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BY ARIEL MARTINO

In print | April 3, 2008

Three new student-run publications are up for charter, but the Charter Committee of Student Council presently has the funds to charter only one. Charter Committee chair Paul Apollo ’09 said that all three publications would be worthwhile projects, but admitted that cost is a “big issue.”

The benefits of being a chartered organization on campus include the ability to receive funding from the Student Budget Committee. However, in order to be chartered, the Charter Committee must unanimously approve the organization and its proposed budget.

The Night Café, one of the three new publications that hope to be chartered, has already released one issue, financed by a $3,000 grant from the President’s Office. The magazine was released just before spring break, complete with a release party. Editor-in-Chief Eli Epstein-Deutsch ’10 said that the magazine was very well received. “particularly glad that so many people seemed inspired to think of ways they could contribute based on their particular niche, talent or interest,” he said.

Apollo characterized the content of The Night Café as “New Yorker-esque,” referring to its mix of journalism, art and fiction. “The content is determined more by how compelling it is than by what genre it falls into,” said Alyssa Work ’08, senior editor of The Night Café.

The Night Café is currently requesting $24,000 per year, considerably greater than the budgets allocated to any other presently chartered student publication, with the exception of the Halcyon yearbook. Epstein-Deutsch said he hopes that the budget will allow for expansion to include a science section, excerpts from novels and pieces about Philadelphia. He also hopes to start an alumni subscription service as well as a functional Web site. Another significant expense will be printing on glossy paper, which Epstein-Deutsch said is the best medium on which to display the work of the artists and photographers who contribute.

Similarly, the budding photography magazine Pun/ctum!!!,, which also hopes to be granted a charter, plans to use glossy paper to provide a medium for photographers that is not offered by any other publication. Editor Linda Huang ’08 calls the magazine “an excellent outlet for the visual and creative minded to express themselves in a publication that caters only to photography.”

With a proposed budget of about $12,000, Pun/ctum!!! is also out of the range that Student Council was willing to spend on new groups. According to Huang, the magazine’s editors originally believed that Pun/ctum!!! had no chance of being chartered and had begun considering an Internet release.

SBC is planning to roll $10,000 into next year’s budget. Given the amount of these leftover funds, “Pun/ctum!!! is likely to be chosen to be chartered,” Apollo said.

At this point, some members of the committee are still apprehensive. Due to the large budgets of both publications, Apollo said the “opinion on the committee right now is it looks like it’s going to be The Night Café or Pun/ctum!!!. The committee is concerned about The Night Café’s enormous budget and Apollo said that "if they are chartered, it will not be for $24,000.”

The Swarthmore Review, the third publication that is being considered for chartering, is an international poetry journal that editor Justin DiFeliciantonio ’10 hopes will be similar to other institution-affiliated poetry journals such as the Yale Review.

Apollo said that The Swarthmore Review has little hope of being chartered. Because its international focus, the publication “is not under the category that should be paid for with student activities funds.” Apollo said that although The Swarthmore Review includes a section for poetic works of Swarthmore students, its primary objective is to publish poetry from around the world.

While The Swarthmore Review is not likely to receive a charter, Apollo is hopeful that the publication will get underway with the help of alternative sources of funding. The Swarthmore Review is asking for approximately $6,000 and is currently working with members of Student Council to find other ways to finance the publication.

Just as Apollo and the rest of the Appointments and Charter committee support The Swarthmore Review getting started with or without being chartered, they hope that both The Night Café and Pun/ctum!!! will find a way regardless of the committee’s decision. “We’re stuck making some pretty hard choices,” Apollo said.

The Charter committee supports all three magazines, but Apollo said “right now the publication market is very saturated at this school, so if a new magazine comes out, we need to make sure it’s contributing something very new.”

Existing student publications are also concerned about the feasibility of continuing their activities on campus. Rachel Aucott ‘08, editor of Small Craft Warnings, Swarthmore’s existing literary magazine that publishes poetry, short stories, black and white photography, drawings, plays and short personal essays, said she is worried about the volume in submissions to campus literary publications. In her time on the staff of Small Craft Warnings, she has seen the volume of poetry submitted diminish by one and a half times the number of submissions in Fall 2004. Generally, most of the submissions come from writing workshops sponsored by Small Craft Warnings and writing workshops offered by the English Department.

Many students have noted the perpetually extended deadlines at Small Craft Warnings as a sign of the shortage of submissions. Aucott points to the fact that most writers simply wait until the last minute to submit anything and that “people have come to expect the extended deadline, meaning that we usually get the bulk of our submissions in the day or two before the extended due date.”

While Aucott believes that the other publications, most notably The Night Café really offer something special, she believes “the creative writing community here is just not big or vibrant enough to result in a competitive volume of submissions for all the magazines on campus.”

Work believes that The Night Café will not take away from submissions to other magazines. According to Work, The Night Café is the only publication for “writers who might not be completely satisfied writing academic prose, daily news reporting, or fiction.”

“There’s something really satisfying about writing a long-form piece well, finding out as much as you can about it without a limiting daily or weekly time frame, putting loads of work into it and seeing it published,” Work said.

Huang is equally confident that chartering Pun/ctum!!! would not funnel submissions from other publications. She is aware of criticism that publishing an expensive magazine is not necessary with the plethora of art exhibits on campus and in the city and responds by pointing out that “art exhibitions around campus cannot substitute a tangible magazine.”

In order to free up student activities funding to distribute to new groups such as The Night Café and Pun/ctum!!!, Student Council is currently in talks with the administration to stop using money from the student activities fee to fund Swarthmore’s yearbook, the Halcyon. According to Apollo, student interest in the publication has diminished and its withdrawal from student activities fund would free up an additional $50,000 per year.

Disclosure Note: Alyssa Work is a cartoonist for The Phoenix, but had no role in the production of this article.

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