By Samuel Rubenfeld
The Student Government Association approved a new campus media organization at its weekly senate meeting.
InformNation will initially be a monthly newsletter, and it begins publication at the end of October. Danielle Marra, a junior, founded it.
“I personally believe that having one news source is not beneficial to Hofstra students,” Marra said. She said the newsletter will focus on politics and be liberal in its ideology, will be satirical and it will not be as many pages as The Chronicle. Marra said it would be between six and 10 pages long.
“The message of InformNation is going to be…change, overall change in lifestyle, for the betterment of our futures and the world we live in,” Marra wrote on the new organization’s Facebook.com group page.
“The tone of the newsletter will have a ‘Daily Show’ feel to it,” Marra said. It will have six sections: politics, economy, environment, campus events, features and opinion.
InformNation will sell ad space in future issues but did not request funds for its first issue, which will be personally financed by the club’s creator, said SGA President Peter DiSilvio.
Marra does not know how much her first issue will cost her, and she will not sell ads in the first issue, she said. The newsletter will be endorsing Barack Obama for president, but it will have no ties to the University’s College Democrats, she said.
“Competition is good, you don’t want one source of information,” DiSilvio said.
The SGA Constitution does not allow for clubs with duplicate purposes but, in 2007, students approved a referendum creating an exception for multiple media organizations, after a similar proposal by then-senator Kathleen Hunker was not approved by SGA earlier in the academic year.
Marra hopes to begin publishing biweekly after adding enough writers and content.
Tuesday evening, SGA also approved two other new clubs: a club fencing team, and Merge, a club devoted to charitable work by using the arts.
In other SGA developments:
Vice President Jared Berry unanimously passed new “rules of the chamber,” which give specific instructions on how legislation will reach the floor for debate and vote.
Berry and DiSilvio split the SGA into two large committees, one to focus on the entire student body and the other to focus on student organizations, in order to figure out how they could better serve students, Berry said.
The SGA comptroller fined the African Peoples Organization $870 for money lost during their spring formal last academic year.
Spring 2009’s Music Fest preparations are underway, and DiSilvio will meet with University administrators in the next two weeks to discuss having ferris wheels and other rides as a part of the event.