Princeton Notebook — PAW To Become a Biweekly

For the past year, the future of PAW has been under intense study by several groups concerned with different aspects of the magazine’s operations. The Board of Editorial Direction (B.E.D.), a committee of alumni with backgrounds in journalism who are elected by the Alumni Council and the trustees of Princeton University Press to oversee PAW’s editorial policies, has been looking into the question of changing our publication schedule. The Publishing Advisory Committee, composed of alumni with experience in the business side of publishing, has been exploring ways of increasing our advertising revenues. The Alumni Council’s Committee on Class Affairs and Reunions, which is responsible for setting PAW’s class subscription rates, has been seeking a method to relieve the burden that our rising publication costs have placed on the class treasuries.

In addition, representatives of the university have been conferring with all of these groups about a variety of questions relating to alumni communications and the financial situation of the class organization. Part of this effort has involved working out a new arrangement between PAW and University Magazine, a quarterly journal published by the university and currently distributed to alumni as an insert in PAW. All of these matters have been reviewed by the Alumni Council’s Committee on Alumni Communications. The staff of Princeton University Press, which is PAW’s publisher, has also been consulted throughout. In recent months, this series of discussions has resulted in the following developments:

First, the B.E.D. has decided that, beginning next fall, PAW will be published biweekly during the academic year. Although the magazine’s finances were a consideration — inasmuch as budgetary pressures would have reduced PAW’s frequency to fewer than half of the weeks of the year in any event — the decision was made primarily on editorial grounds. It will (1) eliminate the long publication breaks at Christmas and Easter to provide better continuity throughout the year, (2) increase the number of pages in each issue to produce a more balanced magazine with a wider variety of feature content, and (3) give PAW’s editorial staff more time to cover campus news in greater depth than weekly deadlines have allowed.

Second, the B.E.D. has approved, on a one-year trial basis, a new arrangement between PAW and University Magazine. Beginning next fall, University, instead of appearing as an insert of PAW, will be made up of articles that have previously appeared in PAW. (This is essentially a return to the arrangement under which University was founded 18 years ago.) The university will pay PAW a few covering the production costs of 72 pages for the right to reprint this material in University. William McCleery, who is retiring from the editorship of University on July 1, will serve as a consulting editor for PAW.

Rate Reduction

Third, the Committee on Class Affairs has determined that the new income from University Magazine and the savings from switching to biweekly publication will make possible an 8 percent reduction in PAW’s class subscription rates next year. Furthermore, the university has offered to aid the class treasuries by paying for one dues-notice mailing annually for every alumni class. Finally, the Publishing Advisory Committee is working out a plan by which a standard 15 percent agency commission will be paid to alumni classes which bring new advertising to PAW.

While PAW will continue to pursue other approaches to increasing its advertising revenues, these measures should provide sufficient relief for those alumni classes whose treasuries have been strained by PAW’s rising subscription rates (due largely to inordinate increases in the cost of paper and postage) in recent years. Under next year’s budget, approximately two-thirds of PAW’s revenues will be supplied by the class subscription system, which has been in effect since 1915.

In going to biweekly publication, PAW will cut back from 28 issues annually to 21, but the total number of pages per year will only be reduced by 36 — from the current 840 to 804 — or about 4 percent. The schedule will begin slightly earlier in the fall, with the first issue coming out the second week of September, and will skip only one issue at Christmas, continuing uninterrupted until the Reunions issue in the second week of July. Thus we will completely eliminate the spring publication break, which some class officers have found to hinder their efforts to organize for Reunions.

Paradoxical as it may sound, in some ways the biweekly schedule will enable PAW to be more current in covering campus news than we are with the weekly schedule, which forces the two-man editorial staff to devote most of its time to the sheer mechanics of getting the magazine out. This often compels us to postpone projects that require large investments of time until after one of our publication breaks or — as has happened this spring — to undertake them at the cost of falling behind schedule. Moreover, reducing the breaks will alleviate the scramble of trying to clear the backlog of accumulated news when publication resumes — a scramble in which some events have not received adequate coverage.

Before deciding to go to a biweekly schedule, the B.E.D. polled a cross section of the alumni body and found that a majority of the respondents were amendable to less frequent publication. In addition, through a notice in this page last November, PAW’s entire readership was invited to submit reactions to a variety of schedule proposals, and again the majority favored less than weekly publication. And in its consultations with other groups of alumni leaders concerned about PAW, the B.E.D. discovered a clear consensus in favor of biweekly frequency.

Although everyone associated with PAW feels some regrets about breaking the magazine’s weekly tradition, the truth of the matter is that PAW has never been weekly more than a few months of the year. In keeping with this eccentricity, we have no intention of changing the name of the Princeton Alumni Weekly or of giving up our acronym PAW. We will simply regard every issue as a special issue, combining two weeks in one, and console ourselves with the fact that we are still far ahead of the rest of the field: no other alumni magazine we know of appears more than 10 times a year; Harvard is down to six (bimonthly); Yale’s magazine appears but five times a year, supplemented on alternate months by a tabloid; and the trend nationally is toward quarterlies. In frequency of publication, as well as in the devotion of its readers, PAW remains unique. 

This was originally published in the May 9, 1977 issue of PAW.