Please say yes.
Your student publication lives on a budget allotment set 20 years ago.
In this new age of campus journalism, our 50 peso publication fee is insufficient for the type of content production we do. The staple ‘annual magazines’ alone eat of a third of our total budget for production. We’ve made use of social media and the internet to increase our reach, but even website maintenance isn’t free. Travels for trainings, and competitions which the publication regularly win are getting more difficult to manage with the funds we have to work with.
Our office is in a deplorable state. We have managed to salvage one of our computers just recently, but other than that, only the light bulb and the AC unit that was donated years ago are functional. Termites have invaded our old cabinets and have ruined several of our file archives. And as if that was not enough, toilet renovations from the DYDC Radio station in the upper floor left the office soaking in filth early this school year.
For content production and coverages, the staff have taken to using their personal cameras and laptops already. The publication is in the parasitic practice of constantly borrowing office supplies from the Department of Development Communication which is nearby. And snacks for meetings and overtime, are shouldered by either the staff, or our faculty advisers.
You might ask, why the bad news right away? Well, we can no longer afford to dance around.
Last year, through a plebiscite during the general assembly, we looked to increase our funds from 50 pesos to 120. We’ve explained these things, we’ve pleaded with everyone who cared to attend, we counted the votes one by one, and we lost. We lost by a very slim margin.
The publication understands that any additional expense is a burden to all of us. We understand that as students, we are financially dependent. But right now it is your turn to understand, hear us out.
In the years of Dr. Bacusmo’s presidency, publication deficits were shouldered by the student development fund. This has allowed us to perform above the limit of our funding and produce five thousand copies of 80 peso per piece magazines, while still being able to produce minor content releases and send our staff to win the regional competitions. In the past years, we had money to spare. But now, we are faced with a crisis.
The implementation of the K to 12 system cuts off the first year enrollment. This semester we are down to 400 first year enrollees. Next semester there will be none. Our already insufficient budget will shrink and shrink along with the reduction of student population as our seniors graduate with each passing semester. This year we have about 6,000 students. Up until the end of the transition period from the K to 12, we will receive no new enrollees. And even then, we will have a few year levels to fill up. We’ve done the math. Needless to say, our funds will not be enough to survive.
Given that projected decrease, the Amaranth pleads with the VSU studentry to vote YES for the increase of our semestral publication fee from 50 pesos to 100 pesos. There are no more fancy words left to stress how much we need this increase. A free press armed with the power and resources to produce quality content and public service is fundamental in our pursuit of excellence. The publication cannot keep crouching to fit the old blanket from 20 years ago. We need a bigger one. It is only the Visca culture of manpower compensating for resource deficiency that has kept the publication going.
But this is no longer sustainable. We do not want quality reduction, we do not want to limit the services we can provide to the VSU studentry. But those who drafted our budget plan in the 1990’s have not taken into account the needs and price adjustments to arise 20 years later. We have done so much with insufficient resources, can you imagine what we can do with enough?
The publication needs your help. The punlication needs your vote. The publication needs your YES. Please say yes, to the publication fee increase.