We’ve mentioned before that The Ubyssey has teamed up with the AMS and others on next week’s referendum question on student fees, which would raise our student levy from $5 to $6. Next Monday we’ll be deluging you with information about why this is a good thing, but today we’d like to explain why we’re asking for a $1 fee increase and what we would do with it.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” And while Charlie Sheen, conscience of America, recently called Jefferson “a pussy,” we think the author of the US Constitution had a good point.

A free and vibrant press is needed in any community. It informs. It entertains. It comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.

And though a campus newspaper does all of this—sometimes well, sometimes less so—The Ubyssey is more than that.

We’re a place that has trained dozens upon dozens of Canada’s finest journalists. In the last three years, we’ve won more national awards than any other campus paper in the country. We’re a historical record of what and who this campus is year after year. Most of all, we’re a paper that is truly the voice of students, produced by over 200 of you each year, the majority of whom are volunteers.

And while we’ve been around since 1918, it was only in 1995 that students voted to make us a financially autonomous organization, with a $5 student fee. In the 16 years since, we haven’t once asked for a fee increase.

We are now. Here’s why.

First, we want to ensure our fiscal solvency. Are we in danger of losing an AMS-level amount of money? No. But this is still an increase that we’re going to need sooner rather than later.
In the last 15 years, the cost to print paper has gone up and salaries have slowly increased. We’ve also invested in webmasters and video editors as the internet has become integral to what we do. If our fees were tied to inflation, they would be at around $6.50 per student right now. Instead, we’ve stayed at $5.

And if you know anything about newspapers, you know that the advertising market hasn’t been great to us over the last decade, so while we’ve upgraded in what we do online, we’ve had to make corresponding cuts to other services. An increase to $6, with annual CPI increases, will ensure that we can continue our current level of services year after year.
This extra money isn’t just about ensuring the stability of what we have, though. It’s about building for the future and meeting the needs of today’s students.

In the last decade, the number of students taking summer classes has increased by thousands. UBC is no longer a little ghost town from May to August.

Because of that, we’d like to provide The Ubyssey for all 12 months of the year, with a reduced staff printing issues every two weeks during the summer semester, while keeping our website updated. We want to serve students who work, live and study here during the summer and if the referendum passes, we can do that.

In addition, a dollar increase would also allow UBC to have the first campus newspaper that truly embraces the internet. We’re talking daily updates, increased online-exclusive stories, more of our awesome videos—things students deserve and we want to provide. The increase would give us the resources necessary to do that.

That’s our promise to you if this passes. We know we aren’t always perfect, but we’re by all measurements one of the best university papers in Canada and we’d like to keep it that way for some time to come.

So if you’re someone who enjoys reading us regularly in print and zealously online, or someone who enjoys having something to read during breakfast in Vanier and lunch in the SUB, please vote for the fee increase next week. It’s a vote that shows your appreciation for who we are. More importantly, it’s an investment in what we can become.

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