If you’re reading this in in a gray box on post-consumer recycled newsprint, you’re not stuck in the past. If these words are appearing as backlit pixels, you’re not living in the future.
We could spend pages explaining how the internet and social media have allowed us to reach and engage readers like never before. But what’s often lost in those arguments is the equal, if not greater, importance of our print edition, which is currently under threat by the drama-ridden politicking of student governments across the 5Cs.
Our argument for printing is not rooted in symbolism or idealism. It comes from a recognition of our role on campus as one adverse to administration-peddled narratives, especially in the current political climate around student organizing.
Our newspaper is the only 5C-wide printed matter that is not vetted or wholly produced by communications departments. From stamps on flyers to glossy copies of Hidden Pomona, we’re encouraged to see our 1-square-mile lives as relaxed, diverse, and utopic.
TSL allows us students to say otherwise, and to rightfully raise our voices in the same physical landscape that hosts corporate campus propaganda.
Our print edition binds together the Claremont Colleges like no other publication. As one supporter of our recent petition eloquently stated: “Newspapers are a symbol and physical manifestation of communal unity, a place where conversations can be held, achievements celebrated, and news shared.”
When you hold a printed copy in your hand, you can know that you’re holding the same copy as any reader across the 5Cs. Very few things knit our campuses together as well as stacks of the community-focused, student-produced newspaper outside our dorm rooms and in our dining halls and libraries.
We understand that our budget is much higher than most 5C student organizations. Like them, we exist to serve students. The vital service we provide to our community relies on our ability to go to print each week, though.
That is, the ability of the student voice to enter the 5C discourse depends on a funded print newspaper. The decision to grant us our full allocation is simple, moral, and decidedly pro-student-voices.
Let us print, and we will show you what democracy looks like. Hint—ten pages, two in color, on the desk of every college president.