The Campus Reader, a competitor with the Iowa State Daily for ad revenues and student talent, will be scaling back its paper next fall and will not be publishing at all this summer.

The Campus Reader was a central figure in a legal battle last year between the Daily and Partnership Press over campus distribution rights. Partnership Press, co-owned by Gary Gerlach and Michael Gartner, owns the Ames Tribune and several central Iowa newspapers. Gerlach said the paper folded because it was just not profitable.

“We originally started the Campus Reader to establish distribution rights,” he said. “We used it as a vehicle. When that was achieved in April of 1998, our goal became to make the Reader a profitable publication. We’re just re-gearing the business strategy in order to achieve that goal.”

Gerlach said this fall, Collegiate Publishing Company, which is owned by the same investors as Partnership Press, will still publish Cardinal and Gold, a sports-centered pullout section that was inserted last year in the Ames Tribune and the Campus Reader.

“The Reader will be merging into the Cardinal and Gold,” he said. “The title will be the Campus Reader’s Cardinal and Gold. We will pick up the entertainment coverage and retain all of the advertising and classified advertising and put them all in one package.”

The restructured weekly newspaper will publish 39 issues a year during the school year. It will have a circulation of approximately 20,000 readers, much through mail distribution. Gerlach said recent ISU graduate Scott Johnson would be editor of the paper, and it would employ five or six ISU interns. The new Reader will also feature the special sports sections, as well as the special Veishea and Greek sections.

Scott Sailor, former editor of the Reader, said he was disappointed that the paper was forced to change focus so dramatically.

“For financial reasons, they decided not to continue publishing,” he said. “I was obviously disappointed because we were getting better every week. But I guess to them it was, ‘How long can we support this, and how much longer would it take to turns things around?’ The paper started in February of 1996 and hasn’t made a profit since then.”

Sailor said Reader employees were not aware that the paper would not be coming back when its last issue came out May 4. The decision to revamp the paper was made in late May. Sailor said he will not be coming back to work at the Reader.

“I am done with the Reader for good,” he said.

The absence of the Campus Reader will leave a hole in campus publications at ISU, Sailor said.

“I thought we served a good purpose on campus,” he said. “It was another voice. We gave a lot of writers and photographers a place to learn and grow and get experience. Not everyone can work for or wants to work for the Daily, and there was a place for those people. I hope some of those people will write for the Daily this fall.”

Gerlach said he wasn’t sure if the Campus Reader folding would hurt the options available for readers on the ISU campus.

“It’s a decision that is still in the process of review,” he said. “We’ll have to keep an eye to see if it leaves a hole. We reserve the right to start publishing a full-blown Campus Reader somewhere down the road.”