By Megan Brewer — 

Back in September, The Cardinal was told we’d lose all of our funding for the 2018-19 school year from university administration. In March, this turned from nothing to something when Interim President Greg Postel pledged $25,000 in advertising.

This still isn’t the $60,000 we received in past years.

If you want to know what’s happening in the world, in your city, up the street, you hop on a news site. 

Where do you think those people delivering your news started their careers?

For most of them, it was in a newsroom much like ours here at U of L — the basement of the financial aid building. 

It’s one room, slow computers, whiteboards that aren’t white anymore and the smell of student’s dedication.

It’s laying out pages on Sunday and shaking up the toner for the printer to get the last little bit.

The Cardinal, like many other student publications, aims to be the voice for the students and the voice to the students. 

We offer news and sports coverage that other news organizations in Louisville don’t.

We are the news for students at U of L, and that’s who we do it for. We spend hours walking the campus looking for information and in a room without windows to hand our peers the information they can’t get anywhere else.

Where else are you going to hear about commencement programs without graduates names in them and be able to fight to get them put back in? Who else is going to tell you how great our pep band is?

Nowhere. 

Where else do students have the opportunity to share their opinions about U of L? Or write a fun features story? Cover an event on campus and see your words published?

Nowhere, except here. 

We’re able to do this because we’re independent from the university and we have just enough funding to stick around. Being independent from the university allows for us to deliver objective news to our students.

We need student journalism, not just for the student journalists, but for each student that walks onto our campus.

A university is a place where a lot happens in a given week or sometimes day, no one student has time to keep up with it all on their own. That’s why we’re here.

Though student newspapers are about delivering news to students, they’re also about the people inside that room — the student journalists. 

Here at U of L, we don’t offer a journalism degree, so the best way for student’s here to get an education in journalism is doing it every day and learning along the way.

Getting society quality news is not something that is learned overnight, it takes months and even years to develop the skills it takes to make it in a professional newsroom. The best place to start your education as a student journalist is a newsroom that is taken to be professional to everyone in it.

The world needs journalists, we want to know what’s happening around us. The only way to keep well-trained, dependable journalists around is by continuing to give us a newsroom to start in as students.

Reach Megan Brewer on Twitter or Facebook. 

File photo / The Louisville Cardinal