just to be clear, there’s no Friday issue, except there is.

So far, there’s been no word on whether the college’s choice to use an anthropomorphic orange in blue pants as its mascot has affected advertising sales, or why a college newspaper in New York would want to affiliate itself with Florida, Texas, and California. Perhaps The Mac Weekly should consider changing its name to include an inanimate fruit that is grown hundreds of miles away from the campus. Or we could just arbitrarily affiliate ourselves with another country.