A saga of independence

Lunch hour was in full swing last Tuesday (Nov. 13) at Pleasant Valley High School, with hundreds of students milling about the campus, their chattering voices creating waves of sound. Suddenly a klaxon sounded, and the voice of Assistant Principal Renee Spaggiari came over the loudspeaker announcing a “code red” drill and ordering students to proceed immediately to the nearest classroom.

I was sitting at a desk in one of those classrooms, interviewing three student journalists about their effort to save their campus newspaper, The Saga, when the alert sounded, and a room that had been otherwise empty suddenly filled with bodies.

The drill, which ended after about 15 minutes, was a reminder that last May both PVHS and Chico High School were on lockdown for several hours in response to a possible suicide situation.

These are the kinds of events student journalists live for. Like all journalists, they’re constantly on the lookout for stories, and crisis situations make for compelling stories.

Unfortunately, Chico High’s newspaper, the Red and Gold, ceased publication a few years ago after more than a century in operation, leaving the 47-year-old The Saga as the only high-school paper in Chico. Then, at the end of the 2011-12 school year, PV Principal John Shepherd announced that beginning with this academic year he was pulling the plug on the printed newspaper and going strictly to an online version of The Saga.

In a phone interview, Shepherd told the CN&R he had good reasons for doing so: Students would no longer have to spend time selling ads to pay for printing and would be freed up to write more stories, one of the main goals of the Saga class. And, in conversations with local business people and educators, he was told that digital was “the future of media delivery” and students would be better served by mastering the skills it demanded than by publishing a print version of The Saga.

What he failed to understand, the students I interviewed told me, was how important it was to them to create a tangible finished ink-on-paper product they could be proud of. An online version was just not the same.

So they decided to take matters into their own hands.

The result is The Saga Independent, a newspaper “spearheaded, organized, written, edited, financed, published and distributed entirely by PV students,” as Umran Haji, who serves as its features and copy editor, writes in a Nov. 2 front-page article, “The Saga rises from the ashes.”

The paper—so far it’s the only issue published, but the second is in the works—is a substantial achievement, a 16-page broadsheet filled with news, opinion, photo essays and sports stories. The hardest part, Editor-in-Chief Alex Scott said during our interview, was setting up a production facility—they borrowed his father’s home office—and obtaining the tools such as a software design program. Then, of course, they had to write and edit the stories, take the pictures, design the paper together, get it printed and then distribute it on campus.

When I met with Alex, Umran and News Editor Sharon Liu-Bettencourt, I was struck but not surprised by their passion for the project. All three have caught the journalism bug, a fever I’ve had for more than 30 years. They love making newspapers together.

“It’s our football,” Sharon said. “It’s to us like football is to others,” meaning something they do as a team that they’re proud of.

Their goal is to put out one more issue this semester and three the following semester, Alex said. Now that they have a paper in hand, they can sell ads for upcoming issues and cover the $400 printing cost for the 1,200 copies.

They’re not opposed to the online version of The Saga, and in fact several of the nine or 10 students behind The Saga Independent also work on the online publication. What they don’t understand is why the school doesn’t do both. Most newspapers also have an online version, they note, and in fact PV had both last year, “and it worked pretty well,” Alex said.

Students are more likely to read the print version than go online to the website, they believe.

They realize, though, that the online version is more timely than their newspaper, and they’re adjusting accordingly. Future issues will have more feature stories and less breaking news, giving them longer shelf life.

The switch to online, Principal Shepherd said, was part of an overall plan to organize several classes, including The Saga, around digital production of various kinds. He sees that as a way into the future for many students.

But he also senses the “team spirit,” as he put it, behind the effort to make a traditional campus newspaper and the joy its creators take in its production. And he agrees that selling ads is good training, even if it does take time away from writing stories.

But he remains convinced that the The Saga online is a better platform. Currently he’s exploring the development of an application that would give PV students “immediate access to the information and news they would need on a daily basis.” He’d also like to set up a program to send out teasers once a week or twice a month alerting students to stories in the online Saga.

These improvements, he’s convinced, will increase readership significantly.

In the meantime, he’s supportive of Alex and his enterprising friends at The Saga Independent. In recent days he’s met with them to clarify some issues regarding distribution on campus, telling them he’s happy to let them pass out the paper. The only restriction is that they can’t do so inside classrooms.

There’s a quotation from Sharon in Umran’s “Saga rising from the ashes” story that conveys the passion the students feel toward The Saga Independent. “There are so many cool things we obtained from working together on a print newspaper,” she told him. “We really wanted to keep that tradition going, and we wanted our underclassmen to get the same experience we had.”