I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.
Good. Now that I have your attention with that great, impassioned line from the movie “Network,” let me elaborate.
I am pretty upset right now, and I’m not going to take this without a fight – a fight as in written words like this, public discussions and peaceful methods.
In case you didn’t read the front page of today’s issue yet, there’s talk of making the Daily Forty-Niner – an essential campus tradition since November of 1949, two months after the school opened – an online-only publication.
That could mean no more print newspaper Monday through Thursday. That could mean no more grabbing the paper to read from class to class. That could mean no more cutting out noteworthy clips or sharing them with those on the other side of the great Digital Divide.
Or, worse yet, that could mean no more using the Daily Forty-Niner as a cover on those rare Southern California rainy days. Tell me which website can do that for you.
But, all lame jokes aside, I don’t think I need to elaborate much on the importance of a daily, student-run campus newspaper of record for this campus, which, by the way, has a population greater than many cities and is the third largest in the state.
There’s a little saying that proliferates this campus nowadays. It hangs from light posts like some kind of Beach Pride propaganda.
It says we’re “Among the Nation’s Best.”
Does a university that’s “Among the Nation’s Best” turn its back to one of its oldest traditions? Does it stomp on its chronicler of campus history that also serves as the starting point for its students’ futures?
Does the university want to be the only major American university without a daily college newspaper? Does it want to take the “paper” out of newspaper?
I sure hope not.
Gerry Riposa, the dean of the College of the Liberal Arts, is making a bad decision by thinking an online-only “feasibility study” will feasibly save this newspaper. If 99.5 percent of the newspaper’s ad revenue comes from the printed product, what does that leave it?
The answer is it leaves a whole lot of nothing. It’s as if he’s indirectly tinkering with chances of exercising First Amendment rights via free press and free speech, dare I say.
Riposa is not a member of the 49er Publications Board. Riposa is not a member of the Daily Forty-Niner staff in any way. Riposa doesn’t endure life in the journalistic trenches day to day like the through-the-roof dedication of the Daily Forty-Niner staff does.
In fact, to my knowledge, Riposa has never even walked into the Forty-Niner newsroom.
If any decisions are going to be made about the future of this newspaper, decency, common sense and good leadership demand they be made involving the people who run it day to day to day to day – students.
When Riposa excused himself at the outset of the meeting Friday, it wasn’t the first time he refused to speak on any terms with students.
Before Friday, a Forty-Niner reporter had been trying to contact Riposa via repeated telephone calls for more than a week regarding his proposed “feasibility study.” Riposa had more than a week’s chance to comment or prepare, to give the newspaper his idea and his side of the story, but he instead evaded such opportunities – until CSULB President F. King Alexander put in a phone call that seemed to open up our access to him.
Word to the wise from former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill: “Ninety-nine percent of the time, if you’re straight with the press, they’ll be straight with you.”
We at the Daily Forty-Niner want anyone – not just Riposa – to be straight with us. In turn, we’ll be straight with you.
Bradley Zint is a senior journalism and political science major and the editor in chief for the Daily Forty-Niner.
