Students Should Have Access to The Daily Hampshire Gazette

It is against everything Smith College preaches not to provide its students with a free subscription to The Daily Hampshire Gazette. Smith boasts how it strives to shape global citizens who care about their community but does not provide students with the easiest way to access the current conversations and controversies of Western Massachusetts.  

One of the simplest ways to be a part of a community is to engage with its local news. Judging by the conversations I have with my peers in class, Smith students are engaged with their hometown politics and controversies. But at Smith, they often act as parasites to the local landscape instead of as new, active community members. Because students do not know what is going on around them, they stay on campus, stick to their own bubble and do not bring anything to this vibrant community. An easy way for the Smith administration to mitigate this tendency would be to provide us with an avenue to knowledge of local issues. With easy access, we could participate in the conversations of and be engaged with the community. 

This fall, Kathleen McCartney, Smith College President, gave a donation to the city of Northampton. She told The Hampshire Gazette, “Smith would not be Smith without Northampton.” If this statement is true, then why doesn’t the president invest in Northampton’s struggling local media? If Smith cared about a thriving Northampton, they would support The Hampshire Gazette not only for the students’ sake but for the sake of the community. It is not enough for Smith to give to the local municipal government. Smith should support the town’s independent media to help all aspects of the community thrive. 

Instead of providing students with local news, Smith gives students free accounts to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. These subscriptions tell students to care about national problems and to keep up with the daily headlines. While these values may be important, the inattention to local news in tandem with national news is feeding into a larger problem. National headlines dominate communities, making on-the-ground work intangible and disconnecting people from their neighbors. 

Smith does have access to the archives of The Hampshire Gazette, which lets us see issues from as early as one month ago. This allows us to see the past of Northampton but stops us from participating in the active conversation. Additionally, this site is incredibly difficult to navigate and does not have a term search option, leaving only dates as our guide. Providing archival access is a faint-hearted attempt to connect students with the community, and Smith can easily do better.

K-Mac, I know you are reading this — you told me you read The Sophian — so do your students a favor and help us be a part of the place in which we will live for four years by providing us with a subscription to our local paper. Accessing The Hampshire Gazette in college tells us that we do not have to wait until we graduate to be active citizens; we can start now.