End nears for 95-year-old college newspaper
SAN ANTONIO — Computers line the walls of Room 212 inside San Antonio College’s Gonzales Hall, where Sergio Medina runs the Ranger, the student news organization that is set to cease operations in December after 95 years.
A day after breaking the story of the upcoming closure, Medina sat in the middle of the mostly empty classroom, sporting the Ranger’s Class of 2020 Tshirt and making calls to administrators to figure out what was next for the publication and program.
His sources couldn’t tell him much.
Program Coordinator Marianne Odom and the only two full-time journalism faculty, Irene Abrego and Edmund Lo, will retire at the end of the fall semester. No replacements have been named. Budget cuts already had forced the weekly newspaper to go fully online in 2019.
The Ranger has launched the careers of journalists across the nation. Some of them said this week that they can only hope administrators understand the program’s value in giving students access to a crucial profession and teaching them how to be good at it.
“You are not just working for a grade, because when you come in here, you are doing a benefit, a service, to the community in the college and around it,” Medina said. “So you feel like you are part of something greater.”
SAC President Robert Vela was not available for an interview this week. In a prepared statement Tuesday, he said the college has begun exploring ways that it can “keep student journalism thriving on our campus.”
“The intention is to have it remain a vital component of the total learning experience at SAC,” Vela said.
On Thursday, Alamo Colleges Chancellor Mike Flores offered more details in an email to Laura Garcia, president of the San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists, after the group issued a statement saying its members were “heartbroken” because the program at SAC “has long provided a pathway for students of color and those with little financial means to enter the industry.”
The future might involve merging all five of the district’s colleges in one Alamo Colleges District student media lab, Flores said, where students can explore careers in the fields of print, broadcast, radio and digital journalism.
“The leadership of the Alamo Colleges District is reimagining a student journalism experience powered by the strengths of each of our five colleges, supported by faculty, staff and professionals in the industry, and open to students at any of the Alamo Colleges,” Flores said.
Garcia, a health care reporter at the San Antonio Express-News, started her career at the Ranger in 2005, where she worked as an editor — spending hours in the student newsroom with classmates and staff who were like a family — before transferring to Texas State University.
“I know what it means to so many people that are still working in this industry, that it’s just so hard to believe that it may not exist anymore.”
Odom, who has taught full time at the college since 1990, said she was pleased to hear there might be a plan to keep the journalism program.
A couple of years ago, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board did away with a list of journalism courses that transferring students could get credit for at a four-year institution, increasing the incentive for students to limit their exposure to such courses at community colleges, Odom said.
As a result, enrollment for advanced journalism courses at SAC has been declining since 2019, and the Ranger has had smaller pools of such students to run things and help guide less-experienced students taking introductory newswriting classes.
Garcia always knew she wanted to be a journalist, “but I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to afford to go to college, not in the traditional route that some students have.”
SAC remains “one of the very few community colleges that has such a wellknown journalism program” and the very first to have a student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, Garcia noted, adding, “I think that speaks to the fact that it is a serious program.”
Joe Vazquez, a retired TV reporter who worked at the Ranger in the mid-1980s before joining the staff of KMOL-TV, now WOAI, and eventually news stations in Houston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, said he used the lessons he learned at SAC “every day for 35 years as a journalist.”
“I learned how to hold powerful people accountable,” he said. “How to deal with hostile interview subjects. I learned how to balance stories, including as many sides as possible. I learned how to find and highlight the good in humanity.
“And I learned the value of a strong work ethic, often working harder on my story deadlines than my homework,” Vazquez said. “The demise of the Ranger means another kid whose parents couldn’t afford to send him to the big colleges misses out. … It means yet another missed opportunity to tell the full story from students who are from the working class of the community. It’s a real shame.”