To the Triton community:
I am writing this letter to ask for your signature on our petition to defend The UCSD Guardian’s control over our operations. While you know The Guardian as the premiere independent and student-run news publication at UC San Diego, you may not know the full extent of the cost we shoulder to maintain this status.
This year, our long-time financial struggles have reached a breaking point. We need your solidarity to ensure the continued existence of our paper as you know it. With your signatures on this petition, we will be more equipped to negotiate with the powers that be to ensure the long-term survival of our organization.
As the legacy newspaper and singular pre-professional journalism program at UCSD, The Guardian has worked around the clock to provide quality, timely, and transparent coverage since our establishment in 1967. This last year was no different; from the encampment and police raid in May, increasingly stringent UC protest policies in September, and the recent wildfires ravaging Los Angeles and on Gilman Drive, to this month’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and federal funding freezes, The Guardian has been and will continue to be there to keep you informed.
We understand the gravity of our function as the primary source of journalism by students, for students at UCSD. To censor and suppress the voice of the people, governments around the world target journalists — even student journalists — and thus, suppress our humanity. As our world rapidly changes, the necessity for accountable, transparent, and reliable student storytelling is more apparent now than ever.
The Guardian’s independence comes at a high cost, but it has always been worth the battle to keep us, the students, as the arbiters of telling student stories. Since the early 2000s, we have been on our own without any faculty advisor or professional staff support, navigating the challenges of the news industry at a school without a formal journalism program. While we take on this honor with pride, we have had to brave unending challenges to survive.
The Guardian is neither a student organization nor an academic department, but an anomaly: We are a UCSD department run entirely by students. Hanging in this balance often subjects us to the University’s fiduciary bureaucracy, but without the financial or structural support — or oversight — that other student-run departments receive from Associated Students and the administration. In simpler terms, this means that, while no one except us can exercise editorial control over our work, we are also no stranger to financial hardship.
Being completely self-sustaining is an uphill battle for a collective of full-time college students. We have made increasingly difficult budgetary decisions in our effort to continue operating at the quality we have become known for, including pay cuts and reduced print. Our ability to offer comprehensive pre-professional training and programming to UCSD’s budding student journalists has been almost entirely eliminated.
The Guardian is not alone in facing these challenges: The Triton, another UCSD student newspaper, has never printed, and Triton TV fights annually to access their funding. All other UC papers ceased daily print years ago, leaving only USC’s Daily Trojan on the West Coast. This semester, they too shared their near-identical budget crisis. As a demonstration of the full might of our community, this petition will serve as an official record that independent student press matters to us all.
As our culture trends toward apathy, the news industry declines and autocracy rises. Big communication conglomerates seek to flatten our perspectives, destroy our empathy, and erode our critical thinking skills. Echo chambers of social media and internet search algorithms divide and isolate our communities. Local and physical media rapidly cycle out of vogue, and with their fall, literacy drops and disinformation proliferates.
Higher education, in particular, is witness to a concerning influx of AI “writers,” bots, and fact-checkers. In a post-COVID-19 world already rife with learning loss, The Guardian endeavors to counter these disturbing phenomena with our work; only humans should tell human stories.
Students are at the forefront of influencing the ever-evolving news and media landscape. Our team is composed of folks united across disciplines and skill levels in our passion to tell the stories that matter at UCSD. This is what we strive for at The Guardian. If I had the time or space, I would tell you about what makes every staffer special and what makes every team tick. I would tell you about all the lives The Guardian has changed, both inside and outside of the organization, and how even after almost 60 years at a STEM-centric research university without a journalism program, we persist.
If you believe in our mission of keeping independent student journalism alive at UCSD, please consider demonstrating your support by signing our petition. That said, nothing helps more than your continued readership, a visit to our website, or picking up the paper from your nearest newsstand. Our work has meaning because you give it that with your critical consideration and engagement, and we could not be more grateful.
Expect further updates, and feel free to reach out to me anytime at [email protected].
With love,
Adalia Luo, Editor-in-Chief
This letter is endorsed by The UCSD Guardian Editorial board, the non-hierarchical, student-run decision-making body which manages The Guardian organization as an entity.
