Every week, The Falcon publishes 2,700 copies of our newspaper. They are distributed across campus by The Falcon editors to various spots where they are easily accessible for students, staff and community members to pick up.

It is our goal to have one copy of the paper accessible for each person to read at SPU. It's not always the case that papers are picked up, and there are often several stacks left over at the end of the week.

At the beginning of the year, we published 3,000 copies of the newspaper every week. After evaluating our publishing costs, as well as the number of papers left over each week at the end of fall quarter, we decided that it would be best to reduce the number of papers by 300. It is not our wish to have extra papers, and we recycle the papers each week after we count those left over.

One reason we still publish 2,700 copies of the paper is that we have an agreement with the publishing company, and in order to make it financially feasible for the company printing the papers to make money, a certain number must be published.

Also, in the time it takes the printing press to get the color and ink right, more copies would be thrown away than delivered if we substantially lowered distribution.

Finally, it is our hope that people will take the time to pick up a copy of The Falcon each week, and we will do our part to make them as accessible as possible.

We want to be environmentally responsible with our publishing and distribution, and the changing face of the newspaper business often makes it hard to determine whether or not publishing a certain number of papers is responsible.

We will continue to evaluate our printing costs and will work toward being as environmentally responsible as possible. And please recycle The Falcon after you read it.