Fundraising campaign launched to keep UNLV student newspaper alive

The staff of the Rebel Yell, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ student newspaper, has launched an Internet donation drive to survive after budget cuts.

Meanwhile, the paper is under pressure to change its name, which some students have called a reminder of Civil War-era racism.

“We definitely don’t have any funding left for next semester,” said Editor-in-Chief Bianca Cseke, who created a GoFundMe page on Sunday, with the goal to raise $30,000 for newspaper operations. “We do have some ad revenues coming in, but it’s not enough. We need a short-term solution while we work on something more long-term.”

Cseke is confident that this alternative funding plan, despite raising only $10 in a 24-hour period, will keep the 60-year-old newspaper afloat for at least one more semester.

Members of the newspaper’s advisory board are less optimistic.

“If we don’t get an infusion of cash by the end of the year, there’s going to be no newspaper,” said Steve Sebelius, advisory board chairman and a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist. “It won’t exist in print, or online. That’s a real problem.”

Sebelius said university officials he’s spoken with said the budget didn’t allow for additional funding and that they wouldn’t help the paper seek outside funding unless its name was changed immediately.

Sebelius said that the students had planned to announce the name change by Nov. 28 after seeking student ideas and did not want to interfere with their timeline.

UNLV, however, said that the name change was never a condition for funding.

“Like many mainstream print publications across the country, the Rebel Yell has not been self-sustaining for several years,” a UNLV representative said in a statement. “UNLV has provided financial support to allow the newspaper to maintain its operations. We continue to evaluate potential solutions to this issue and have made no final decision.”

Sebelius was told that the university was getting pressure from outside groups, including the NAACP, to change the name. However, he said neither he nor the Rebel Yell staff received any such communications from outside groups.

The newspaper received $30,000 from the Student Life Funding Committee for operations this year, a significant decrease from the $86,000 it received last year, Sebelius said.

“We received catastrophically less,” he said. “The Rebel Yell cannot exist without a healthy subsidy from student fees.”

One possible long-term option, Cseke said, is to ask every student to contribute $2 per semester to support operating costs. Such a measure, however, would not be in place until fall 2018 at the earliest, she said.

Laura Widmer, executive director of the Associated Collegiate Press, called campus newspapers important and necessary.

“The importance of a campus newspaper, is truly what our entire democracy was built on,” Widmer said. “There needs to be the presence of that community paper on campus, otherwise, everything will be going through public relations.”

Sebelius agreed with Widmer.

“It’s absolutely critical,” he said. “If the Rebel Yell goes away, you will have no entity, no group that’s dedicated to scrutiny of the administration, of student government, of activities, on campus. Vital information will go unreported.”

Contact Natalie Bruzda at nbruzda@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3897. Follow @NatalieBruzda on Twitter.