Opinion: I went through 10 years of Daily Emerald archives; our paper looks markedly different after the 1971 shift.
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When I started working at the Emerald, I was presented with one task: keep it relevant to Eugene or better yet, to the university community. I began writing at the peak of the 2020 George Floyd; so, it did not make sense to me — why must a story I had to share be locally relevant.
The premise was that the Emerald was not designed to compete with national media outlets. Any take that a student in Eugene had, the thinking was, the New York Times or the Washington Post had already done, and better. I could write about how that in itself is wrong, but that is a separate point. For over two years, I have had to twist my every thought to fit this schema. Writing about race, climate change and pervasive social inequality had to be tied to Eugene. Do not get me wrong, I have failed to do so many times, but I disagree with the notion that the Emerald must be a local outlet at all.
Currently, we function like a local feel-good paper. Of course, this may be an unpopular opinion — Eugene’s residents may enjoy these stories. I do not disagree that the university’s primary paper should cover the newest cute shop to open in Eugene or the music and Saturday market scene. But our world is infinitely more complex. Our society is in a state of disarray. To prove the point, Googling the latest news on “chaos” yields 10 different sources on 10 different crises we face today.
Everyone experiences these crises, regardless of whether we are in Eugene or a student at the university. To write as if our contributions’ values are inherently tied to our spatial existence or our presence within a specific institution demeans the human experience and necessarily produces a hierarchy on written thought.
When the Emerald became an independent paper, we were not like this. I looked through a decade of the paper’s coverage, specifically 1968 to 1978. I went in looking to examine UO students’ coverage of the Vietnam War, but I found a trove of writing on so much more.
This time period is special for our paper. In 1971, the Emerald gained its independence from the university’s administration, a popular move for student papers at the time and one endorsed by UO’s then-president, Robert Clark.
Our coverage of world events, before and after independence, was markedly different. The Vietnam War was documented by the Emerald, but not in the same way following 1971. Afterwards, a slew of different takes emerged. The university’s Socialist Club at the time published an opinion piece on an anti-war movement taking place in Chicago. Writers voiced disappointment with the nation’s administration over a decade after the war. The paper published an exponentially greater number of articles about the protests over nuclear weapons proliferation and waste, and political cartoons were hypercritical of governments from the local to federal level. For (better or) worse, students began exchanging opposing sentiments on the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Our independence gave birth to the expansion of student voices — honest ones. These pieces were not tied back to Eugene. A response could be that print journalism placed local papers on a similar level of prestige as national outlets; unlike today where readers have access to all sources without many barriers. While that is true, I think that the Emerald’s current emphasis on locality indicates a broader point: student writers’ voices are not considered as important as those in the national media.
Our last 60 news articles (I got tired of scrolling) did not offer any commentary without qualifying it within the sphere of Eugene. The closest piece related to national issues was on UO students’ concerns about the Supreme Court leak about Roe v. Wade. In the 10 years of archives I examined, every issue, printed daily, shared information on global news. Whether that be the Carter administration’s statements on Saudi Arabia and Iran or news on the Cold War, students covered every single global event. Their voices were powerful, as they communicated a youthful voice on issues broader than our tiny county.
Our voices matter just as much as national outlets. I would far rather read a student’s pessimistic and existentially complicated piece on the state of geopolitics than the New York Times’ Paul Friedman’s hollow and bourgeois take on his lunch with President Biden — which was entirely off of the record. Student news can and should occupy the space of honest, grassroots journalism, superseding what profit-seeking news seeks to fulfill.
But let’s say writers today do not want to cover national news. Our coverage of local news is abysmal as well.
Following the paper’s independence, not a single week went by without coverage of ASUO or the administration’s actions for several years. It seemed as though the paper published every word President Clark uttered. Every budget change, and every ASUO member’s living breath appeared in the paper. In the last six months, the Emerald has written only six news pieces on ASUO and zero news pieces on the administration.
This is bad journalism. We cannot criticize the university administration or our student government if our media fails to track down stories. Our three most recent opinion pieces on ASUO came AFTER the election, lamenting the controversy and lack of student voting. The independent Emerald of the past dedicated entire daily publications to candidates in upcoming elections and their platforms. We are failing to seek the local news that matters as we should.
To the Emerald, I issue a challenge. Over the last two years, I have met incredible writers with brilliant minds that are capable of tackling not only the local happenings but the national crises we face today at the same level of importance as the big boys in journalism today. We should encourage this, rather than pigeonhole writers into covering information on our university’s dorms.
To the writers, I issue another challenge. If national media is not your area, cover the local news that is missed. Our local government, our administration and our student government should not be able to breathe without the Emerald documenting the rhythm of their aspirations. I’ve come to learn that accountability in journalism begins with proximity and quantity. With budgets that we fund that contribute to our livelihoods; every decision and comment must be accessible to the public. That is the writer’s duty. Every day that those in power act without public knowledge, journalism has failed.
