The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and USA Today were readily available for any Northwestern student before or after a meal in the dining halls. That is, until this year.

I’ve been looking around but have failed to find the three neat files of newspapers that used to line the doors of the dining halls across campus. I’ve asked the resident assistants and the dining hall staff but found no answer, as they confessed they didn’t know why they weren’t there either.

I went ahead and started a home delivery subscription for The New York Times, so I’ve come to a personal solution, but I still believe the pan-campus newspaper subscription should be brought back.

Before going through a list of reasons, I’d like to briefly share my experience.

Yes, I did come in as a journalism major but that’s not the reason why I am interested in newspapers. I only decided to be a journalism major two months prior to starting college. Besides, I never read newspapers: I can’t remember when my family ever had subscriptions. It just wasn’t a thing and that was that. I’ll be frank to admit, I was not the biggest fan of newspapers.

Freshman year, I found a fresh batch of newspapers every morning and I started to take some and browse through them. It was different from online news because I was exposed to so many more stories. Online, I could click away in a perpetual circle of my defined interests; with physical news I could open up the spreads and surprise myself with things I never knew about or topics that I didn’t think I liked. Sometimes my eyes would just roll around and the next thing I knew, I was reading through the paper, soaking in the details, the quotes, the images and the stories.

I don’t think I was the only one though. My roommate and many of my floormates would just casually pick a newspaper up and read it. At dining halls over dinners or breakfasts and even during busy lunches, I would see people read through the papers. There was something more to do in our leisure time than staring and scrolling through our smartphones.

Some people may not like newspapers even still, and that’s totally fine. But for those who have not had the chance to have a newspaper reading experience, like me, the school’s subscription could be a great opportunity to discover an interest. College is about shaping our selves, our ideas, and our habits, one of which could be reading newspapers. It’s important for the University to give students options.

I still hear people say that print journalism is a dying field. I understand where that opinion comes from. Newspapers have gone from the dominant, if not the only, source of news to just one of the many media forms that constantly lure potential readers with eye-grabbing videos, interactive news, pictures and a mixture of all.

Although it may not be the dominant form of media anymore, that does not mean newspapers are worthless. On the contrary, I find them to be attractive.

The options of news we can consume are endless. It’s literally impossible to imagine not having fresh news to read at any given time. But more is not always better. Sometimes I feel myself floundering in a sea of too many choices. Rather than everything, I want to have a good selection of a few stories. That’s what newspapers are for me. Instead of getting distracted by new queries on similar topics or fields, I want to just get the wide selection of what is the most pertinent for that day. Just that day’s chunk.

Moreover, with newspapers, I just love having a physical copy. I can look back to some of the articles or op-eds that really inspire me and, on a more academic note, this can be very useful as a journalist. I can scrapbook the infographics or striking pictures that inspire me. Taking notes on mind-halting issues or details, I feel more engaged with the stories than I would online. Simply to improve my writing skills, I also analyze the sentences, story structures and expressions by underlining, circling and drawing arrows to connect different parts of the story. All of a sudden it’s become a study for me.

Newspapers can serve a wide array of functions for different individuals. I don’t know what happened with our subscriptions but I do know now that it was a gift to NU students to have these three newspapers handy. Bring back our newspapers.

Heiwon Shin is a Medill sophomore. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].