The Saga Independent
Publishing - , ,
The Saga Independent Employees
The Saga Independent Details
In the spring of 2012, the administration of Pleasant Valley High School in Chico, CA decided to eliminate its 47-year-old print student newspaper, the Saga, in favor of shifting its journalism class to a solely online platform. Local business leaders had convinced them that print media was dying and that teaching students print journalism was of increasingly marginal value. Several Saga staffers protested the decision. They were not opposed to the idea of effective online journalism; Rather, their outlook was, "Why can't we have both?" They believed the wholesale sacrificing of print for online would undercut the publication's effectiveness in reaching students and sacrifice many valuable skills learned through print.This small group of journalists decided to organize themselves and create their own newspaper, dubbed "The Saga Independent". Entirely managed, written, edited, designed, and financed by students, it was launched as a quarterly paper and published four 16-page issues throughout the 2012-2013 academic year. The papers (1,000 copies of each) were distributed to students on PV's campus, and covered everything from local news and PV events to student opinion and reviews. Their goal? To continue the Saga‘s decades-old tradition of putting the news right into students' hands.
