Dozens of students, approximately 25 articles, and uncountable hours. These are the elements of a successful college newspaper.

Every week, the Charger Bulletin works as a team to build content, copy edit, and consistently fact check. The newspaper is a voluntary entity that students involved have pride, confidence, and hopes for.

That’s the thing about our newspaper. We want it to thrive for years to come. Behind every single page is a team who spent more hours editing than they did sleeping. A team who investigated and researched anywhere from a campus-wide, to a global issue. Writers who reached out to interview a professor and got rejected. Editors who obsessively checked their AP handbooks for the correct use of a comma. Behind every school newspaper is a team of writers who are dying to be journalists. Who are journalists.

To student journalists, the school newspaper becomes a job that they do for the love of it. Students involved are with the paper because they want to be, not because it’s easy, because it’s not, or because it doesn’t require much time, because it does. The student newsroom is made of willing students, who want to work their way from the bottom, up. We work together, we create the content, and piece by piece, we create a paper. We have student-run meetings, we communicate with each other, and we are consistently successful and happy doing it in our cluttered newsroom.

To place a student run organization in the hands of the school is to take the voice of the student body away. Right now, we have the freedom to write about what we want, to have opinions about politics, to cover worldwide issues, to inform our peers, and to be the future of journalism. The newspaper isn’t something to pass or fail, or to be graded on. We put the time in because we want to, not because we have to. Students need a voice. The Charger Bulletin wants to continue to be the voice of the University of New Haven. #SaveStudentNewsrooms.