The Toronto Star has cancelled its Campus Readership Program with Queen’s University due to lack of sponsorship.
JDUC Director Robert Burge said the newspaper contacted Queen’s about two months ago. He received an e-mail saying the program would be ending at the end of August if the newspaper didn’t find another sponsor.
The Star has been providing free daily newspapers around campus since 2000. The program, which provides free Toronto Star newspapers daily to campuses only in the Greater Toronto Area, was intended to contribute to the learning environment and encourage readership among university students.
Frank Salerno, who runs the Star’s readership program, said the program lost Pizza Pizza as a sponsor.
“We’re in between sponsors for students,” he said. “The hope … is to find another sponsor and see how much they can put towards the newspapers.”
But Salerno said sponsorship wasn’t the only reason the program was cancelled at Queen’s.
“It was cancelled to all the schools outside of the GTA area because of delivery costs,” he said.
The program is still running at York University, the University of Toronto and Ryerson University, but “at greatly reduced numbers,” Salerno said.
Burge said although the program was “great while it lasted”, the University also had to absorb the cost of recycling.
“I guess to some extent I would expect our recycling costs to go down, but not significantly,” he said.
Currently, there are no comparable readership programs available with other newspapers. Burge said the University has talked with local media like the Kingston Whig Standard, and he will be contacting them again.
“There was a time when we had the National Post—when it first came out—on campus, but that was for a limited time.”
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