March 6, 2018
Scribe staff
“Every good story starts with you.”
For student-run media at UCCS, this simple sentence drives how we cover the campus that we call home.
This sentence also drives how we, The Scribe and UCCS Radio, continue to bring important, reliable and relatable news and entertainment to you.
The Scribe and UCCS Radio like to say we are the collective voice of UCCS — and that’s true. We represent the student perspective in our stories and shows. No other local news outlet covers our campus from your perspective.
We want to continue telling your stories, and we want to tell them well.
And as students, it’s important for us to be informed on the campus we spend so much time at. Campus news affects you on a daily basis, and being informed only helps you make better decisions about how you spend your time here.
However as our current funding stands, we cannot do inform you in the ways we want to.
As the 2018 SGA Election approaches, we’re asking you to support us through voting yes for the Media Fee.
The Scribe and UCCS Radio are proposing an independent Media Fee to fund our organizations.
We are seeking an independent fee to separate ourselves from the funding mechanism of the Student Government Association, to address concerns with minimum wage and to give money back to the Student Activity Fee fund.
We believe that media should be a separate entity from government, especially one that only has so much money to allocate to every club and organization on campus.
As it stands now, our departments take one third of the Student Activity Fee pool. To put that into context, the total allocated funding for clubs in this pool was $300,000 as of fall 2017.
We want to give this money back to the Student Activity Fee. This means more money for your club or organization.
We’re asking for 53 cents per credit hour, per student for this fee every fall, spring and summer semester.
This would effectively amount to $155,000 that would sustain The Scribe and UCCS Radio’s operations, along with any new media organizations that form and request funding.
We realize that we are not reaching every student, and we want to change that with addition of this independent fee.
For every student who works for this newspaper and radio station, student media serves as a forum to be involved on campus in the most unique way.
We also have the power to produce a product of information and entertainment for you each and every week, covering campus happenings from a student perspective.
With this money, we plan to expand our paid staff, expand advertising and expand coverage of the topics you care about.
We cannot achieve these goals as minimum wage climbs 90 cents every year, and the constrictions of being funded via a small pool of money inhibits us from expanding and telling every story that matters.
It costs money to run a newspaper and a radio station. We have to account for payroll for our employees, equipment costs, printing cost and other costs.
And with the money we receive from the Media Fee, we want to expand our organizations to serve you, our audience, in a more representative, robust ways.
We implore you to vote yes for this fee in order to allow us to better serve you.
Because our organizations exist for one audience: you.