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Syracuse University students now have access to a free online subscription to The Washington Post via SU Libraries, it announced Saturday. The service is in effect as of this weekend.

Students, faculty and staff who sign up for the subscription will have unlimited digital access to content posted by The Washington Post and streaming access to press conferences.

SU Libraries already offers free online subscriptions to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which the university established in April 2020. SU offered a similar subscription to syracuse.com/The Post-Standard in the 2020-2021 school year.

In the announcement of the syracuse.com/The Post-Standard subscription during the fall of 2020, SU cited access to news as essential to understanding and engaging with democracy and politics.

Because the university did not renew the subscription after the spring semester of 2021, students no longer have access. The free syracuse.com/The Post-Standard subscription remains available to SU faculty.

Andrew Hood, a sophomore studying broadcast journalism and psychology, said he regularly uses the SU subscriptions to stay informed and is happy with the expansion. He said he began using the New York Times and Wall Street Journal while taking COM107: Communications and Society — a class required for all students in the Newhouse School of Public Communications — for weekly news quizzes.

Without the free subscriptions, Hood said, he would have to turn to more expensive or less reliable sources for news.

“It’s really not just for journalism students, even though of course it’s part of what we do, but really for the wider student body, to be better informed,” Hood said.

Mark Lodato, dean of the Newhouse School, requires students in the section he teaches of COM 107 to read articles daily from national media organizations like The Washington Post for weekly news quizzes and general knowledge, according to the course syllabus. At least three other COM 107 professors require the same in their sections’ syllabi.

Hood said that during classes like JNL 221: Foundations of Data and Digital Journalism, he’s faced paywalls from articles that are required course readings, which can create roadblocks that prevent students from learning about current events and completing their coursework. Hood said it’s important for students to engage with news media during college as they develop perspective and media literacy.

“You always want as diverse a set of viewpoints as you can, and for just your average students, I think reading as many different sources as you can is huge, and not just reading it from one specific place,” Hood said.

Other universities with prominent communications programs, including University of Southern California, Boston University, University of Missouri and Northwestern University, offer subscriptions to local news sources like the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, St. Louis Business Journal and Chicago Tribune in addition to the NYT and WSJ.

Northeastern University offers a range of subscriptions to national science and education publications in addition to local and national newspapers, including Chronicle of Higher Education, the Economist, the Financial Times, and the Scientific American.

SU has not publicly stated any plans to expand free subscriptions for students to other news sources.

To access the subscription on the Washington Post website, students, faculty and staff should register with their syr.edu email addresses, according to the announcement.

Disclaimer: Andrew Hood was previously a podcast editor with The Daily Orange. He no longer serves in that position and has no influence on the editorial content of the news section.

Published on February 27, 2023 at 1:09 am

Contact Stephanie: spwright@syr.edu