UNLV’s Rebel Yell faces existential crisis

By Daniel Rothberg

Sunday, Nov. 6, 2016 | 2 a.m.

UNLV’s student newspaper could be forced to cease printing next semester if can’t close its budget gap. It’s the natural next step in a funding issue that has troubled the Rebel Yell for months.

The paper’s annual budget of about $100,000 has for years come from a UNLV activities fund operated by the Student Affairs Department. Although the staff has applied for the funding each year, advisory board chairman Steve Sebelius said he was under the impression that it was guaranteed, given past agreements with UNLV.

But this year, the Rebel Yell was provided only about $30,000, setting it up for a shortfall in its operations budget and potentially an existential crisis. Having already cut production days, the paper will decide how to proceed in the coming months. “There’s no fat in the Rebel Yell budget at all,” said Sebelius, a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “When you lose your central source of funding, it’s very difficult to continue to go on.”

In letters and meetings with the university, Sebelius and other members of the advisory board, including The Sunday’s Jackie Valley, have stressed the importance of having a campus paper to keep UNLV organizations transparent and hold the administration accountable.

“There’s no other independent news source,” said Bianca Cseke, the Rebel Yell’s student editor.

College campus newspapers across the country, with budgets often tied to the university explicitly through student fees or implicitly through advertising, often run into funding challenges. Frank LoMonte, executive director of the national Student Press Law Center, said defunding a paper should be viewed with healthy skepticism, given its watchdog role.

“A newspaper is not like other student recreational activities that are competing for funding,” LoMonte said. “If the Ultimate Frisbee club goes away, that’s sad, but that doesn’t diminish the civic health of the community. If the newspaper goes away, you have a less informed public and greater opportunity for abuse and corruption on campus to proliferate.”

Both the newspaper’s staff and the university have been under pressure, including from the NAACP of Nevada, to change the name from the Rebel Yell, an allusion to the Civil War battle cry of the Confederates and meant to symbolize UNLV breaking away from UNR in the North.

The NAACP did not respond to a request for comment.

The paper plans to change the name to Rebel Review or Scarlet and Gray Free Press in a process it committed to in April. The school reportedly pushed for the name change by September, prior to UNLV’s hosting of the final presidential debate, but students didn’t want to deviate from a methodical timeline that included marketing and input from the student body.

UNLV, according to Sebelius, has not provided additional funds but would be more amenable to helping procure outside funding with the name change, something stressed in their last meeting.

“What they said, in no uncertain terms, was that there was no additional funding, but that if we did change the name, they would look at helping with ideas for funding going forward,” he said.

Cseke is hopeful that the paper will increase its ad revenue and generate crowd-funding to keep it afloat through the school year. “I’m confident that we won’t have to stop printing next semester,” she said.

Long-term, Cseke said the board of regents should pass an annual $2 student fee to fund the paper. This is similar to how the paper was funded prior to 2012, when it received a percentage of student fees allocated by the student government.