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theJournal

Volume 14 Issue 13 | Friday, February 21, 2014

Editorial

You may have noticed that The Journal has created a habit of posting notices on the front page about future issue cancellations. This week is no exception. After two cancellations, we felt it was time to inform our readers of the reason. We would like to make it clear that canceling issues is not something we want to do and not something we do for personal interest. All year we have struggled financially to stay afloat. In attempts to preserve the paper, we have made numerous budget cuts, while avoiding, at all costs, cutting from the paper itself. These attempts have included cutting staff salaries and positions as well as increasing the already monstrously ambitious amount of advertising revenue that the Incidental Fee Committee (IFC) expects us to bring in. One main problem we are facing is IFC’s preliminary decision to decline our advertising revenue enhancement request. As full-time students, and a few student athletes, our staff spends all of its free time in the Journal office working to bring you the news. We inherited only one consistent advertiser from last year. We have since built rapport with other advertisers and have run as many as six ads in an issue this term. We are currently expected to raise approximately $2,500 a term in advertising revenue. The Journal lacks the resources and financial ability to create a paper each week. We are stuck in a Catch-22: if we are unable to print an issue some weeks due to budget constraints, how are we suppose to raise money through advertising if we have no paper to run the ads in? The issues we do print are already nearing maximum ad capacity. We do not always have room for more than four ads, nor do we want our paper overrun with them. Our many fundraising efforts are not enough and we fear we will be unable to meet our advertising goal if we are forced to continue cutting issues. The Journal had asked for a $3,745 enhancement for the 2014-2015 school year to relieve some pressure of raising money to fund our paper. This would require us to raise $2,500 for the year instead of just over $6,000, as expected of us now. Currently we do not have enough money in our budget to even put out a weekly paper. Because the enhancement request was denied during the IFC’s preliminary decision, the Journal staff must continue to struggle in order to make sure we publish. We want to apologize to our readers and assure you we are doing everything we can to continue printing and to increase support for our paper from IFC and the school in general. The Journal will be operating next week to create an issue that will be available on our website. We are fully committed to keeping this paper alive and will continue to do our best to have something on the stands for you each Friday morning. The issues selected for cancellation so far this term are Feb. 28 and March 14.

R EM INDE R Re gis t rat io n f o r Sp r i n g te r m 2014 b e gi n s ne x t we e k ! C h e c k yo u r s t u de n t e -m ail f o r yo u r re gis t rat io n t i me .

IFC Concludes public hearings page 4 Game over for Flappy Bird page 6 What is the Model U.n. up to? page 9 Baseball ranked 30th in nation page 11

artist wanted Are you an aspiring artist interested in creating a comic strip for theJournal? Scan and submit your strip of four to eight picture to our photo editor Tori Gannon at vgannon11@wou.edu, or bring it to the Journal office, located at the bottom of Werner in room 106. The Journal does not guarantee the publication of all submitted comics. Comics may be drawn in color or black-and-white.

www.wou.edu/student/westernjournal


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