Tonight, Travis Rozich is switching up his usual dinner routine. Rather than grabbing a quick bite at Tartans Pavilion, he’ll be sitting down with university deans and administrators at the annual President’s Dinner. The event provides a forum for established and emerging student leaders to discuss campus issues with upper-level faculty and senior staff. And Rozich, a freshman architecture student, is excited to bring something to the table. His ears perk up when the conversation among his dinner companions turns to global awareness. Several in the group, including University President Jared Cohon, question whether students are keeping abreast of national and international events.
Rozich is working hard to make sure that they are. He is the Student Senate liaison for the Collegiate Readership Program, which is a nationwide program that provides newspapers to college campuses. At Carnegie Mellon, a member of the program since 2005, students have daily access to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The New York Times, and USA Today through a $5 media fee that is incorporated into student costs each year. Newspapers are delivered to open and closed (accessible with ID card) bins around campus, available to all undergraduate students. As the liaison for the program, Rozich communicates with the student body and CRP staff to determine the plan of action that will encourage students to pick up a paper.
With more than 685,000 newspapers in circulation, Carnegie Mellon’s CRP program is running strong, but Rozich is looking toward improvement. To start, he hopes to implement a newspaper delivery day during orientation week. By bringing newspapers directly to students—perhaps by delivering papers to dorm rooms on move-in day—he hopes to get students to add newspaper reading to their daily routines. And to make sure that students remember that the newspapers are available, he plans to advertise around campus, including signs that show students where they can grab a paper on their way to classes. Students who prefer reading the news online will be accommodated by CRP’s “digital seats” initiative, which enables more than 300 daily users to bypass any paywalls of the participating newspapers.
Ultimately, Rozich hopes that his tenure as the liaison will encourage more students to take advantage of the program, whether they are first-time readers or news junkies. And if CRP readers happen to find themselves in the company of the university’s president, perhaps at next year’s President’s Dinner, they should have no trouble chatting about what’s in the news.
—Olivia O’Connor (A’13)
