I’m Luke DiStefano and I’ll be helping Mark with the newsletter for a while. I’m a student at The College of New Jersey majoring in Journalism & Professional Writing, with a minor in Creative Writing. Outside of this newsletter, I am the Nation & World editor at The Signal newspaper, and I am a published poet—with my poetry collection “the gentlemen gallery” available on Amazon.
On this episode of The Journalism Salute, Mark Simon spoke to Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez. He is a political science and philosophy student at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) and the editor-in-chief of The Retrograde—a student newspaper that operates independently of UTD’s administration.
“I’m from Jalisco, Mexico. I moved here to the US for my studies, and I got into journalism really on my first day of classes,” he said about his journalism genesis. “I was kind of set in doing pre-law litigation, things like that after my undergraduate degree, and this just fully appeared to me as like an entirely different opportunity because it was the kind of research I wanted to be doing.”
Gregorio’s story gets complicated from here, however, as tensions rose when the nature of his work ruffled more and more feathers.
Following a few stories which received some pushback from the administration, The University of Texas at Dallas removed its newspaper stands in an effort to seemingly kill The Mercury.
“The first article I remember administrators being upset with was our ‘Bring our rocks back!’ editorial covering the removal of the campus spirit rocks, which were a public forum of student expression. After this came out, a lot of offices stopped talking to us, unless the office of communications was in charge of providing the statement to us. I saw the first removal of newspapers from kiosks in response to our suicide awareness and support editorial ‘In the wake of death.’ And of course, everything rapidly began escalating after our May 20 issue, which covered the student encampment on campus and subsequent violent raid of it. I would attribute their aggression towards us as a response to our insistence on investigative journalism and accountability on campus,” he said on the matter, in an interview with the Gateway Journalism Review.
Following these more minor pushbacks, the university further attacked the newspaper’s editorial line by demoting the paper’s advisor, installing another who referred to the student’s work as “journalistic malpractice, and then she refused to elaborate when asked for specifics,” said Gregorio. Another advisor orchestrated the removal Gregorio as editor-in-chief only later to be fired herself. And after the student staff went on strike, they were fired by campus administrators too.
Gregorio’s determination in the face of this systematic shutdown did not waver, evidently, as while The Mercury is done, The Retrograde has replaced it. In order to avoid the red-tape associated with being affiliated with the school, The Retrograde is its own independent non-profit entity to keep doing what The Mercury would have done otherwise, if not for the administrative attacks.
“When everyone got fired, we just continued using the new processes we developed with no real impact,” he said. The paper resumed the same biweekly publishing schedule as The Mercury.
Gregorio is a study in journalistic willpower, and a testament to how perseverance is a journalist’s best tool. Unfortunately, oftentimes, the things worth reporting on are the things which stir up the most controversy.
Platforming truths worth sharing sometimes means going against other’s interests, and any successful journalist has to learn how to be at peace with the idea that their reporting is likely to upset some demographic of people. Especially when the delicate situation is set up in a way where what it signifies towards a larger issue can make the outcome all the more crucial.
This reminds me of a situation The Signal, the paper where I work at, dealt with last year. I suggest reading the hyperlinked article for context, but in essence, the controversy surrounding the hateful messages shared by the TCNJ College Republicans in their private GroupMe, that we had been informed of, left us in a tricky position as a paper. It’s a predicament that parallels the systemic struggle that Gregorio also experienced simply by aiming to platform the truth.
On the one hand, there’s the need to remain objective. Journalists are ideally meant to be more vessels for the truth—not prophets. By the same token, however, is there objectivity and/or nuance in bigotry? Isn’t there some line in the sand that we as an organization should announce we are standing behind?
It can be a tricky situation to navigate, as there’s no easy answer. It took much deliberation before that initial article was even penned, and even more before we decided to present it as a stance we were taking as an organization. Because it’s not as simple as expressing morals, when there’s always the fear of compromising our objectivity and letting biases stain our integrity as reporters of the facts.
“I was getting the reward of talking to people, making new friends. Just having a generally good impact on campus. So it was this fun kind of dopamine rush of, oh, I’m having a meaningful impact,” Gregorio said.
It can feel futile and draining as a journalist to come up against larger systems that are trying to hinder your ability to be a truth-teller. Ultimately, all successful journalists are only able to retain this resolve by focusing on the exact thing Gregorio does: the community fostered from shaping an informed public.
We have to, because unlike other careers, journalism’s glory is less overt. You have to find some meaning in the act itself, as there aren't many external rewards to derive from the selfless act of objective reporting. That being said, the effects of said reporting are always palpable if you know where to look.
“In this 10 month period, we crossed a million views across our social media and website, which is something The Mercury had never done in a whole year,” he said. “So it’s been really nice to see this kind of level of support. Even if everything we cover is kind of bad.”
Gregorio’s salute: Steven Monacelli, a local investigative journalist in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.