The ASUO Executive recommendation for the Emerald’s budget, which the Programs Finance Committee eventually passed, represents the lowest student subscription rate in at least 20 years, when factoring for inflation.
To deserve such a historically low budget you might think the Emerald did something horribly wrong. Did our fundraising level fall off the map? Did the amount and quality of our coverage suddenly decline? Just the opposite is true. The Emerald’s fundraising, in the form of advertising, is the highest it has been in years, covering almost 85 percent of our costs. And we are providing more original and professional content than ever, to a growing number of students, in the face of skyrocketing printing costs. In short, the Emerald has been doing more with less all year long.
So why are we being punished with more than $8,000 in cuts ($13,000 less than our
request)? The ASUO believes the Emerald prints too many papers and is concerned that students are being charged for newspapers read by University faculty and members of the Eugene community.
According to a two-year-old readership survey, 81 percent of students read our paper at least once per week. Any freely distributed paper would be envious of this level of saturation. But readership is not the only measure of the Emerald’s impact on this campus. Of those students that never read the Emerald, how many are in a student group that receives discounted advertising in our paper? How many have been featured in an Emerald story? How many have written a letter to the editor? How many have been informed about an issue or a story from a friend who read it in the Emerald?
Everyone on campus, whether they read the paper, is touched by the Emerald and the work of its dedicated student staff. That is why the bulk student subscription fee, which allows for distribution of the Emerald to the student body free of charge, has never been based on the number of copies read and
distributed. In fact, in a contract signed last year by ASUO President Adam Petkun
and ASUO Vice President Mena Ravassipour, it expressly states, “The parties agree that the payment amount … is not related to the
number of newspapers to be distributed … in that it is not based on a cost per distributed paper figure.”
In the past, attempts by the ASUO to
impose such a formula have been met with skepticism and rejected by the PFC. This year, a far more incompetent PFC completely
ignored past precedent and approved the
Executive recommendation without bothering to discuss the issue.
Not only that, nobody on the PFC felt it was necessary to inspect how the Executive arrived at its recommendation figure. The only person at the table who understood the complex equation was Mike Martell, who conceived it. If the PFC had bothered to inspect the math, it would have discovered that it was nothing more than a series of inaccurate numbers cobbled together with arbitrary calculations to arrive at a meaningless total.
The Emerald would have refuted the
numbers if we had been given our Executive recommendation before the meeting as
originally promised. In a November e-mail to all student groups, Ravassipour wrote, “The executive recommendation will be completed 72 hours prior to your hearing.”
The Emerald didn’t receive notice 72 hours
beforehand nor did we receive it 24 hours
beforehand as mandated by
ASUO rules. It is now painfully
obvious why: Martell knew we would tear his formula to pieces and expose his performance for the farce that it was.
The truly amusing thing about the ASUO suggesting the Emerald prints too many papers is that the 2004-05 signed contract between the ASUO and the Emerald stipulates, “To ensure student access to printed copies of the newspaper, ODE shall distribute a minimum of 8,500 newspapers.”
During the months of September and October, the Emerald printed 9,000 papers per day on average. In November and December, that number fell to 8,500 papers per day, the minimum amount as set by the ASUO. Yet still the ASUO says we print too many copies. The ASUO is asking us to print less than they have contractually obligated us to print; an amount they admit would fail to
ensure student access to the paper.
The ASUO’s arguments about our circulation amount to nothing more than a smoke screen; an attempt to cover up their true motivation: revenge for our coverage. The ASUO can threaten the Emerald all it wants, but we will never be intimidated into covering up the truth.

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