Last week, The Daily reported the cancellation of a program that provides free daily newspapers in campus dining halls. The Collegiate Readership Program, run by USA Today, provided us with copies of its own newspaper, the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times in each dining hall and at Norris University Center, but not anymore. Apparently students just weren’t picking them up.

I’ll admit that when I lived on campus I certainly didn’t partake. I wouldn’t even know where to look for the brightly colored newspaper racks that now stand, lonely, bereft of the stacks of fresh newsprint, in dining halls from Sargent Hall to 1835 Hinman.

It’s fine, I’m a plebe. But it got me thinking: Where do I get my news? I know about what’s going on with Ebola; I know that Starbucks is maybe starting a delivery service; I know about midterm elections and the New York City Marathon and that Northwestern lost in football and that the president of Zambia has died. I’m not necessarily calling myself well-informed. Personally I’m still at a stage where world news kind of makes me sad and when given the choice I’d rather read Vulture than the Tribune. Everybody has interests and, as you probably know already, mine tend to swing toward “American Horror Story” rather than America’s horror stories. Again, I’m a plebe.

But the fact is that I am aware of what’s going on around me in the world, and the sad fact is that I’m aware because of Twitter. Twitter is where I get most of my news. Now that I’ve said it I feel a flush of shame creeping up into my face. I get my news from a microblogging platform that Cher uses to regale her followers with stories in all-caps of how Whole Foods ran out of a certain type of Halloween cookie. 

Who am I kidding? I love Twitter. I love it way more than Facebook; a social media platform that irritates me because of the convention that a single encounter with a new acquaintance warrants a friend request. Apparently if I’ve met you once, we should be Facebook friends. Thus it’s not uncommon for people to have upwards of one thousand Facebook friends, and it’s not uncommon for me to still be Facebook friends with people I only glimpsed around the halls of my middle school. No such obligation exists on Twitter. This frees up my timeline for things that I actually care about.

I’m still a newbie: For news, I currently follow The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Daily Northwestern, The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and I’m in the process of vetting more accounts to add to my list (this is serious business, obviously). I don’t have access to the entirety of each publication, but for free I get a good smattering of headlines with links to full articles. I check Twitter countless times per day, whenever I get a free moment, and so I keep up with The New York Times’ constant updates. Every respectable news source has a Twitter, and if they’re good at it, they update regularly. If you’re into breaking news, there’s no place better for that than Twitter; CNN’s Breaking News Twitter account can provide up-to-the-minute coverage on world events, as do many other accounts dedicated specifically to bringing you live updates. Just refresh your Twitter feed and the world’s events are right there, as they happen.

As a student, I often don’t have the money to subscribe to a newspaper, which is why The Collegiate Readership Program is a nice idea. But Twitter is free and it’s also paperless. Don’t get me wrong, I love cracking the spine on a new book, but I’m not opposed to being as paperless as possible. The format of Twitter is ideal for scanning headlines, and news sources tend attentively to their Twitter feeds. To my mind this is a respectable and handy alternative to a newspaper subscription.

Though if Residential Services were to find some way to offer digital subscriptions, I would be very on board. As someone who has trouble finding reasons to stay informed, and as someone who unabashedly ascribes much power to the smartphone, I simply appreciate accessibility. I assume that you are all far better functioning members of society than I am and you all can be found casually perusing a copy of The New York Times every morning. Just leave me to my tweets, and maybe someday we can chat about Congress or something.

Madeline Burg is a Weinberg senior. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].