Cal State Dominguez Hills loses its newspaper, for now

Cal State Dominguez Hills is the underdog university in Carson best known for not being best known.

Joy Masha is the school's earnest student body president, intent on instilling campus pride.

To that end, the student leader typed up her first "President's Corner" column for the campus newspaper and submitted it a few days ago, looking forward to delivering many future essays to the campus community.

The problem: No one had told Masha that the Bulletin had been thrown on the state of California's ever-growing budget scrap heap. Dominguez Hills administrators shuttered the student newspaper to save $76,000, making it the only general education Cal State campus (the Maritime Academy has no paper) without a regular outlet for student journalism.

With classes jammed to overflowing, instructors facing furloughs a couple of days a month and library hours reduced around the state university system, it's hard to make the case for the resurrection of a little paper produced by roughly a dozen students.

But I'm going to argue for the Dominguez Bulletin anyway. The decline of dead-tree communication notwithstanding, the Bulletin has given striving students something more urgent than "Beowulf" to write about; it has trained young journalists how to work on deadline and provided a rallying point for a school that needs one.

It's not clear how seriously administrators considered compromises that would have allowed the Bulletin to survive, perhaps as an Internet-only publication.

"It's just kind of sad," said Masha, 23. "I just wish the university would have done a little more in seeking funding. Or maybe it's time for our newspaper to go online, before it's eliminated."

Dominguez Hills had to absorb about $16.1 million in Cal State's most recent financial contraction. A campus spokeswoman told me that student fee increases (a 20% hike systemwide puts charges for undergraduates at $4,026 a year) and teacher pay reductions (via two days off a month) closed much of the gap.

Next on the chopping block, spokeswoman Brenda Knepper told me, were classes that had low enrollment or that students didn't need to graduate. The elective journalism class taught by Cathy Risling fit into both of those categories, Knepper said.

The university stands to save $76,000 by eliminating the paper -- a figure that includes printing costs, Risling's part-time salary and pay for two other part-timers -- one a journalist in residence and another who laid out the paper.