The research question that I am planning to pursue for my archival essay goes something along the lines of: what role did The Santa Clara (Santa Clara’s student-produced newspaper publication) play in student life and how has it as well as its role evolved over the years?
When thinking about this question, I first wondered about why schools had student newspapers to begin with. What was their importance? To gain some insight and perspective into this question, I looked online for articles that might have some answers and came across the following article.
It was titled “Why a Newspaper Club is Important for Your School”, and brought about several interesting points that I thought held relevance to the artifacts that I had chosen (which were several publications of TSC).
Its number one reason for advocating that all schools have student newspapers is that students need a voice. It essentially claims that having a newspaper provides students with a platform to bring about their opinions and thoughts in a credible and respected manner, while also allowing them to enter a conversation with other readers and people on campus. This is in contrast to students simply being “spectators” and not voicing any of their thoughts but instead silently giving their two cents worth in the sidelines.
With this in mind, after looking at some of TSC’s publications, especially those from the 1940s-1960s, I can see that the student newspaper definitely filled this role in publicizing well-written, yet often times rather biased and opinionated pieces. TSC had several sections of published anonymous letters that were sent to them from the student body, written about almost anything and anyone. However, while there were these opinionated pieces, I also noted that (according to its featured box) a Reverend moderated the paper, which makes me wonder how autonomous the paper really was, and what kind of stories were censored.
Another point the article makes is that despite recent technological advances, journalism will never die, and with it will remain the need to be able to convey one’s thoughts and do research to back it up. I thought this was relevant to my archives because if I did end up studying how the newspaper’s role evolved overtime, I could also see if its role as a platform for quality writing (as evident by stories with credible content) was fulfilled despite all of the technological changes that occurred down the line.
Finally, the last point that the article brought up was that the newspaper was a means of student discovery, meaning it allowed students to voice their otherwise unheard opinions, and in doing so connected them to other potentially likeminded people. This in a sense brings a more encompassing sense of school community, and encourages other people to voice their opinions as well. When reading through several of the publications, I got a sense that Santa Clara’s student body, though not necessarily close in terms of social groups, were nevertheless likeminded people who were very aware of each other’s whereabouts and activities, which was its own sense of community in a way.
Overall, this article presented key elements that I’ll be looking for when further analyzing my archive artifacts.
Images Credit:
http://www.ireporter.ge/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Stei081213_med.jpg
http://assets.fauquiernow.com/images/uploads/news_contributed/_320/censorship.jpg
https://static-secure.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/10/18/1318929679444/leeds-newspaper-007.jpg