Help Save Our College Newspaper--protect freedom of speech! [View All]

[Liberty Belle]

DUers - this is a sneak preview of my editorial that will be running as soon as my webmaster can post it at www.eastcountymagazine.org. Meanwhile I hope you'll all do this easy action alert to help stop Grossmont College in San Diego's conservative east county from shutting down its campus newsletter due to budget cuts!

SAVE GROSSMONT COLLEGE’S NEWSPAPER AND JOURNALISM TRAINING PROGRAM!

Grossmont College has announced plans to eliminate Media Communications 132, the class which creates the campus newspaper, The Summit. The decision, made due to state budget cuts, would not only eliminate the school newspaper. Instructor Christy Scannell warns, “Most critical, if the class is canceled, students will be unable to complete the cross-media journalism major…which could result in its demise. Students interested in print journalism would need to find another school or another major.” She asks your help to save the students’ newspaper.

Grossmont has no online news source. Closing the newspaper would result in clear censorship of student views as well as eliminating training for future journalists. “What if all colleges were to decide to cut their campus news organizations to reduce budgets?” Scannell wrote in Society of Professional Journalists local newsletter, SPJ Journal.

As a journalist who has written for numerous East County newspapers before founding East County Magazine, I can tell you that there is a severe shortage of journalists in East County. Ask any local news editor. One regional publication went months with no one to cover city council hearings. Finding writers to cover events in backcountry communities is even harder. Now East County is about to lose a primary training ground for community journalists. Most cash-strapped local publications use interns from our community colleges, and those will vanish, too, meaning you’ll see more fluff and less news.

President-Elect Barack Obama recently noted that writing skills help students entering the job market. Of all the things to cut, why this?

This is not the first local attempt to shut down a student newspaper. Fallbrook High School administrators closed the students’ newspaper after it revealed the district superintendent refused to close the school after a fire marshal asked to use the facility as an evacuation center during the 2007 wildfires. Students had also published an editorial critical of the school’s abstinence-only sex education policy. The newspaper won first place in a national journalism contest for high school newspapers, but remains closed down in direct retaliation for defying administration orders against printing the stories.
Censorship of student views is a very, very dangerous precedent – as is eliminating training programs for journalists in our public schools. First amendment freedoms are at stake.

What might be cut instead? Scannell suggests starting with administrator’s salaries, which have not fallen prey to the budget axe. Or perhaps it’s time to rethink state taxation levels to assure that important public education programs aren’t gutted.

Also in today’s news, the University of California regents announced a 6% reduction in freshman admissions. Tuitions have been raised through the roof. San Diego State University has halted admission of “automatic” transfer students from our community colleges, also due to budget cuts. So where else are aspiring journalism students to go?

Christy Scannell asks that readers help save her media communications class and the student newspaper at Grossmont College by sending an e-mail to [e-mail] and to Sunny Cooke, Grossmont College’s president, at [e-mail]. You can also contact the district’s new chancellor, Dr. Cindy Miles at [e-mail], call 619-644-7573 or e-mail the Vice Chancellor at [e-mail].

For the sake of our children’s futures, I urge you to raise your voice and urge that Grossmont College preserve its student newspaper, journalism training, and First Amendment freedoms.