The campus’s oldest and largest student newspaper lost out on much-needed revenue for next year because of one little word, according to the person in charge of administering the recent student election.

On the ballot, the Varsity newspaper asked for a 75 cent increase in the levy it receives from students, in order to compensate for massive declines in advertising following the economic slowdown.

The referendum question lost by just a few votes, with 1031 opposed and 998 in favour of the 75 cent increase.

Chief Returning Officer (CRO) Mike Foderick says many students got the newspaper question mixed up with the referendum to ask student to pay millions to build a new athletic centre. The heated referendum about the Varsity Centre Project—often dubbed just “The Varsity Levy”—could have easily been confused with the Varsity newspaper, he said.

“Significant confusion with the Varsity Centre levy caused it to lose,” Foderick said.

Varsity editor-in-chief Jeremy Nelson is frustrated with the outcome and plans to have meeting with university officials and student governments over the next week to discuss what to do next. In the meantime, he is encouraging student who mistakenly voted against their student newspaper to email him at [email protected].

“This is really infuriating, because one of the things that mattered most to me was to leave the paper in solid financial shape for next year instead of having to deal with a financial mess,” he said. “If the editors have to spend all their time fundraising and worrying about the paper running out of money, it makes it pretty hard to find time to spend making a good newspaper.”

Because of the economic slowdown, Varsity advertising dropped more than $60,000 this year. Advertising industry analysts, including Campus Plus, which sells national advertising for the Varsity, do not expect the numbers to get much better for quite some time.

If the levy had succeeded, it would have provided the Varsity with about $25,000 in new revenue, which, when combined with cutbacks, would have allowed the paper to break even next year and begin to rebuild its savings, which were depleted to almost bare minimum levels this year.

“As it stands now, I’m not sure what we’re going to do,” said Nelson. “It’s just so frustrating because it shouldn’t have happened….within five minutes of me finding out the results, I had already heard from one student who voted against our levy because he thought he was voting against a student-funded stadium on campus.

“If I found one student in a room of less than fifty, how many others made that mistake too?”