Zachary Noyce | Keeping it local

I dare you. Just try to think of something more relevant to you than real estate prices in the Bronx.

Well, thanks to the UA Readership Program, you'll never miss a Knicks box score or a Staten Island Zoning Meeting write-up. You'll always know which new Brooklyn bar is a hit and it will be harder than ever to avoid wondering what Tom Friedman keeps hidden in his mustache.

No doubt in a move prompted by overwhelming student demand for a second copy of The New York Times crossword (engineering students, read: Sudoku) puzzle, the Undergraduate Assembly is now distributing free copies of said liberal propaganda every weekday. (Don't be so easily fooled; your friend did it with pencil in the DP first.)

In all honesty, the UA deserves serious praise for finally bringing free newspapers to campus and The New York Times was the safe choice.

But it wasn't the best choice.

Last year, the UA launched a pilot program which offered the Times along with The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. The distribution racks made it clear that The New York Times was the most popular choice, and a later survey by the UA confirmed this truth.

In this survey proposing a free newspaper program, 92 percent of the respondents said they would like free copies of The New York Times (though the survey did not limit the number of selections). The other 8 percent of respondents were found to be from neither New Jersey nor New York and their surveys were destroyed.

Personally, I would have liked to see Penn offer The Inquirer or Daily News. Maybe I only think that because I'm one of about seven Penn students whose greatest dream in life do not all center on being a successful, single twenty-something living in Manhattan. Maybe it's just sour grapes because The New York Times is the only place in the universe where I'm a "Utahan" instead of a Utahn.

But I'm not surprised that most Penn students prefer the Times and that so few are clamoring for an Inqy or Daily News either.

It seems we care more about national issues than local ones. How many of us honestly paid anywhere near as much attention to the Philadelphia mayoral race as we've been paying the current presidential race. We'll all read a lot more about Bush-Pelosi slugfests and deadlocks than we will about Philadelphia police reforms.

That's not necessarily even a bad thing. Keeping up to speed on national politics and international diplomacy makes you look a lot better in your PoliSci recitation, I know. You'll understand the jokes on The Daily Show better if you read up.

Somewhere between the 28 or so cable news networks we have and the Web sites we go to, we get our fill of national news. In fact, that's the exact impression I get from students who have been taking advantage of the free copies of The New York Times. Students look over the front page and might read a few of those articles, but don't dive much deeper into the paper.

A newspaper is so much more than its front page. Front-to-back, a Philadelphia newspaper would be much more relevant to Penn than The New York Times is.

Sure, Penn students might be just as quick to blow through a Philadelphia newspaper without reading many stories. But just in the process of flipping through to see how much the Sixers lost by or to check if Penn got a mention in the paper, students would learn a lot more about important issues in the city that FX says is always sunny.

In the coming months, the UA will evaluate the program. They need to expand it. The 657 copies it now gives out are grossly insufficient and offering only The New York Times in a city with two major daily newspapers is unfortunate to say the least.

UA Chairman and College senior Jason Karsh readily acknowledges that "[the program] is not perfect," but he also optimistically adds, "It brings a lot to campus. I'm excited to see it grow in the future."

You and I both.

Hopefully it won't be too long before I can pick up a free newspaper that covers the Phillies as easily as I can pick up one that covers the Mets.

Zachary Noyce is a College junior from Salt Lake City, Utah. His e-mail is noyce@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Stormin' Mormon appears Mondays.

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