Dear Readers,
Today marks the 40th anniversary of The Independent Florida Alligator’s, well, independence. Our first issue hit the stands Feb. 1, 1973, debuting a publication that has since seen the Gators win three national football championships, six UF presidents lead the university and the population of Gainesville nearly double in size.
Forty years ago, there was no Internet, no cellphones and no iPads. The Student Government reporter didn’t send out live updates from Senate meetings because Twitter was decades from being invented. Stories were punched out on typewriters as production workers designed pages by hand.
As the pervasive digital world has increasingly changed journalism, the Alligator has evolved. Today, we see story ideas on Facebook, edit our articles in Google Docs and create layouts in Adobe InDesign. We are not the same paper we were 40 years ago.
But make no mistake: Our independence is more crucial than ever.
Being independent isn’t about bashing university administrators or printing curse words. It’s not a gimmick, it’s not a liberal agenda and it’s not a superiority complex.
The Alligator’s independence is so vital because it enables us to serve our readers the best way we know how. Independence allows us to deliver honest reporting that casts a critical eye on university ongoings, city events and global news. No subject is off-limits. We have the freedom to investigate, experiment and — most of all — inform.
When you read the Alligator, you know where the content is coming from. All of our reporters and editors are students. We pour our hearts and souls into every single edition, which means working too much, staying at the office too late and drinking too much coffee.
When our predecessors separated from the university all those years ago, they might have been young, but they knew exactly what they were doing. They were giving us the power to operate as our own entity, to cover news as we saw fit, to make mistakes and have to deal with them.
There’s no one over us. Nobody is dictating what we can and cannot print, and that’s often a positive and negative thing — at the same time. People hate us, people love us, but we hope all those people know we’re trying our damndest to do the right thing.
We appreciate our independence because it holds us even more accountable to you, the readers. You deserve to know what’s really going on in your community without sugarcoating or ulterior motives. You deserve a newspaper that’s committed to giving you the facts, whether they’re good, bad or ugly.
The Alligator staff of 1973 did not believe in censorship, and neither does that of 2013.
And for the next 40 years, and the 40 after that, and the 40 after that, we’re going to keep working with this history in mind. After all, they say the elder years are always the most fun.
Thank you,
The Independent Florida Alligator
