Well, this is it.
This community, including UF, Santa Fe College and Gainesville as a whole, has been through a lot this semester. We’ve had the highs and lows we’d expect and those we just couldn’t see coming.
This semester, we at the Alligator faced the breaking news on all fronts: a sexual predator on the loose, Ebola scares in the U.S., the shooting at Florida State University, a new president and football coach and the recent protests after deaths of black men at the hands of white cops who were never indicted.
And the reason we stay up at all hours of the night chasing stories, the reason why we scramble to get the facts to put in print the next day, is for you.
You, the reader, are why this newspaper gives us opportunities to not only serve you but also grow our careers. Every night, Sunday through Thursday, nearly 40 of us work tirelessly to produce a paper that we find pride in. For some of us, this newspaper is everything. This old, vine-covered frat house on West University Avenue squished between old storefronts is a home away from home. We have meals here, spare clothes here, frantically study here, and we spend so much time here for you.
Without an audience, we wouldn’t have a paper.
So this is a thank you from us to you: Thank you for reading our stories. Thank you for calling in story ideas. Thank you for writing for us, and thank you for commenting and sharing our stories online — even if it wasn’t always to praise us.
The face of journalism is changing, and we are trying our best to keep up. One thing is consistent, though: Nothing beats good storytelling.
Our newsroom is run solely by students. We don’t have an outside supervisor, and we don’t have an adult in the field telling us what our next step should be. What we do have is a collective of experiences and opinions that propels us forward. And the only way we can keep this newspaper up is if we know what you want.
Within the flux of changing mediums is the flux of changing writers. Each semester begins with a new team of journalists with different ideas and goals. Some may see this as a weakness because it looks like a lack of consistency, but we see it as an advantage. Every semester, we try to bring better things to the table. And every semester, we do.
We wish you a very enjoyable and safe holiday, and we can’t wait to serve you again in 2015.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 12/10/2014]
