The Harbus is Harvard Business School’s student newspaper. The weekly publication theoretically covers a broad range of issues of high topical relevance to the students at the school.
…But you wouldn’t know that. Because nobody reads The Harbus.
I think I can fix that.
The overarching problem here is a little weird to explain. I’ll try: Nobody reads The Harbus because nobody reads The Harbus. Make sense?
Framed a little differently, I might call the problem something like “The Watercooler Effect.” The value of the paper is largely only as good as the number of people you can discuss it with. From a business school perspective, you might more simply describe this as a “network effect.”
Problem #1: Distribution
The Harbus is distributed around campus at most of high-traffic areas. I don’t really know all of the locations I where I can pick it up, currently. It feels kind of erratic. There’s a rack by the downstairs dining hall, but not by the upstairs location. There’s a rack by the entrance of the gym, because…I guess some people want to read the newspaper while they’re lifting weights?
When the latest issue is released, there are usually GINORMOUS piles on the racks. And when I see a ginormous pile, I get the impression that nobody’s been picking anything up. So there’s that disincentive, too.
If I can’t really tell where the paper is available to be picked up, or really predict if there will be copies left by the time I get there, it’s going to be awfully hard for me to become a loyal reader.
Solution #1: No racks anymore. Distribute one copy (900 total) of the Harbus to every single RC (1st year) desk.
Here’s why this is great: First, it instills a sense of ownership. Even though I had no say in the matter, the paper that showed up on my desk feels like it’s mine. Don’t take it!
On a related note, this system instills a sense of scarcity. If an EC (2nd year) wants to read a copy of this week’s Harbus, she has to steal it.
You might think that dropping off 900 individual copies is a lot of hard work, but really, it’s not. I know this because half of the student groups at HBS send a member out once every few weeks to drop quarter sheets off on every single RC desk. It takes a few minutes per room, and all of the rooms are in the exact same building. With a small team you could be done in less than half an hour.
Speaking of which…
Problem #2: The Content
It’s crazy to me that The Harbus is theoretically a perfect medium to reach students with information about upcoming events, and yet, NO student group advertises in the paper and EVERY student group is happy to print and distribute its own aforementioned quarter sheets.
For an editorial team, it’s really hard to create compelling content when you’ve only got 4 pages to work with because you don’t sell enough ads for anything bigger.
As far as I can tell, student groups have preposterous budgets for senseless stuff.
Solution #2: Some kind of program where the ad in the first issue of the year is free for every student group. This gets them into the habit of placing ads in the paper, and gets them in the habit of promoting the paper on their own, and makes the first issue of the year huge, and gets students interested in the magazine out of the gate.
Advertising in the paper should be a no-brainer for student clubs, once you’re mirroring the distribution routes they’re already practicing and can reasonably mirror the costs as well.
That all said: The ads are only half of the content. The other half is the words in the actual columns on the page.
Solution #2B: Mindful that the Harbus is now an RC-only magazine, we can now safely create content that is HYPER specific to RC life at HBS. (As an outsider, you might be surprised at how different 1st and 2nd year are.) Regular content such as:
- Notes from ECs about RC cases (which all 900 RC’s will be reading) for the upcoming week.
- Satire comments that can be used.
- A schedule and map of official and unofficial events that are coming up from HBS, and in greater Boston.
- Reader-submitted 1- or 2- sentence reflections on last week’s cases.
- Professor-submitted reflections on last week’s cases.
- Guidance on RC time- or season-relevant events (winter formal: buying a tux? finding a date? february recruiting: tips? horror stories? etc.) from ECs.
- And so on.
In fact: Making the content RC-specific would actually probably be even MORE interesting for EC students than the current general-use paper. As an EC, I’d have loved the opportunity every week to reflect intimately on my experience from last year.
Problem #3: The Medium
Newsprint sucks. A newspaper is a big, clunky thing. Impossible to open, flip through, read on the go. Especially when the entire thing is only like 4-8 pages long.
Solution #3: Maybe I’m biased, but I think they should switch to magazine format. Heck. Make it look like an HBS case. Something that’s more culturally relevant, has more staying power. Something that you might save and look back on. Besides, I’d assume that the school has some sort of advantageous economies of scale for prices on printing in the case format.
There is one distinct benefit of The Harbus being in its current format, which is that it’d be much easier for professors to enforce not reading it in class–much more difficult to obfuscate the rattle of shuffling newsprint pages around, compared to the relative ease of covertly and tranquilly flipping through pages of cases.
I think much of everything else can still stay the same. I don’t see a problem with ECs being the Editors-in-Chief of an RC paper. I don’t see fundamental shifts in staffing requirements. I don’t think the new format necessarily prohibits the paper from pursuing tangential interviews that volunteer journalists are interested in writing — chatting with a famous business person visiting campus, recapping their section’s last retreat or exploits on the field for intramural soccer, etc.
Ultimately: Our goal is to make the paper more attractive to potential advertisers. With a highly pointed audience, and relevant & predictable content, this should be infinitely easier to accomplish. Exploratory articles of different parts of town should draw advertisements from local bars and restaurants. Culturally relevant pieces on social events should draw business from requisite facilitators (Who should I call if I want a tuxedo for upcoming formal? If I want to rent a party bus like this party that was described in the last article?)
Of course, instead of all of that, the Harbus could just work to really flesh out its social media presence and try to accrue a lot of Twitter followers and hopefully that will work out.
