Post navigation

Prev: (06/04/12) | Next: (06/05/12)

Community college student journalists find sweet backer to get back into newspaper biz

Tuesday night at 10p the number of Capitol Hill-based newspapers will double. 11th Ave’s The Stranger, Capitol Hill’s *only* newspaper, will have competition in the pulp department. Thanks to a generous boost from an unlikely backer, Seattle Central Community College’s independent student publication the New City Collegian will return to print with a special edition 1,000-issue run.


“Ultimately we’d like to get the journalism program back on campus using the paper as catalyst,” editor Sebastian Garrett-Singh tells CHS.

Now fully independent of the school, the Collegian has reawakened online at www.newcitycollegian.com and covers issues related to the Seattle Community College system, and student life and culture. It actively documented Occupy Seattle’s stay on the SCCC campus and has continued to dog administrators on First Amendment issues. The 10p release time is no coincidence. Though the new rule set is not yet in effect, the Seattle Community College board adopted new rules governing protest on the system’s campuses — including a mandatory 10p cutoff time — in the wake of Occupy’s establishment of a camp at Seattle Central last fall.

Garrett-Singh tells CHS he doesn’t plan to be arrested Tuesday night. “I’ve notified the campus security,” he said.

Long-term, Garret-Singh said the hope is for the Collegian to eventually return to the school’s fold and have funding restored to continue to produce the paper edition and support the site.

In the meantime, the special 1,000-print run has a unique backer. Cupcake Royale has stepped forward to support the venture. Hey, Molly Moon, we’re just saying, CHS might be interested. Call us.

Subscribe and support CHS Contributors -- $1/$5/$10 per month

7 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jill
11 years ago

Gah! Jody Hall is so amazing. That’s all I have to say.

Yeah...
11 years ago

Hopefully they’ll avoid racist articles like they had in the past:
The dispute can be traced back to a controversial piece that ran in January 2007, in which opinion editor Lee Myers linked African-American crime rates to black culture and appeared to condone racial profiling. The piece outraged many African-American students at the college and led to demonstrations and an apology from the paper’s editor-in-chief.
From: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008385013_s
Don’t know if I am interested in purchasing cupcakes from Royale anymore.

Maybe they’ll have a different adviser than the one at the time, Wyman who himself noted:
BACKGROUND: I do not preview all copy before it is published. However, the paper has a standing policy that any article or op-ed which covers sensitive topics like race are vetted to all editors at the preissue meeting. That happened last quarter, when the staff voted down an “Islam is not compatible with democracy” op-ed. In this case, however, in a late-nite call, the editor in chief ran the op-ed by just a few other editors and then put the story through to layout. It was breach of policy that she admitted to in a
front-page apology last issue.
From: http://scccstudentnews.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/narrative
How does an advisor not preview the material that will be published?

Gryphon MacThoy
11 years ago

Let’s assume for a moment that the article you cite loosely was negatively racist, even horribly so.

Is one such mistake by a student editor a good enough reason to destroy a student body’s instrument of free speech? I do not think it is.

The burden of the 1st Amendment to our nation’s constitution is that we must all withstand verbal offenses without reacting destructively.

Perhaps that student should have been demoted. Perhaps Jeb should have been reprimanded or even replaced as the advisor. But those who really know what happened to the school’s journalism program know that this supposedly racist article was the front for the background reasons the administration killed the student news and journalism program at SCCC.

Read all about it here :
http://www.newcitycollegian.com/about/what-happened-to-the-c

SCCC Anon
11 years ago

It is stupid to assume that one article represents nearly half a century of SCCC publications, and to equate that the current staff will write “racist” articles due to one article nearly half a decade ago. People will say shit that offends you, thats America, thats an Americans right, get use to it.

LiamWright
11 years ago

Max, I’ve known you for a long while and I hope you know that I staunchly oppose racist systems and ideas, and have been involved in organizing and struggles to that affect. In no way do I condone such an overtly racist piece. Frankly it should have never been run.

But then how do we solve this? By have a state crackdown on free speech? Do we silence people’s ability to speak their minds? How else will people learn, even by negative example? It could have been used as a catalyst to unleash anti-racist and radical activity among students. Instead, because the Administration shut down the NCC for a long time all we’ve had is a state journal, where everything written has to be approved. Is that what you want?

The view that because something reactionary and backward was posted in the past that therefore the newspaper should not exist is itself a very conservative view. I would hope you reconsider. Let’s rely on students, their consciousness, initiative, and power instead of state sanctions by a bunch of corrupt capitalist bureaucrats.

Ian Awesome
11 years ago

Oh give me a break. As long as we’re being ridic, cranky jerks let’s point out that the person who is accusing NCC of being racist is a member of a student government that, instead of allowing the general student populace to vote for prospective members, hand picks their “representatives” like a cool kid’s club. Max. Stop trolling. You’ve apologized to me for making these sorts of comments before and I’d hate for you to have to do it again.

Free Press
11 years ago

Even IF there was a piece that was racist or could be construed as racist, that is not a reason to shut down a paper and if that is what happened, this is very sad for all people, but especially people of color. Especially since I’ve looked at old issues and that was a very good paper.

The only thing standing between a dictatorship and/or run away business and a democracy is a free press. Without a free press, a means to distribute information that has been vetted, fact checked and properly reported on government, business and people can do whatever they want, in secret. And you are not going to find this information on Huffington Post, which is TMZ wearing a business suit.

When government, business and people can do whatever they want in secret, the idea of someone writing something racist will be a walk in the park to the new reality society would face without a free press.

Think this through please and don’t overreact to opinions that may a) might be outright wrong or b) just different than your own. The civil rights movement without a free press would have fallen on dead silence.