EDMONTON – The Gateway, the 106-year-old student newspaper at the University of Alberta, will stop publishing weekly paper copies, staff said Wednesday.
The new model will focus on digital, but a monthly features magazine will still be published.
“I don’t view this as a failure,” editor-in-chief Cam Lewis said in a Gateway article. “We can, and have the resources, to continue existing and printing the way we are right now. We’re not being forced, but we want to steer the path for everybody else.”
The article said The Gateway‘s print newspaper pickups on campus have declined in recent years while website traffic has grown. It had approximately 242,000 page views during the 2015 fall term.
In 2015, an average of 2,500 newspapers were picked up each week, down from 7,000 in 2012.
“We’re looking to diversify and adapt to the current student climate,” The Gateway’s executive director Beth Mansell said. “I believe in the current landscape of media, more regular print products would be shifting to this model if they weren’t so reliant on their advertising revenue. You can’t monetize a print product the way you can monetize a website.”
Lewis agreed, adding it would be wasteful to continue to use students’ money to produce a newsprint product.
“This is us trying to lead in a media revolution,” he added. “We’re trying to be the change we think people want. We didn’t mess up. We wanted to do this.”