Despite narrowly losing its ASSU special fees vote last spring, the Stanford News Readership Program (SNRP) has secured funding from University administrators to continue providing free newspapers in dining halls and newsstands across campus.

The six year-old program was bailed out in part by $15,000 in funding from the Provost’s Office matched with funds from the Undergraduate Senate, the Vice Provost of Student Affairs and its own reserve money, Aaron Qayumi ‘09, president of the program, told The Daily in an email.

The program also cut costs by eliminating distribution to the graduate community, which strongly voted against the SNRP’s special fees request.

Although the SNRP received 67.57 percent of the undergraduate vote, it fell short of the requisite endorsement by 15 percent of the total student population, both graduate and undergraduate. SNRP advocates cited two reasons for the shortfall, the first being an unexpected lack of support from the graduate community. The second, according to ASSU Senator Stuart Baimel ‘09, was acronym ambiguity.

“The main problem is that undergrads didn’t vote for it in the highest numbers because they didn’t know what SNRP stands for,” said Baimel, who also writes a column for The Daily. He added that if the group’s name had better conveyed its purpose, it would have received more votes.

Baimel also cited discontent among Row House residents, who do not receive a share of the 800 copies of The New York Times or the 600 copies of the San Jose Mercury News papers distributed on campus Monday through Friday. He said the group is addressing the problem, and copies are available at the quad and at a few other locations besides dining halls.

Provost John Etchemendy was “very sympathetic” to the program’s requests for emergency funding, said Baimel, who attended a meeting with the Provost and leaders of the SNRP.

Seeing that the group fell just short of gaining the necessary endorsement, Etchemendy agreed to help the group for this year only, Baimel said.

According to Baimel, this is not the first time the Provost has helped a student group that lost special fees, although he could not name any other group specifically.

In addition to funding from the Provost, the SNRP will also draw on unused special fees from previous years.

“The way special fees works is that groups rarely spend all the money that they ask for, so groups build up large reserve accounts,” Baimel said.

But reserves were not enough to keep SNRP afloat and, though the Provost is making up the difference this year, his office will not be supplementing next year’s fees, Qayumi wrote.

“He made it very clear that this was something his office pretty much never does,” Qayumi wrote. “[H]is response to student groups who ask for ‘bailouts’ is always, ‘If your group deserves our funding, then why couldn’t you get enough votes.’”

He said the SNRP will be back on the special fees ballot next spring, though for undergraduates only.