Opinion: The Gargoyle should be in print

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably one of the special few Uni students who regularly read the Gargoyle. I know that throughout most of my Uni career I didn’t read the Gargoyle and neither did most people I knew. However, looking back through the Gargoyle archives there are so many fantastic articles that I wish I had read when they were initially published. I don’t think that expecting people to just read the online Gargoyle is the answer though. I think that we need to publish a print version of the Gargoyle.

The first issue that I think the Gargoyle has since it went online is that articles are published irregularly. If a student starts at Uni checking the Gargoyle every day, every week, or even once a month, there is no guarantee that they will regularly see a consistent number of updates. What happens after this is that students will stop checking the Gargoyle if they ever did in the first place and then when interesting things do go up, they won’t get read.

The other thing that differentiates the Gargoyle from print publications are the additions to many print publications that people find fun. Things like crosswords, horoscopes, comics, and letters to the editor provide a variety of different forms of news and entertainment for people in the paper. When people are excited to do the crossword or see what their horoscope is they will get the paper and they might see something else that interests them too.

Handing people a complete copy of the Gargoyle that seems more like the newspapers they are used to seeing than the version of the Gargoyle that we currently have will make people more likely to read their peers’ writing and be invested in the news at our school.

The question that this may evoke for readers is, why isn’t the Gargoyle in print already? Well, it used to be. However, once it became feasible for it to be online it moved, because printing many copies of a newspaper regularly is very expensive. This is especially a problem because Uni already pays for the Gargoyle domain, and if we were to maintain both, it would be even more expensive than it was initially. I have a few solutions to this problem.

The first one is that we don’t publish a copy of the Gargoyle for everyone. I think that students can share copies of the Gargoyle, especially when we don’t know what the interest level is. My second suggestion is that we publish the Gargoyle regularly, but not necessarily weekly or even monthly if that is too expensive. I think that a lot of this also depends on how invested students get in the Gargoyle, which isn’t really something that we can measure until we try it.

I think that to increase engagement with and interest in the Gargoyle, we need to print it out.