Dear Scripps Community,
Four years ago, the three of us attended our first Scripps Voice meeting from our bedrooms.
It was bizarre to join a team without having actually met anyone, but that didn’t stop the excitement that came with writing for our college paper. The legacy of journalism at Scripps and TSV’s mission, aimed at highlighting the voices of marginalized communities, was more important than ever in the face of the pandemic and 2020 social climate.
We owe much of our early experience to our predecessors who laid the foundation for our success. Amid the chaotic transition to an online setting, they ran the paper remotely and successfully brought back print publications upon our return to campus. We sat by them as they dealt with the financial aftermath of the pandemic and have carried on from where they left off. We watched as they led our pitch meetings and worked to exemplify their infectious energy when it was our turn; we felt the love they showed towards the staff when things got difficult and channeled this care through our daily lives. Their approaches exemplified strength, compassion, and dedication to journalistic integrity that we hope have continued into our legacy at the paper.
At the beginning of each year, our editorial team creates a list of goals and shares them with our staff. From these, one concept that has consistently come up is building on our investigative work. TSV’s focus has never been to break a story first – many publications on our campus do an amazing job of that – but rather to thoroughly explore and report on topics that really matter to the community. We are extremely proud of our team, who have challenged themselves to dive deeply into important issues on campus even when they were challenging. We are consistently impressed by the way they hold themselves in the face of adversity and know that they will continue to do so.
While some of our goals have been met during our time at TSV, we still have many hopes and expectations for what our publication can bring to Scripps and the 5C communities. Throughout our time at the paper, we have continually returned to TSV’s original mission: more than a paper promoting neutrality and objectivity, we want to be a platform for radical voices, creative perspectives, marginalized identities, and uncompromising activism.
An email we recently discovered from TSV’s founder, Dara Pressley ’93, emphasized this sentiment and showed us the importance of understanding our origins in the context of the greater 5Cs. Started by a group of students from marginalized backgrounds, the paper aimed to give our campus a voice that it had previously lacked. What did it mean when Scripps’ stories were being told by publications from other campuses? And how was it possible that our college was the last one to have a news publication? Under these premises, TSV became a space to undermine any attempts to silence Scripps students and instead uplift those voices. We, as students from underrepresented groups on campus, continue to see this value in TSV’s role. It is by speaking to different campus communities to cover diverse narratives that we come to understand each other, and in doing so, we grow as a collective.
Now more than ever, it is essential to have a platform for varied perspectives and community support on college campuses. We are disheartened by the way student voices have been suppressed nationwide in the past months. Opening up opportunities to share perspectives and highlight issues that may fly under the radar are important elements of freedom of speech. There is value in being heard, and there is value in allowing the community to engage in thoughtful conversations through writing. It is when this writing is taken off the page and into our lives that we make the largest impact, and we want our publication to be a space for students from all backgrounds to engage in this process. Freedom of speech, whether it be written or spoken, is something we have and will actively continue to support.
That being said, we understand the importance of our role in promoting this speech. We’ve felt the weight of that responsibility in moments when we’ve faced resistance, and it’s been these times that have demonstrated the value of community. Over 15-hour production weeks and stress-inducing deadlines, the necessity of community support both in and out of the production room has been invaluable. We have had the privilege of knowing and working with our amazing editorial team; they have become our second family at Scripps. Through our highs and lows, they have consistently shown up for us and will continue to do so as we step off this campus. We have also seen immense support from the greater Scripps community throughout our time at TSV, and it will be this ongoing support that will enable our staff to continue important and impactful coverage of our campuses.
We cannot express how grateful we have been for the opportunity to engage with the Scripps community in this way. Thank you for supporting us as we found our footing and uplifting us when our team poured hours into their work. Our time at TSV is something we will always look back at fondly, and it is something that will stay with us forever.
All the best,
Ellen Hu ’24, Aanji Sin ’24, and Alyssa Wend ’24
2023-2024 TSV Editors-in-Chief
Photo Courtesy of Frances Walton ’26
